Florida has a rep for being a "swing state," but it arguably really isn't one. It's tilted slightly Republican for quite some time. From 1952 to present, the only Democratic presidential candidates to win the state were Johnson in 1964, Carter in 1976, Clinton in 1996, and Obama in both 2008 & 2012. That's only five wins out of 18 elections (officially, at least; see also the 2000 election). The state also hasn't elected a Democrat to the governor's office since 1994. While the state is only marginally Republican, it's enough to where Republicans win statewide elections more often than not, and because of that you get absolutely garbage bills like this that actually have a good chance of becoming law because the state is ran by absolutely garbage "leaders" like DeathSantis.
And the reason for this is mainly the northern half of the state. Northern Florida is mostly like the most redneck-y parts of the rest of the South, being more sparsely populated and rural, and predominantly Republican. The panhandle does have three major metro areas, those being Tallahassee, Pensacola, and Panama City, but only Tallahassee is predominantly Democratic. Going out towards the Atlantic coast, even Jacksonville barely tilts Democratic despite being a major city, and Alachua County (where Gainesville is) is the only place in northeast/north-central Florida to be heavily Democratic. So, even the cities in northern Florida are typically more Republican than average for cities of their size.
Meanwhile, the southern part of the state leans Democratic, thanks to the more traditionally Dem-skewing cities of Miami, Tampa, and Orlando. It's not
heavily Democratic, but would probably be
consistently Democratic if it were its own state, kinda like Minnesota or post-Bush Virginia.
I've seen suggestions for a hypothetical Florida partition that look something like this:
If Florida was split in two this way, the results of the 2020 election would have looked like this assuming the county-level votes remained unchanged:
| Population | Electors | Biden vote | Trump vote |
| N. Florida | 5,416,920 | 10 | 1,351,784 | 2,003,756 |
| S. Florida | 13,384,390 | 21 | 3,945,261 | 3,664,975 |
That just shows you how much the north part of the state skews things in the Republicans' favor.
thehill.com
