Down-ballot wins and Miami-Dade shifts could make Florida competitive in 2028
Florida stayed in Republican hands at the top of the ticket in Tuesday’s midterm elections, but the margins collapsed from recent cycles. Republican Ashley Moody beat Democrat Angie Nixon in the Senate race by three points, and Republican Byron Donalds edged Democrat David Jolly by little more than a point in the governor’s race. Democrats fared far better than in 2024, when Trump won the state by 13 percentage points, or 2022, when Gov. Ron DeSantis won re-election by 19 points.
The results marked a striking shift in a state that had transformed from the nation’s pre-eminent presidential swing state into the epicenter of the MAGA movement — Trump won Florida three times, after Barack Obama won it twice by narrow margins. Democrats hope the razor-thin margins in races up and down the ballot will serve as a wake-up call as the party looks to the future.
“Florida is not a lost cause, and I think we proved that tonight,” Nixon said after her loss. She pledged to spend the next two years registering voters and building support for Democrats, saying “2028 is around the corner.”
The gains stand to make Florida more competitive in 2028 if the party can rebuild and fund its operation, and the stakes are amplified by population growth: Florida is projected to gain two or three congressional seats, and an equal number of Electoral College votes, after the 2030 census, reflecting its population growth. Yet Florida Democrats face the challenge of persuading national party leaders to make the state a priority after Democrats expanded the battleground with victories in red states such as Texas and Ohio — states likely to command significant resources given the high cost of campaigning in each. National Democrats largely abandoned Florida after DeSantis won his first term as governor in 2018, and competing seriously again would require dedicating significant resources to infrastructure, voter mobilization and ads.
Nikki Fried, chair of the Florida Democratic Party, said she spent much of Thursday speaking with donors to press for more support to fund year-round organizing efforts and extend the party’s reach into minority and rural communities.
“Strike while the iron’s hot and reinvest,” said Matthew Isbell, a Democratic elections analyst. “If they don’t want to do that, we might not get another chance.”
One longtime Democratic strategist from Florida said the slim GOP victories would likely keep 2028 presidential hopefuls from paying too much attention to the state. A Democratic governor would have coaxed national investment and pressured candidates to show up, the strategist said, and without one, Florida remains a very expensive state to campaign in — money that would go a long way in a number of other states.
Down the ballot, Republicans captured 17 U.S. House seats in Florida to Democrats’ seven, with four races uncalled as of Thursday. A redistricting push spearheaded by DeSantis, as part of a broader White House strategy, backfired: if the current result holds in an uncalled seat south of Orlando, Republicans will have lost all four races in districts redrawn to favor them. In the legislature, Democrats picked up a net of at least 15 seats in the state House, breaking the GOP’s supermajority, and flipped a seat in the state Senate.
Some of the most striking erosion of Republican support came in Miami-Dade, the state’s most populous county. While Cuban-Americans have long leaned conservative, that support deepened significantly during Trump’s rise — a rightward surge that extended to other Hispanic groups and transformed the county from a Democratic stronghold into a pillar of Trump’s coalition. This year, Nixon and Jolly both won Miami-Dade.
Two prominent Cuban-American Republican incumbents, Reps. María Elvira Salazar and Mario Díaz-Balart, were still awaiting the outcomes of their races after clinging to narrow leads. Salazar’s contest drew national attention after she warned Trump that his immigration policies had gone too far — including in a television ad a month before the election — and that his Hispanic voters felt betrayed. The tight race for Díaz-Balart, a 12-term incumbent, caught both parties off guard and sent a shock wave through Florida’s political circles.
“It’s a moment of celebration, but it’s also a moment of reckoning,” Salazar told supporters Tuesday night.
Across numerous demographic groups, Florida voters shifted heavily toward Democrats, according to data on this year’s Senate race from a national voter survey. Hispanics moved a net 22 points toward the party, partly in response to the Trump administration’s immigration raids that especially affected communities in South Florida. “They couldn’t escape the effect that it was going to have on Latinos,” said Julio Ligorría, a Miami political strategist who has advised candidates from both parties, noting that Salazar’s district was severely affected by the raids. Cuban-American voters still supported the Republican candidate, but moved 17 points toward Democrats. Despite evidence that an antisocialism stance wasn’t resonating with many voters, Republicans “doubled down on socialism, saying it’s going to be our winning message,” Ligorría said.
Nixon, a Democratic socialist who joined the Democratic Socialists of America this year, captured nearly as many votes as the moderate Jolly, suggesting the label didn’t matter as much as it used to. She largely rejected the label during her race, and Democrats pointed to her energetic, on-the-ground campaign as key to her competitive performance.
Democrats also benefited from voter concerns about an affordability crunch driven by inflation, soaring real-estate prices and rising home-insurance premiums. According to the survey, 58% of Florida voters said Trump’s policies had worsened economic conditions, and 60% believed his tariff policies hurt the national economy. Another 41% said their family’s financial situation was worse than two years ago, and 79% reported financial hardship as a result of inflation.
Despite such advantages, Democrats still came up short, and party members pointed to lopsided fundraising. Donalds raised roughly 6.5 times as much as Jolly and spent more than $165 million by the final stretch, compared with about $25 million by the Democrat. The Democratic Governors Association invested at least $10 million apiece in seven states, including Georgia and Michigan, but only $1 million in Florida. Christian Ulvert, a Democratic consultant in Miami, said the result wasn’t surprising given the fundraising gap and the lack of support from national Democrats.
“It is painful to see that we came so close in Florida but clearly lacked the resources to put us over the top,” said Chris Korge, the Democratic National Committee’s finance chair, who lives in the state. Democrats had made “giant steps” this election, Korge said, “but the job is not done.”
Republicans cautioned against measuring the results against past cycles. “Florida’s Republican victories should be measured against the national political environment, not past elections,” said Slater Bayliss, a Republican lobbyist close to Donalds’s campaign. “Given the tailwinds Democrats enjoyed nationally, their inability to win statewide should concern them.”