Abstract
Between 2018 and 2022, perceptions of Florida shifted from viewing it as the quintessential swing state to labeling it as solid Republican territory. In a highly polarized political environment, state-level partisanship tends to be quite stable over time, raising important questions about how a deviant case like Florida came to be. In this thesis, I ask, “How did Florida go from a heavily contested battleground to a Republican stronghold?” I specifically explore the case studies of the 2018 and 2022 gubernatorial elections, examining how Ron DeSantis went from winning his first campaign for governor by less than one point to winning reelection by nearly twenty points. In a quantitative approach to my research question, I examined Florida’s population changes by using both public and commercially available data. None of the demographic changes or ideological changes I found were large enough to fully address DeSantis’s increase in his margin of victory by eighteen percentage points. As a result, I also considered the role of campaigns and parties in changing Florida’s electoral competitiveness. In a qualitative approach to my research question, I interviewed thirty-three political operatives in Florida, consisting of seventeen Democrats and sixteen Republicans. They had a variety of backgrounds, including campaign staffers, party officials, legislators, and government employees. I corroborated the information I learned from my interviews with articles from news outlets. I found that the election results in 2022 were made possible in part by demographic factors but also because of functional failures on the Democratic side and consistent organizing on the Republican side. The changes in Florida’s partisan dynamics between 2018 and 2022 imply that swing states can lose their battleground status when one political party declines in quality while the other political party remains the same (or improves), regardless of the actual ideological makeup of that state’s electorate.