Strategic Retreat from Florida

 

Is it time for progressives to shut the door on the Sunshine State?

 

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Florida has always held a special place in the imagination of Americans. A place where people can go for a walk in their flip flops and watch the sun set beneath the waves in January while the rest of the country is scraping ice off their windshields. It’s little wonder that Walt Disney chose Orlando for the site of his massive Disney World complex.

It’s a feeling I know well. After growing up in Kansas and spending 21 years in the military we decided to make Pensacola our forever home after retiring in 2014. However, in recent years the Sunshine State has more frequently seen dark clouds on the horizon, both literal and metaphorical. Many progressive minded people are starting to wonder, is it time to get out while the getting is still good?

Move to the right

It’s not a secret that Florida has become a right-wing haven the last couple of years under America’s most obnoxious governor. Without going too far down the rabbit hole of Ron DeSantis’ assault on decency, here’s a few of the highlights. He’s disenfranchised thousands by undermining voting rights reforms passed through the voter referendum. DeSantis violated Florida’s constitution by dividing up congressional districts with large numbers of African American voters to dilute the impact of their votes. He’s banned any mention of African American history that acknowledges institutional racism or might make white children feel bad. He’s forced schools to close their libraries until they scrub any book that normalizes the LGTBQ community from their shelves. And of course, there’s DeSantis’ infamous war on Disney because they made a rather timid statement opposing his “Don’t say gay” legislation.

That’s a very small sampling of the type of policies DeSantis has put in place, but governors come and go. Even if he’s not the Republican nominee for President, he’ll be gone in 2026. Is DeSantis really a reason to leave the state? It hasn’t been that long since Florida was a purple state that often determined the winner of presidential elections. When we moved here in 2014, Florida had voted for the Democratic presidential candidate in the last 3 out of 5 elections with one clear Republican victory and the disputed 2000 election that was essentially a tie. However, after Trump carried Florida by 1.2% in 2016, we became one of the only states in which Trump increased his support in 2020, nearly tripling his margin of victory.

The move to the right has been even more obvious in the governor elections. Beginning with Jeb Bush in 1998, Republicans have won seven straight gubernatorial elections. Both Jeb Bush and his successor Charlie Crist were moderates that didn’t necessarily signal the state was moving to the right. Rick Scott’s two terms in office represented a more significant move towards conservative government, but both of his elections were very close, and in 2018 the largely unknown Ron DeSantis won the race for governor by only 0.4% of the vote.

At that point, even though Republicans had won six straight governor elections, the Democrats were still competitive in the state. Then 2022 happened. Even by comparison to Rick Scott, Ron DeSantis was both the most right-wing and most divisive governor Florida had elected in decades. However, instead of making him vulnerable during his re-election campaign, DeSantis scored the largest gubernatorial victory the state had seen in forty years, winning by nearly 20%.

Voter Registration

How did DeSantis go from a 0.4% victory to his shocking 19.4% in 2022? Looking at voter registration statistics, the 2022 election starts to look a lot less surprising. There was a movement across the south of a shrinking Democratic party dating back to the 1970s when the old Democratic segregationists left the party over the national party’s support of civil rights reforms. Most former Confederate states were solidly Republican by the 1990s, however in Florida the Democrats held on to their majority. By the early 2000s it seemed the Democrats had stopped the bleeding, and their majority stabilized at around 500,000, with a large number of independents who could swing an election either way.

The election of Donald Trump changed that dynamic, and the Democratic majority started shrinking once again. Slowly at first, but quicker each year. Last year alone, the Republican increased their current majority by 340,000 and it appears they’ll add that many or more in 2023. No matter how you slice it, Florida has become solidly Republican. Not just Republican, but Trump MAGA Republican.

When I first saw these statistics, I was pretty shocked. How could a twice impeached president like Donald Trump actually help the Republicans who have been reeling in most other parts of the country. To answer this question, we have to look at the state’s shifting population. That siren call that has lured people to the state for decades has caused Florida to often be an outlier. When the rest of the South was becoming solidly Republican, northern migration to Florida helped to keep Florida purple. Now the demographic shifts are working against the Democrats.

 Migration

Analysis of Census data from 2021 about migration in and out of each state reveals that Florida led the nation in the number of people moving into the state with 675,000. It’s difficult to quantify the reasons for this migration, but when looking at where they came from there is a clear trend. A disproportionate amount of these people came from Democratic controlled states. If these people were simply moving for the nice winters that would likely push the state to the left, but that doesn’t seem to be the case.

