Dear Florida Democrats, 2022 Version.

Dear Democrats:  

Let’s have an honest conversation about 2022 here in Florida.

I get asked all the time how I feel about Florida.   In a lot of ways, it feels rather deja vu.  Fifteen years ago, I got the same questions, phrased the same way, because well, we were in the same place.  

In 2002, Republicans swept the Cabinet, followed two years later by a 5 point Presidential loss, a US Senate loss, and Democrats at their lowest points in history in both chambers of the legislature.  I’ll never forget my then incredibly able deputy, Tara Klimek, pointing out to me that the share of Democrats in the legislature then in Florida was actually lower than the share of Democrats in the South Dakota legislature.   That was bad.

It should also be noted that soon thereafter Tara went to law school, and now is an incredible lawyer.   Maybe I should have followed…but, I digress.

We came out of 2004 and had a pretty good run, winning 3 of 6 statewide races in 06 and 08, including the Presidential, and picking up 10 GOP seats in the Florida House, and seats in both the Florida Senate and in Congress.  2010 sucked everywhere – but then we did pretty well again in 2012.

Back in 2005, I went over to the Florida Democratic Party and ran the State House caucus, and as you can imagine, I got a lot of advice (politics is not a career that is low on outside input), most of it lining up in the bucket of “Democrats need to think outside the box more to win.”  But here was the problem:  the issue wasn’t that we needed to think outside the box – the issue was we didn’t even have a box to think outside of.  By the way, if you think the Democratic Party is a mess now, you should have seen it in 2005.   We literally needed to build a box. 

Longtime readers of this here ole blog wouldn’t be surprised to know that I wrote like a 50-page memo of things that I thought we needed to do, because that is what I do.   I sent it to my dear friend/mentor/old boss/guy I used to talk to on the phone 12x a day Dan Gelber, who read it and said “that’s great Steve – no one will read it, and no one could actually do all those things.  So go pick 3 things and let’s figure out how to do those things right.”   He was right – all we could do was to put ourselves in the best place to succeed by building our programs on a solid foundation – and giving ourselves a chance to win.  And that’s what we did.   

And that is kind of where we are today.  Notwithstanding the hard work of people who have taken on the absolutely miserable and thankless task of being Chair or working the Florida Democratic Party – nor the people who work for and fund the various outside groups, we are once again at a place where the question isn’t so much how or can we win in 2022, but what do we need to do to put ourselves in a competitive position.  

This blog is my attempt to lay out those things that I believe we need to do to put ourselves in a place to succeed – and I couch it this way because in politics, there is so much you can’t control – and often in midterms, the most important factor will likely be the standing of the President.  For example, do I think either Sink or Crist wins in a world where President Obama is at say, 46, 47, or 48% approval, compared to the low 40s in 2010 and 2014?  I do. But those aren’t things you can control, and when you are losing in states like Maryland, you are probably losing almost everywhere.  

So back to focusing on what we can control.  I believe if we get these things basically right, Democrats will put themselves in play with opportunities – and if we don’t, well it will be a hard year.  

(and before someone e-mails me/tweets me with the “why are you giving away the plan” – first, this isn’t a plan, and secondly, the Republicans already know all this stuff).

One other caveat – I will use the word “party” a lot – but in our case, I don’t just mean the Florida Democratic Party or the Democratic National Committee – I mean literally everyone engaged in the effort to help elect more Democrats in Florida.  

One – Change the Electorate. 

If we as a party literally only did one thing this year, that one thing should be register voters.

Seriously, this is a really long blog, so you can quit reading here and get to work if you want. It’s Number 1 for a reason.

Longtime readers of the blogsite dot com know, outside of poor play at the quarterback position by the Jaguars, there is nothing that has driven me crazier over the last decade than my party’s relationship with voter registration numbers (you can read previous versions of this here, here, or here).   Listen, if politics was rocket science, I wouldn’t be doing it – and while I am certainly no rocket scientist, I do know that when one side has more in their column than the other, that increases the likelihood given said side will get more votes. 

Between 2004 and 2008, the number of Democrats registered to vote in Florida grew by roughly 478K voters.  Over the same window of time, the number of Republicans registered to vote in Florida grew by about 152K voters – or a net increase of about 326K voters to the home team side. 

Barack Obama won Florida by about 230K votes.  #math

Now, if I told you that between 2008 and today, the share of non-white voters would grow from 31% to 38.5%, most people – including (while they won’t admit it) many of my Republican friends, would believe that the Democrats advantage among voters would increase.

Well, that didn’t happen.

In fact, between 2008 and early summer 2021, the total number of Democrats registered in Florida has grown by about 467K voters – in other words, a smaller number over 13 years than was done in the 4 between 2004-2008.  

