1984 to 2020 Florida County Republican Presidential Election Trend Report

The information in this 1984 to 2020 Florida County Republican Presidential Election Trend Report was originally tied to the monthly Florida’s Registrations Report but owing to a delay in reporting of one major county, and the report becoming too unwieldly, a separate report on long-term trends of the vote is being issued.

The Republican Party is a candidate-based political organization. The variability in registration and vote trends noted in past registrations reports suggests that being a candidate-based political organization does not allow for the optimization of Republican political fortunes.

There are many political organizations, both national and international, who are satisfied with undertaking long-term political efforts. Fabian Socialists and the Chinese efforts come to mind. This raises the question of how are Republicans doing in improving their long-term prospects?

1984 was chosen as the base year for the examination as the 1984 Presidential Election was the peak of Republican share of the vote and the 36-year time span (1984 to 2020) is sufficiently long to be considered long-term. The Republican national popular presidential vote margin since 1984 is an eye-opening, and poorly trending, negative 23,938,640 votes (going from a 16,938,640-vote win in 1984 to a 7,060,520-vote loss in 2020), and a worrisome, but positively trending 908,745-vote loss of margin in Florida (falling from a 1,280,431-vote win in 1984 to a 371,686-vote win in 2020).

To demonstrate the need for a change from being a solely candidate-based organization to an organization which also considers policies, charts and tables showing long-term Republican vote trends, with accompanying tables, were created. Chart 1 and Table 1 are based on percentage of the vote and Chart 2 and Table 2 are based on vote margin. These charts, and the accompanying data tables are attached.

The shift in Florida county political sentiments based on presidential elections on a percentage basis ranged from Lafayette County increasing the Republican percentage of the vote by 21.7% to Orange County seeing a drop of 33.6% in the Republican percentage of the vote, a difference of 55.3%!

The shift in county vote margin in presidential elections ranged from St. Johns County increasing the Republican vote margin by 37,255 votes while in Broward County the Democrats increased their margin by 345,302 votes, almost ten times that of the Republicans’ gain in St. Johns County.

For clarification of what is meant by vote margin, St. Johns County, the best performing county in growing Republican margin between 1984 and 2020, increased its Republican vote margin from 9,841 votes in 1984 to 47,096 votes in 2020, a gain in margin of 37,255 votes. Lee County, the county which had the largest Republican margin in 2020, had a Republican vote margin of 54,995 in 1984 which grew to 75,552 votes in 2020, a difference of 20,557 votes. In margin gain, St. Johns County outperformed Lee County by 16,698 votes.

The generally poor performance in Florida’s higher population counties has led to Florida’s Republican share of the presidential vote falling from 65.32% of the vote and a vote margin of 1,280,431 in 1984 to 51.11% of the vote, and a vote margin of 371,686 in 2020.

There were nine Florida Counties whose Republican percentage of the presidential vote exceeded 80% in 2020. These high performing counties are target poor as these counties have little room for improvement short of growing their populations, which they hopefully will pursue. Optimistically, the positive changes seen in the 2022 election in many of the traditionally poorer performing, target rich, and more highly populated counties, will carry over to the 2024 presidential election.

These data demonstrate that there are factors not associated with campaigns which, over time, have an overwhelming effect on election outcomes. Republican operatives should take this traditionally quiet times between elections to exhaustively pursue the adoption of policies that will increase Republican market share and ideally give Republican candidates ammunition to use in campaigns.

There are innumerable challenges for Republicans to adopt market share growing strategies. These include

• No funding mechanism, as nearly all Republican funds are used in campaigns.
• Republican politicians and their strategists, who have successfully navigated the current system, seeing no need for new strategies.
• A dearth of Republican non-campaign strategists.
• Unlike the free market, where the capturing of a small percentage of market share allows alternative ideas to flourish, alternative political ideas are easily stifled by the existing status quo by simply ignoring the alternative ideas.

One of the most significant long-term factors in politics is the relative size of the Democrats’ favoring demographic of those who rent their housing. Democrats, as a political strategy, champion policies which increase the relative numbers of those who cannot escape rental housing. Vote trends suggests this is a highly effective Democrat strategy!

Housing is one policy area where Republicans could gain a campaign advantage. Democrats want relatively more renters. In this effort, they, their willing allies, and their non-willing, but ignorant opposition, adopt policies which subsidize rental housing, and which make the purchasing of a first home a near impossibility for most. This successful Democrat strategy should be pointed out to the Democrat rank-and-file by Republican candidates as a part of a traditional campaign strategy.

Those multitudes of Republicans who favor policies which will be referred to here as smart growth real estate policies, face a binary choice. Our Republic cannot survive without a super-majority of its voters being propertied. Smart growth policies create costs the housing market cannot overcome while corrupting current homeowners, who are more Republican than not, with unearned wealth as the smart growth policies unfairly increase the value of their properties. The binary choice is to keep smart growth programs in place and lose our Republic, or jettison smart growth policies and keep our Republic. The choice is this stark!

Housing policy changes take time to affect the electorate. The 2011 Florida legislature and Senator Rick Scott, who was then serving as Florida’s governor, jettisoned the enforcement arm of Florida’s smart growth program, which was made operational in the late 1980s through the mid-1990s, by eliminating the Florida Department of Community Affairs.

The political significance of Florida ridding itself of The Department of Community Affairs in late 2011 is not broadly understood. Traditional political analysts tried to figure out how President Trump carried Florida in 2016. Then the analysts puzzled over how Governor DeSantis defeated Andrew Gillum in 2018. Next, the analysts pondered how President Trump carried Florida by an even larger margin in 2020. Now the analysts are trying to make sense of how Florida experienced a red wave in 2022 while other states did not.

Competent state Republican governance and national incompetent Democrat governance surely played a role in the 2022 election, as likely did an influx of Republican voting Puerto Ricans, but so did the 2011 Florida legislature, and then Governor Scott, who made the Florida real estate market less burdened resulting in comparative growth in the Republican vote!

Florida Election Report 1984-2022

©Steve Meyer, Indian River County, Florida REC Member. All rights reserved.

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