If you’ve been on social media the last five or six years you probably know there are a lot of really angry Trump supporters in blue states like California, New York and Illinois. Ron DeSantis’ anti-woke rhetoric is luring the disaffected MAGA crowd to leave liberal bastions for what the Governor likes to call, “the free state of Florida.”

This population shift is also working against progressives on the outflow. In addition to having the most people coming to the state, Florida also has the third most people leaving. It appears that many of the people departing Florida are going to the same states that Florida’s immigrants are coming from. In other words, Florida is basically trading our liberals for blue state conservatives. My interpretation of this data is speculation, however, the trends are pretty clear. That’s particularly true when coupled with the corresponding surge in Republican voter registration. Florida has a migration fueled shift to the right.

Again, the people who are disrupting their lives and moving cross-country for political reasons aren’t people who just lean towards the Republican party. These are the Trump dead-enders who see him as a national hero and Democrats as anti-American communist. In short, the political refugees that are showing up in Florida are the worst of the worst from the rest of the country.

The Price of Staying

This disturbing trend might be enough to make any progressive minded person think twice about moving to Florida, but for those of us who are already here, moving out of state is a pretty big deal. It means disrupting your family, your career, and spending thousands of dollars to relocate. That puts many of us in a difficult position. As bad as the political environment is in Florida, there’s always the option of keeping your head down and enjoying Florida’s beauty and hope the political winds eventually swing the other way. For those without the means to relocate, that may be the only option.

Staying in Florida, however, means living in a state where politicians force schools to teach a distorted right-wing version of history, where the LGBTQ community is treated as less than fully human and where there’s little chance of expanding Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act (ACA). Florida is one of only 10 states that haven’t adopted the ACA’s expanded access to healthcare. Because of this a quarter of adults under 35 have no insurance, double the national average. Even those with insurance are often hostages to their jobs out of fear of losing their insurance. Staying in Florida also means living in a state that has virtually outlawed all abortions, assuming the state’s Republican appointed supreme court upholds the 6-week abortion ban that DeSantis recently signed into law. That’s a lot of real-world consequences for staying put.

Climate Change

Even if Florida does manage an unlikely political U-turn that undoes the actions of twenty-five years of single party Republican rule, that’s not the only reason to consider making a run for it. Florida has either the lowest or second lowest elevation of any state depending on how you measure it. Just looking at a map it’s clear that Florida is uniquely vulnerable to climate change and sea level rise. No matter how much the state’s elected leaders want to pretend climate change isn’t a problem, that doesn’t change the reality. Florida is looking at a foot or more of sea level rise by 2050, and three to six feet by the end of the century depending on how aggressive we are at limiting greenhouse gasses.

Just this summer scientists measured an ocean surface temperature of 101° in the Florida Keys, the hottest ocean temperature ever recorded on earth. The combination of higher sea levels and hotter water temperatures is leading to hurricanes that can intensify quicker and maintain higher maximum wind speeds. As I’m writing this, Florida is still recovering from hurricane Idalia which went from a tropical storm to a category 4 hurricane in 30 hours.

 Hurricanes

If you have any doubts about this, look at Florida’s home insurance crisis. Florida already had the highest rates in the country, and this year insurance companies hit homeowners with an additional 43% increase on average. Many blame the state’s Republican party for passing legislation that seemed more focused on helping insurance companies than consumers. However, the problem with Florida’s home insurance market isn’t any particular insurance reform, it’s the ever-increasing risk of catastrophic disaster. The modern era of meteorology spans the last 60 years, since we’ve had routine access to satellite data.

In the first 20 years of that period Florida had three major hurricanes, in the next twenty years there were also three. However, in the last twenty years the number of major hurricanes in Florida has soared to 11 with more of them being category 4 and 5 than before. That also doesn’t include hurricane Sally that caused widespread damage in 2020, but came in just under the threshold for a category 3 hurricane. At least in the short term, there’s no fix to this problem, it’s only going to keep getting worse.

Conclusion

After making multiple moves over the course of my career in the Air Force, when we settled in Florida after my retirement, I was confident this would be the house we’d grow old in. The house our children would always think of when they thought of home. Even four years ago the thought of moving was nowhere on my radar. Unfortunately, I’ve been forced into the realization that Florida is no longer a decent place to raise children. Across the state I know many are wrestling with this same issue and the census data shows many are coming to the same conclusion.

In war, there are times when a general must perform a strategic retreat from an unsustainable position in order to better continue the fight. That’s the situation progressives in Florida face today. Is it time to reposition to higher ground where we can continue the struggle to make this land more equitable and sustainable? I think it is.