Florida voter registration by party – February 2021
Bottom Line: The voter registration momentum Republicans built throughout the 2020 Election cycle didn’t end with Election Day. By the end of 2020 Florida’s Democrats maintained the smallest advantage over Republicans in voter registration in our state’s history. My recent research revealed that Florida’s Republican party has consistently benefitted from a combination of Floridians reregistering as Republicans in addition to a majority of new voters registering as Republicans. This indicated that a majority of those relocating to Florida, even from Blue states, have been Republicans seeking refuge here. But it’s a new year. Did last year’s momentum continue in January? The answer is not exactly...
Here’s the change in voter registration by party in Florida to start the year:
- DEM: -16,858
- GOP: -30,219
- NPA/Other: +20,595
Now, there’s a lot to unpack here. Both Democrats and Republicans saw a significant loss of registered voters to start the year, though the GOP lost nearly twice as many voters. This while NPA and minor party affiliated registrations saw significant gains. Even then however, there are a net 16,000 fewer registered voters in Florida period. So, what happened? Did a bunch of registered voters decide to cancel their voter registrations? And how can we be down so many voters when we’re hearing about 900 new residents moving here daily?
Florida’s largest purge of voter rolls occurs at year end. This includes the removal of former residents and those deceased. The outflow of Floridians has been low so most of the loss of voters overall came from the deceased. What we don’t know after one month is whether many more Republicans passed away than other political persuasions in our state or if they were largely reregistering as an NPA. We’ll need info from future months to sort that one out.
The current breakout of registered voters looks like this...
- DEM: 36.4%
- GOP: 35.7%
- NPA/Other: 27.9%
What comes next should be interesting. Donald Trump has now opened up a post-presidency office in South Florida and is poised to continue to work within the Republican party rather than starting a third-party as had been rumored. Without a doubt his influence in Florida’s politics was positive for Republicans in recent years. Will that continue to be the case in our state going forward? To be continued.
Photo Credit: Getty Images