Q&A of the Day – Will Florida’s former felons flip Florida blue?
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Today’s entry: Thoughts on felons voting lawsuit currently being argued. I feel this will flip FL blue and cost Trump the election. 777k plus felons are not all Dems but a good majority are. Senate race win was by 10k / Gov was 33k...enough felon votes to flip.
Bottom Line: It’s altogether possible. Just on Monday in the federal court hearing over financial restitution of felon voting rights, Florida’s director of the Division of Elections, Maria Matthews, testified that as many as 85,000 registered voters may be ineligible to vote under Florida law– this is independent of the debate/battle over financial restitution which you’re citing. Most of the issues cited by Maria Matthews involved registered felons who are sexual offenders or even those convicted of murder which are ineligible under Amendment 4. The effort to register felons since the passage of Amendment 4 has registered many people in these ineligible groups as well. So, what about the politics of it? There have been two related accredited studies. One from 2002 and another in 2014. They produced similar results. Former felons favor Democrats.
The first study evaluating the political leanings of felons occurred during the 2000 election cycle and was conducted by the American Phycological Review. In the study, felons were surveyed, trends estimated and the results were decisive. If felons had been able to vote in 2000 – 69% would have voted for Al Gore and 76% would have voted for Democrats in congressional races.In fact, the results of the study specifically cited increased felon voting would have led to a decisive victory for Al Gore in Florida and thus winning the Presidential election. This speaks directly to your concern about Florida in 2020.
The more recent study was conducted by researchers who published their study in The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science. They studied New Mexico, New York and North Carolina. States that recently changed laws expanding felon voting access. They found...An average of 56% registered as Democrats compared to 9.8% who registered as Republicans. Florida hasn’t been studied in a similar way as of now, but based on the two previous studies, it's clear that Amendment 4’s passage has the potential to flip Florida blue – even if the state’s financial restitution mandate is upheld in court. This is without a doubt why various left-leaning interest groups pushed as hard as they did – including false representation (promising financial restitution would be a condition of a former felon being eligible to register to vote) of the proposal before Florida’s Supreme Court in 2018 to get the measure on our ballots in the first place. The one caveat, in all groups studied, former felons are the least likely to turnout to vote. Studied turnout has been around 30%of those who are eligible to vote.