Darryl PaulsonSecond of two parts.
Republicans won control of the Florida Senate in 1994, the House in 1996 and the governor’s office in 1998, making Florida the first southern state to have complete Republican control over the legislative and executive branch.
Republicans have maintained their control for two decades even though Democrats have an advantage in registered voters. In 2012, 40.07 percent of Floridians were registered as Democrats, 35.58 percent as Republicans and 24.35 percent as independents or with no party affiliation.
There are troubling signs on the horizon for Republicans in Florida. From 1952 to 1992, Republicans won eight of the 11 presidential elections in Florida. From 1996 to 2012, they won only twice and Democrats won three times — and one of those was George W. Bush’s narrow victory over Al Gore.
Just as Democrats have done well with women voters, Republicans do very well with male voters. In Florida, 53 percent of women voted for President Obama, while 52 percent of men supported Romney. One would seem to cancel out the other. Not so. Remember that 55 percent of the 2012 electorate were women.
Republicans continue to do well with voters over the age of 45. They won 52 percent of the 45 to 64-year-old vote and 58 percent of the over 65 vote. As these older voters die, they are being replaced by Millenials, who are heavily Democrat.
Republicans continue to do well with married voters, winning 58 percent of married men and 54 percent of married women. The numbers are even better if you look just at white married voters. Unfortunately for Republicans, the percentage of all white voters who were married was 70 percent in 1984 and 65 percent in 2012. The growth of single-person households is a plus for Democrats.
Republicans do well with religious voters and especially with evangelicals. They won 58 percent of the Protestant vote in Florida and 79 percent of the evangelical vote. There was concern among Republicans that Romney’s Mormon religion would depress the evangelical vote in Florida. In fact, Romney won a larger share of the evangelical vote than John McCain did in 2008.
While Obama won 80 percent of the minority vote in Florida, Romney won 60 percent of the white vote. The problem Republicans face is that the minority share of the electorate is rapidly expanding while the white share is on the decline.
The white share has dropped by about 2 percent every presidential election. It has dropped from 79.1 percent in 1996 to 71.1 percent in 2012.
On top of everything else, the strength of Republicans among white voters is exaggerated by the overwhelming dominance of Republicans in the South. Obama won only one in six white voters in Alabama and one of nine in Mississippi. In Florida, Romney captured six out of 10 white votes.
This raises the issue of whether Republicans can win Florida and the nation primarily on the strength of white voters. Some Republican strategists, notably Sean Trende, argue that Republicans can win by maximizing white turnout. He argues that Romney would have won if his campaign had motivated more whites to vote. He contends that more than six million white voters who should have voted for Romney simply didn’t go to the polls.
Critics dismiss this contention, arguing that Romney won the second-highest share of the white vote in modern presidential history. Republican pollster Whit Ayers argues that “any strategy that is predicated on getting a higher percentage of the white vote than Ronald Reagan got. . . is a losing strategy.”
As Republican Party Chair Reince Preibus noted after the GOP conducted an assessment after the election loss: “The nation’s demographic changes add to the urgency of recognizing how precarious our position has become. Unless the RNC gets serious about tackling this problem, we will lose the future elections; the data demonstrates this.”
