Ruby red Pasco stays ruby red, but even there, abortion and pot were favorites

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Pasco County voters unsurprisingly elected and re-elected Republicans up and down the ballot Tuesday, and rejected two statewide amendments seen as liberal priorities, though more than half of voters supported initiatives to protect abortion access and legalize recreational marijuana.

Of Pasco County’s electorate, nearly 44% of voters are registered Republicans, while less than 26% are Democrats. With a voter registration advantage of 18 percentage points, it’s no surprise that Election Night was marked throughout the county by Republican victories.

Pasco broke for former President Donald Trump by a staggering 25 percentage points. The margin was smaller, but still overwhelming, for U.S. Sen. Rick Scott, who dominated Democratic challenger Debbie Mucarsel-Powell by nearly 20 percentage points.

Incumbent U.S. Rep. Gus Bilirakis, a Pasco County mainstay with a familiar family name, defeated his Democratic challenger by an astounding 38 percentage points. And U.S. Rep. Laurel Lee dominated Democrat Pat Kemp, winning with nearly 59% of the vote, a nearly 18-point victory in the county. That number is particularly remarkable given that the vote count in neighboring Hillsborough County, which is also included in Florida’s 15th Congressional District, was much closer, at about 8 percentage points.

State Sens. Danny Burgess, Ed Hooper and Blaise Ingoglia all similarly dominated their races, with Ingoglia scoring an impressive 36-point victory. All three won with more than 60% of the vote. Jeff Holcomb in House District 53 defeated his Democratic opponent with nearly 74% of the vote. Reps. Randy Maggard, Kevin Steele and Brad Yeager all beat Democrats with more than 60% of the vote.

And Republicans swept County Commission races, with one candidate, Kathryn Elizabeth Starkey in District 3, collecting more than 89% of the vote. Other races were closer, but none even remotely competitive.

That’s why it makes vote totals in the county for Amendments 3 and 4 so interesting. To be sure, neither amendment was successful by Florida’s onerous standards, which require 60% voter support for passage. And Pasco’s tallies underperformed the state as a whole.

Amendment 3 earned 56% of the vote statewide and Amendment 4 earned more than 57%. In Pasco, the “yes” share for Amendment 3, the effort to legalize marijuana for recreational use among adults 21 and older, nearly matched the state, at just shy of 56%. Amendment 4, which would have added abortion protections into the state constitution, underperformed the state at 55% support.

But considering both exceeded majority support, it sends a strong message about conservative support for both marijuana legalization and abortion access.

Looking at raw numbers, more than 174,000 voters favored recreational pot, and more than 171,000 voted in favor of abortion access. That’s only 23,000 more votes for Trump than for recreational cannabis, and about 26,000 more than abortion access.

Given that there are only about 105,000 Democrats in Pasco County, that means even if every single Democrat cast a ballot (which they most certainly did not) and every single Democrat voted in favor of the marijuana and abortion amendments, which is unlikely, there would still be nearly 70,000 crossover or nonpartisan voters supporting both measures.

And this is where there are some takeaways for both political parties, but for Democrats in particular.

For the GOP, it’s a reminder that not every Republican voter takes a hard-line stance on drugs and abortion.

But for Democrats, the message may be that it doesn’t matter.

Democrats had made abortion in particular a lynchpin in their electoral calculations this year, up and down the ballot. Vice President Kamala Harris repeatedly campaigned on the issue of reproductive freedom, and down ballot it was a top campaign talking point for Democrats running for seats in Congress all the way down to the Legislature.

The calculus was that Amendment 4, and to some degree Amendment 3, would drive voter turnout among low-propensity voters who might be inclined to support Democrats on the ballot. And specific to Amendment 4, the hope was that some moderate Republicans, particularly women, may support Democratic candidates based on the reproductive rights issue.

It’s difficult to quantify using available data whether the issues turned out voters, but the numbers suggest it didn’t. Far fewer voters cast a ballot on the two initiatives than voted at the top of the ticket — a difference of about 8,000 votes on Amendment 3 and about 9,000 votes on Amendment 4.

Those numbers counter other data that suggests the turnout strategy may have been at least moderately successful.

Voter turnout among Democrats was 80%, a hair lower than overall turnout and nearly 4 points lower than Republican voter turnout. The Pasco County Supervisor of Elections Office does not include party breakdown in its historic voter turnout data available on its website, and the Office said it may take until next week to provide that information. But overall voter turnout in 2020 was 77%, about 3 points lower than this year.

But even if Amendments 3 and 4 did drive turnout, it’s clear that voters were not concerned about splitting the ticket.

“We believe the General Election results were a response to failed Biden economics the past few years. We were originally worried about Amendment 3 and 4 being used to increase turnout for Democrats,” Sunrise Consulting Group President and CEO Shawn Foster said. “We did two polls in Pasco. One September 15 and another one October 22. We saw a deep increase in Republican turnout and support for the Republican candidates.”

“Turnout for Republicans for Early Voting was better that we have ever seen. By Election Day we have nearly 54% of voters that had already voted so we know we were going to have a high turnout total for the General Election,” he continued.

Pasco County is obviously just one of 67 Florida counties, and its electorate is not directly a microcosm of the state as a whole. But the trends nevertheless suggest that even if conservative-leaning voters support abortion access, it doesn’t necessarily mean they’ll support Democrats.