At the same time, the number of registered Republicans has grown by 1,071,416.  So, while the state’s ethnic make-up is trending in a way that should work to our favor, registration is going the other way.  In fact, the nearly 700K voter advantage we had in 2008 – which was still north of 550K in 2012 is basically down to zero.  Without a full-frontal, professional and accountable partisan effort to turn it around, sometime before the end of this year, there will be more Republicans registered in Florida than Democrats – that has NEVER happened before. And, given their voters have higher turnout scores – this isn’t a great place to start. 

Other than the candidate-driven registration that’s been done on a few limited state and congressional races, and the presidential campaigns – most of the registration done over the last few years has been done by non-partisan organizations – but I think it is fair to say, the most successful registration that has been done over the last twenty years has been partisan-organized.  Since at least 2012, there has not been a statewide, sustained professional partisan Democratic registration operation – and the numbers confirm that reality. A professionally run permanent partisan registration effort will change that and have other impacts:  they will serve as party organizing, and allows additional opportunities for real outreach into key communities, and secondly, the organization needed to support such an effort will provide a career path for rising operatives, who often find themselves in search of new careers after each cycle.  

I’ll go so far as to say there is no question Democrats win the 2018 Governor’s race, and Bill Nelson is re-elected if either of them are given an electorate that looks like 2012 – in which case, the narrative on Florida looks a lot different.  

TWO – Miami Dade and South Florida in general.

Donald Trump won Florida in 2020 by 254K more votes than he did in 2016.   Joe Biden won the three big SE Florida counties: Broward, Dade, and Palm Beach, by 224K fewer votes than Hilary Clinton.  In other words, if SE Florida had performed for Biden as it did for Clinton, 2020 is basically a carbon copy of 2016 – and that is with the voter registration issues mentioned above.

Let me put this another way.  If Biden and Trump got the same vote share (percentage of the vote) in these three counties as Clinton and Trump did in 2016, under 2020 turnout, the Trump statewide margin would have only been 50K votes.  Are the Clinton 2016 numbers a little optimistic going forward?  No question.  Can we win without getting the South Florida numbers back to something that looked closer to Obama in 2012, or even Crist/Gillum in 2014 and 2018?  It’s tough.  Really tough.  FSU beating Alabama tough.  The Jaguars beating Alabama tough.

Two things – no one election is a trend – just as too many Democrats bought into the idea that demographics is alone destiny, I suspect the 2020 Dade GOP numbers are as much an outlier as the 2016 Dade Dem numbers.   In fairness, I also think the decision by the Biden campaign to not do in-person campaigning due to COVID-19, which I am in no position to, nor will I criticize, likely had an oversized impact in South Florida, particularly in Dade, where campaigning is a hand-to-hand sport.   Was it the entire factor?  No.

The drop of support among Hispanic voters does not alone explain the change in South Florida margin.  The truth is a lot of things are going on at once – all of which need attention:  Hispanic persuasion, African American persuasion and turnout, and Caribbean persuasion and turnout – not to mention my party’s struggles with non-college white voters, which is one of the reasons why we have not done as well in Palm Beach County as we had in the past, a county home to a sizable non-college white population, particularly among retirees.

Misinformation most definitely played a role, but so did, candidly, a failure to call out bull shit.  There have been a lot of lessons “learned” from Barack Obama – some of them not accurate – but one that would be useful when dealing with misinformation during the campaign is never to let crap just lie, and that campaign immediately hit that stuff with a baseball bat.  A lie without a response becomes a truth.  For example, only one of the two candidates for President actually proposed cutting funding for police, and it wasn’t Joe Biden.  But truth doesn’t matter when lies are left on the dock.

There is one other key lesson of Obama:  Barack Obama tapped into the aspirational immigrant story, because that story was his own.  Yes, many people came here to escape socialism and lawlessness – but all who came here did so because of the sense of opportunity that is at the root of every immigrant story.   America is that shining beacon on a hill – and have to be the the party that embraces that story.

THIRD:   We have to win the battle of the margins.  

With exception of one or two places, Florida doesn’t have battleground counties – Florida is just a battleground.  The side that can win the margins game – running up the score on their turf and keeping the race closer on their opponent’s turf wins.  It is a state where a winning candidate wins both the turnout game – and the persuasion game.

In 2016, Hillary Clinton hit every mark you’d want to see in a Democratic county.  She did not lose Florida because of turnout.  

Let me point out two counties that illustrate this story.

Pasco County.  Pasco is a growing, exurban county just north of Tampa.  It is huge, and has a higher population of residents without a college degree than the state at large.  Despite being the 12^th largest voting county in Florida in 2020, more people voted in Pasco than voted in Wyoming.    Barack Obama lost Pasco in 2012 by roughly 14K votes.  Hillary Clinton lost it by 52K votes.  Joe Biden saw his margin push up to nearly 61K votes. 

