There weren’t too many Republicans cheering their party’s performance in the aftermath of the nationwide thumping they experienced. But Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis probably came closest to a victory lap.
DeSantis, who plans to run for president in 2028, said that election night would have been an “extinction-level event” for the Republican Party if it weren’t for the Sunshine State. “Really, Florida is the last main anchor standing,” he said.
GOP strongholds such as Texas and Ohio saw both the governor’s office and a U.S. Senate seat flip blue this week. Of the nation’s 10 most populous states, Florida will be the only one where Republicans control the governor’s office and the state legislature when newly elected officials take office in January.
Even in Florida, the blue wave reached down the ballot. Democrats flipped 15 seats in the state House, ending the Republican supermajority, and picked up a seat in the state Senate. In Miami-Dade County, which President Donald Trump carried in 2024, voters swung back blue.
But statewide, Republicans held on. Republican Byron Donalds beat Democrat David Jolly by 1.3 percentage points in the governor’s race to succeed DeSantis, while the Republican incumbents for attorney general, chief financial officer and agriculture commissioner won by similarly close margins. In the U.S. Senate race, Republican Ashley Moody defeated Democrat Angie Nixon, 51 percent to 48 percent.
“Now it’s going to take a lot of time and effort to rebuild. It will not happen in just one election cycle. But Florida shows how you can build a coalition, not only to convert on all your promises in good times, but also to withstand the bad times,” DeSantis said.
So, how did Florida Republicans hold on?
Big lead going in
Political analysts said, among other reasons, the party had a “cushion” before the campaigns even began: a sizable lead over Democrats in voter registration.
“There was no secret little thing they did here in Florida that allowed them to stay in power,” said Brad Coker, managing director of Mason-Dixon Polling and Strategy. “It’s strictly the cushion, and that cushion got pushed to the limit.”
At the end of 2020, Democrats outnumbered Republicans among Florida’s active registered voters by about 97,000. But by the end of September, Republicans led by roughly 1.55 million, according to state figures.
Much of that lead is attributed to people moving to Florida after DeSantis promoted it as a haven from pandemic restrictions, said Aubrey Jewett, a political science professor at the University of Central Florida. The newcomers helped reshape the electorate, he said, giving Republicans an edge even in an election favorable to Democrats.
“As long as they didn’t have exceptionally low turnout, as long as they were just solid, they were going to have an advantage,” Jewett said.
Huge fundraising advantage
As with elsewhere across the country, Republicans in Florida also had an edge on the money side.
Donalds’s campaign and political committee spent more than $165 million through Oct. 29, compared with almost $25 million for Jolly’s campaign and political committee, according to a Florida Politics review of state filings. In the U.S. Senate race, Moody’s campaign reported spending $13.7 million through Oct. 14, compared with $8.1 million for Nixon’s, according to Federal Election Commission data.
Kathryn DePalo-Gould, a political science professor at Florida International University, said a lack of national Democratic funding and support hurt the party’s chances in Florida.
She credited Republicans, especially the Donalds campaign, with canvassing and a “really great ground game.”
“They didn’t take the state for granted,” DePalo-Gould said.
Donalds’s focus on affordability also resonated, she said, in a state where younger voters worried they couldn’t afford to buy a home and older homeowners feared they couldn’t afford to stay in theirs.
The lure of low taxes
Voters also weighed in directly on costs of owning a home. On Tuesday, they approved Amendment 3, a DeSantis-backed measure to increase Florida’s homestead exemption for nonschool property taxes. DePalo-Gould said the prospect of lower property taxes may have drawn enough reluctant Republican voters to the polls to help the party win statewide.
“I think Republican voters might have stayed home in greater numbers had Amendment 3 not been on the ballot,” she said.
DeSantis made the same case: “The existence of Amendment 3 on the ballot is one of the reasons Florida averted the fate of other red states. It drew more voters to the polls.”
A popular governor
DeSantis also endorsed all five Republicans who won statewide races Tuesday. An early October Stetson University pollfound that 55 percent of likely voters in Florida approved of the governor’s job performance.
In the governor’s race, Coker said, DeSantis’s support helped Donalds when Trump had become somewhat of a liability.
Ahead of the August primary, Donalds trumpeted Trump’s endorsement in a campaign ad. But by September, as he faced Jolly, his campaign had scrubbed several prominent references to Trump from its website.
The following month, Donalds released two ads on the same day, one featuring Trump’s endorsement and the other touting DeSantis’s.
“DeSantis bailed him out,” Coker said of Donalds.
For the next election, Coker urged Republicans to keep the focus closer to home.
“If you are a Florida Republican right now, stay away from national stuff,” he said. “Just stay away.”
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