Florida didn’t hold the line on Tuesday. It barely held on. Byron Donalds beat David Jolly for governor by about 100,000 votes out of roughly 8 million, around 50% to 48.7%, in a state Donald Trump won by 13 points two years ago. And Miami-Dade, the county Republicans spent a decade flipping, voted for the Democrat, with Jolly taking about 53% there, The Miami Times reported.
So before anyone calls Florida stubborn, look at what happened around it.
Which red states turned blue on Tuesday?
A lot of them. Democrats took governor’s offices from Republicans in Texas, Ohio, Georgia, Iowa and Nevada, and won Senate races in Texas and South Carolina while beating Susan Collins in Maine and Jon Husted in Ohio. In Texas, James Talarico beat Ken Paxton and Gina Hinojosa ousted Greg Abbott. In Ohio, Amy Acton beat Vivek Ramaswamy after his ad featuring her estranged mother. Those are states Democrats had mostly written off.
Why didn’t Florida flip?
Mostly math and money. Republicans have about a 1.5 million voter registration edge in Florida, according to AP figures cited by NBC 6, and Donalds raised more than $140 million to Jolly’s roughly $20 million, according to MultiState. Donalds also refused to debate Jolly, which drew criticism from both parties, NBC News reported, and painted Jolly, a former Republican congressman, as too far left. With that kind of head start, losing by about 1.3 points is a near miss for Democrats, not a blowout.
What happened in Miami-Dade?
The floor fell out for Republicans. Countywide, Donalds ran about 20 points behind Trump’s 2024 showing and more than 25 points behind Ron DeSantis in 2022, a Miami Herald analysis found. Even in heavily Cuban precincts in Westchester and Hialeah, he ran about 10 points behind them, and he lost Doral, home to South Florida’s biggest Venezuelan-American community, which Trump and DeSantis both won by more than 20.
Republican consultant Giancarlo Sopo put it plainly: “That’s a hard sell to someone who thinks you want to deport his cousin.” Donalds saw the glass half full. “Some of the prognostication was we were going to lose Miami-Dade County by 20 points, that did not happen tonight,” he told reporters.
The BeezLoop Take
Florida isn’t a red wall. It’s a state where Republicans start with a huge registration lead and a money advantage of about seven to one, and still won by only about 1.3 points. That’s not stubborn. That’s a state Democrats stopped competing for and nearly won anyway.
The warning sign for Republicans is Miami-Dade. Hispanic voters who moved right under Trump moved back when deportations started hitting their own families. If the national party keeps treating those voters as locked in, Florida’s next close race won’t go their way.
The open question: will national Democrats actually spend money in Florida in 2028, or write it off again?
More on BeezLoop: Democrats won the House and Senate. Here’s what changes.
Sources: Miami Herald via Yahoo News · NBC News · NBC 6 Miami · The Miami Times · MultiState · WPLG Local 10 (video)
