How Republicans conquered Florida

In 2022, before he began a campaign for the presidency, Ron DeSantis was reelected governor of Florida in a landslide. This was impressive and surprising because the 2022 elections were disappointing for Republicans almost everywhere else in the US. But DeSantis’s overwhelming victory was doubly impressive and surprising because when he had first been elected, just four years earlier, it was by just a tiny margin.

For a long time, in fact, tiny election margins were the norm in Florida elections. Florida was a “swing state” — it sometimes voted for Democrats, sometimes for Republicans, and was a major prize up for grabs in presidential elections. But by 2022, something had changed: Florida Republicans up and down the ballot won their races by margins similar to DeSantis’s, and no one was calling Florida a swing state anymore.

Florida seems to have undergone a political transformation. So what happened? In this video, we look at three possible explanations.