On the flipside, just south of Tampa is Sarasota County.  Similarly sized to Pasco, it is home to one of the larger populations of voters with a college degree – a demographic that generally my party has been doing well with around the country. Since  2012, the Republican margin has grown from 15K votes, to 26K in 2016, and 28K in 2020 – not as eye popping as Pasco, but margins that are growing from cycle to cycle.

It is hard to see a scenario where a Democrat is going to win without seeing these margins start to work back the other way – as they did from Gore/Kerry to Obama – which goes to one key point:  We have to start meeting voters where they are. Too many Democrats assume some “modeling score” is concrete evidence some voters either absolutely will – or won’t vote for us and we ignore them – guess what, we prove the model and they don’t vote for us, or they don’t show up because we assume they will vote.  Republicans do not operate that way. They go after “our voters” aggressively and the results speak for themselves.

Now before some of you all start @ing me on twitter, no, I am not saying we are magically going to start winning the classic Trump voter that has been profiled in a wings & beer bar by every news station in the history of humanity – but I am talking about making a real effort to connect to voters that are up for grabs.   I absolutely refuse to believe that any voter that voted twice for America’s first Black President – himself a first generation American with an admittedly not-made for classic American politics name – is a voter who is somehow lost to us forever.

But again, in the mythology of Barack Obama, one piece of lore that is often forgotten was in addition to being a generational candidate with his ability to inspire, he was also a magician at talking to voters where they were – not only about his and their hopes and dreams, but also in a way that reassured swing voters:  lofty oratory that was matched with practical ideas communicated clearly:  reducing middle class taxes, and protecting those with pre-existing conditions.  He had a plan for the space industry, talked about fisheries in North Florida, and traffic on I-4.  He went directly into Jewish communities and confronted the lies said about him, and he did the same in exile Hispanic communities. He understood that to win, you had to appeal to 50%+1.  You get the point.

Republicans figured out after Obama that to ease their path to winning in Florida, they had to change the math and trajectory of the Hispanic vote – not necessarily to win it, but to keep the margins in check, which in turn, keeps our margins down.   We have to do the same in Florida’s rural and exurban counties, that is, if we want to win elections again. 

BONUS FOUR – Recruitment of candidates. 

This last little bit is less about whether or if Democrats can win statewide, and more about how we win down the ballot.

Back when I was recruiting candidates for the legislature, it seemed like everyone had a buddy who would be the perfect candidate, and 99% of those suggestions had a “but” – and that but was usually “well, they can’t raise money.”  If in the first sentence of someone’s description of a candidate includes the word “but,” well sorry, they aren’t a great candidate. 

Candidates matter, and particularly when you consider that most competitive places that Democrats have to win in down-ballot races are districts that start out with a Republican lean, and where we are automatically going to get outspent. 

The party’s job isn’t to run candidates everywhere, or support everyone that raises their hand – their job is to win elections – to find the best possible people, who have the most currency in their communities, with the ability to raise money and connect with voters.   Sure, it is always great to find that popular city commissioner with great name ID and a fundraising base, but there isn’t an archetype of a perfect candidate.  Take Anna Eskamani for example, who I am proud to say I’ve known since she was literally still a kid.  She doesn’t fit the “prototypical candidate” on paper, but she was strategic about her career, she put in the work, built relationships and political capital, so when she became a candidate, she was already a force.  And once she became a candidate, she was tireless on the phones raising money and at the doors talking to voters, and she got a win.   She also didn’t expect someone to come in and do the work for her.  She did the work. 

Some cycles, the party recruits aggressively and well, but many cycles, recruitment isn’t much more than waiting for someone to raise their hand, then hoping for a good outcome.  Back in the dark ages when I did this work, our team picked up nine GOP seats, and kept in Democratic control, two competitive open seats.  Of those eleven wins, seven of the candidates were current or previous officeholders in the district, one was a legitimate community legend, and three ran remarkable grassroots efforts while still raising significant dollars.  No one was lightning in a bottle.

We need a year-round, party-centric recruitment effort.

FIVE – If you can only do one of the previous 4, do the first one (again, it’s number 1 for a reason).  

Registering voters is, by far, the least “sexy” and most essential element to winning – it is the foundation. In 25 years of doing this stuff, a couple things largely ring true:  Politics is about timing and opportunity – but it is also about fundamentals and preparation.  Just like football, good preparation, sound fundamentals, and talent will win more than it loses.  On the flipside, not preparing, ignoring the fundamentals, constantly taking unforced penalties, and not putting good talent on the field – sorry, this is digressing into a Jaguars rant, but you get the point.

Secondly, things are rarely as good, or as bad as you think.  

They are almost always going to have more money, and more resources.   We are always going to have to choose between competing interests.  Our coalition is more diverse, more challenging, and harder to turnout.  Nothing here will ever be easy.  But that doesn’t mean it is impossible.  Now is the time to do the work.

There is no secret. Just work.  We don't need to think outside the box.  We once again, quite literally, need to build the box.