Florida’s Updated Voter Registration by Party – May 2023
Bottom Line: The Florida Division of Elections has provided the update for all eligible voter registrations through April. The trend hasn’t been the friend of Florida’s Democrats in recent years. For the better part of twenty years Republicans steadily ate away at the voter registration advantage Florida’s Democrats had held since the onset of partisan voter record keeping in the 1970’s. By November of 2021, amid massive pandemic induced relocations, Republican voter registrations outnumbered Democrats for the first time. And every month since the GOP advantage by way of voter registration has grown. Earlier this year Florida’s Democrats opted to head in a new direction with party leadership tapping former Agriculture Commissioner Nikki Fried to lead the party going forward. Has the shift in leadership resulted in a shifting of voter partisanship?
These are the year-to-date voter registration information:
- DEM: -93,374 (-19,293 last month)
- GOP: -4,548 (-1,431 last month)
- NPA/Other: +10,356 (-9,992 last month)
The current breakout of registered voters looks like this...
- DEM: 33.5%
- GOP: 36.7%
- NPA/Other: 29.8%
In the answer in short remains no. Not only has Nikki hasn’t stopped the trend of Democrat defections, but the pace of Democrat defections is also ramping up. While voters of all political stripes lost net voters last month, Democrat defections were far and away the largest while Republican registrations dropped the least. The net-net of it entering May is that Republicans yet again have a record voter registration advantage in Florida. The Republican advantage relative to Democrats now stands at a record 472,780 voters with a net change of 17,862 to the advantage of the GOP in April alone. With current trends in place, it’s possible that by that by the 2024 election cycle NPA registrations could be threatening to overtake Democrats in the state. Notably, while Republicans won all but five counties last November, there remain 13 of Florida’s 67 counties in which Democrats retain a registration advantage, including South Florida’s Tri-County.