Registered Republicans Continue to Grow, Overshadowing Democrats in Florida

Registered Republican voters are continuing to grow in what Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) has described as the “free state of Florida,” besting Democrats by over 175,000 voters.

The number of registered Republican voters in the state has increased exponentially over the past few years. Democrats historically held a clear advantage in voter numbers in the Sunshine State. That is, until last year, when Republicans finally overtook Democrats in voter registration.

“When I got elected governor, we had 280,000 more registered Democrats than Republicans in the state of Florida,” DeSantis said during a press conference in Seminole in November.

“Today, and it will probably be fully publicized very soon, today for the first time in the history of Florida, we’ve now overtaken Democrats. There are more registered Republicans in Florida than Democrats,” he said to applause.

For further context, ten years ago in 2012, registered Democrats led Republicans by 558,272 registered voters. In 2020, the year the Chinese coronavirus struck, Democrats led Republicans by nearly 100,000 voters. But Republican figures only continued to grow. In March 2022, DeSantis’s office confirmed that registered Republicans led Democrats by over 100,000. And according to the most recent Florida Division of Elections data, Republicans lead Democrats in by 175,911 registered voters.

All of this follows the freedom first approach embraced by both DeSantis and the Florida legislature, which has tackled a variety of issues over the past two years — from vaccine mandates to woke gender ideology in children’s classrooms.

“Florida has become the escape hatch for those chafing under authoritarian, arbitrary, and seemingly never-ending mandates and restrictions,” DeSantis said during his State of the State address this year, noting that leaders in blue states are “grounded more in blind adherence to Faucian declarations than they are in the constitutional traditions that are the foundation of free nations.” 

Some, however, are in denial. Far-left Gov. Gavin Newsom, for example, attempted to switch the narrative on the Fourth of July, urging Floridians to move to California — a place, he claimed, that still believes in freedom:

Gavin Newsom / Twitter

Despite Newsom’s insistence that Florida policies remain unpopular, the state experienced the highest level of domestic visitation in its history last year.