How the Covid pandemic helped make Florida more Republican – NBC 6 South Florida

We previously reported on how some Americans moved to Florida and left states like California.

But our analysts also believe that these grafts have overloaded their politics, which helped drive previously swing-state leaning Republicans in the 2020 and 2024 elections. And they believe the Covid pandemic is a likely reason for this.

“The Republican voter registration advantage is over a million voters compared to the Democrats, and that changed three years ago, and I think that was a direct result of Covid,” said FIU Professor Kathryn A. DePalo -Gould. “I think culturally, those who left the blue states to come to the red state of Florida now also brought with them a lot of their ideology and certainly their party affiliation, which is now Republican.”

According to numbers released by county election officials in August, there are 5.3 million active Republican voters compared to 4.3 million active Democratic voters. About 3.9 million voters do not belong to a political party or join smaller parties.

The state's changing political landscape is unusual because it became conservative so quickly. In 2020, Democrats had a vote registration lead of about 97,000 over Republicans. Since then, there has been a rapid increase in registered Republican voters.

This large voter registration lead is a win for the Florida Republican Party, which touted the party as “the most successful party in the country,” according to an August statement from Evan Power, chairman of the Florida Republican Party.

Democrats often point to Florida's changing demographics as a reason for the voter registration lead, as a large influx of voters came to the state as DeSantis emerged as the leader of Republican resistance to pandemic-related public health measures. The U.S. Census Bureau estimated that an average of about 667 more people moved into the state than left each day between 2020 and 2021, but did not identify their political party.

Last year also saw the enactment of a Republican-backed law cracking down on third-party voter registration organizations that mobilized minority and college-age voters who tend to vote Democratic. The law partially increased fines for violations such as submitting documents to the wrong county or hiring a non-citizen volunteer from $1,000 to $250,000 and shortened the amount of time groups can return registration applications from April 14 days to 10 days.

Nikki Fried, chairwoman of the Florida Democratic Party, called voter registration “empty rhetoric.”

“While Florida Republicans have spent years dismantling voting rights to boost their numbers and take victory laps over the voter registration gap, that hasn’t stopped Florida Democrats from winning elections like the Jacksonville mayoral race or flipping State House District 35, both victories that demonstrated a growing lack of enthusiasm for the Republican Party and a growing number of independent voters who reject extremism in Florida,” she said in a statement.

Fried noted that since Vice President Kamala Harris entered the presidential race, the state has seen an influx of 18,000 volunteers joining the Florida Democratic Party, which she called a “massive shift in momentum.”