Can Kamala Harris do what was unthinkable a week ago and produce a Democratic presidential win in Florida?
In the days since the vice president became the de facto Democratic nominee for president, more and more Democrats — from excited South Florida activists to elected officeholders and state party leaders — have been professing optimism, dreaming of a Harris win.
“Florida is totally in play,” declared Randy Fleischer of Davie, who’s been active for decades in Democratic politics. He said he would not have offered the same assessment before President Joe Biden ended his campaign for reelection and Democrats turned to the vice president.
“People are gonna come out, they’re gonna come out strong, they’re gonna really come out strong for Kamala,” Fleischer said.
Dream on is the message to Democrats from Republicans, who find the notion of Harris winning Florida to be nothing short of absurd.
“Florida is more and more a red state every year,” said Richard DeNapoli, the state Republican committeeman for Broward and a former county Republican party chair. “They have no ground game to speak of. They have no funding. And they really don’t have a lot of great candidates. It’s like the trifecta of a losing proposition.”
“President Trump will definitely win the state,” DeNapoli said.
Democrats emphatically disagree.
“There are some who would try to say that Florida is not in play, but let me quell those rumors or suppositions now. Florida absolutely is in play,” said Fentrice Driskell of Tampa, the Democratic Party leader in the Florida House of Representatives.
“Florida is not a red state, it has been a red performing state,” Driskell said. “What we know is that when there are strong candidates at the top of the ticket and people believe that elections are competitive, they do show out and they come out and vote.”
And Florida Democratic Party Chair Nikki Fried asserted that Democratic victories are newly within reach, not only at the presidential level, but in the U.S. Senate race and other contests across the state.
Enthusiasm critical
The rapid coalescing around the vice president as the candidate to go up against former President Donald Trump has produced remarkable displays of enthusiasm among Democrats.
It’s showing up among committed party activists who show up at political clubs; when party faithful post on social media or join online organizing sessions; in the numbers of people signing up to volunteer for the campaign; during news interviews with elected officials — and when people click the donate button on their phones or computers.
“The energy and enthusiasm out there for Vice President Harris is absolutely amazing,” said state Rep. Christine Hunschofsky of Parkland, who’s been elected by her colleagues to serve as state House Democratic leader after the 2026 elections.
Lauren Book of Broward, the Democratic Party leader in the Florida Senate, also said Harris has “generated incredible excitement and momentum here in Broward County, and across the state of Florida.”
Book cited the more than 6,000 Floridians the Harris camp said signed up to volunteer for the campaign in its first four days. Hunschofsky said the number of people registering to volunteer has broken records.
A nationwide Zoom call attracted more than 40,000 Black women for Harris hours after she became a presidential candidate on Sunday. And, Driskell said, a Florida call for Black women attracted 2,000 participants, compared to previous such calls that would attract “maybe 100 people.”
Hunschofsky said campaign contributions are another positive sign for the Democrats. “If you look at the maps where they showed where a lot of the donations were coming from in those first 24 hours, Florida was pretty heated in that map. There were a lot of donations coming from Florida.”
The Harris campaign hopes to continue its momentum with a nationwide “mobilization blitz” this weekend. Florida events include a golf cart caravan in The Villages, a Black men’s roundtable in Tampa Bay, phone banking in Broward, and an ice cream social in Palm Beach County.
Will it matter?
Aubrey Jewett, political scientist at the University of Central Florida, said Democrats’ excitement doesn’t mean Harris will win the state.
“I’m not going to say it’s not possible,” Jewett said. “Could she win? Of course you could work out a scenario,” he said.
But, he added, Harris at the top of the ticket makes Florida more competitive than it would have been with Biden as the Democratic standard-bearer. “How competitive remains to be seen.”
Jewett said enthusiasm is extremely important for winning elections.
“That’s been one of Trump’s strengths. He has a big group of core supporters that are just crazy about him. They are just so enthusiastic. The last time the Democrats really had that at the top of the ticket was Barack Obama. It’s been a while since anyone could whip up enthusiasm like that,” he said.
Florida Democrats, especially, are all-too-familiar with what happens when their party’s voters aren’t excited and don’t show up.
In the 2022 gubernatorial election, for example, it was clear for months to anyone paying attention that Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis would defeat Democratic challenger Charlie Crist, and U.S. Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., would defeat Democratic challenger Val Demings.
Droves of Democrats didn’t turn out to vote, and that showed in the results: DeSantis received 13% more votes in 2022 than in 2018. Crist received 23% fewer votes than the 2018 Democratic nominee for governor, Andrew Gillum.
“We know from some research that’s the main reason why DeSantis won by almost 20 points,” Jewett said. “The blowout was because Dems didn’t show.”
Driskell described the falloff in Democratic turnout in South and central Florida in 2022 as “dramatic.”
And that had an impact. Republicans had victories across the state, including racking up super-majorities in the Florida Senate and the Florida House in 2022 — a year when Democrats in other states did well, outperforming expectations.
“Energy, enthusiasm and excitement drives people to the polls. Enthusiasm is a huge factor in driving turnout … and voter turnout is what determines who wins or loses in any of these races,” Hunschofsky said. “What we had in 2022 was a lack of enthusiasm, a lack of turnout. This is the absolute opposite situation now in 2024.”
Other factors
Enthusiasm on its own doesn’t produce election victories.
Even if Democratic turnout is strong, Jewett said the party has to “face the reality that there are about 1 million more registered Republicans than Democrats” in Florida.
Although Democrats don’t like to see Florida as Republican red, it has moved strongly in that direction, making it much harder for Democrats to plot plausible paths to statewide victory.
For much of the 2000s, Florida was close enough that Democrats sometimes won statewide offices. And In 2012, President Barack Obama and Biden, then the vice president, won the state on Obama’s way to a second term, and then-U.S. Sen. Bill Nelson won reelection.
Immediately after that election, Democrats had 558,272 more registered voters than the Republicans. There are now 956,443 more registered Republicans than Democrats in Florida.
Stephen Gaskill, a communications strategist based in Palm Beach County and former president of the Florida LGBTQ+ Democratic Caucus, said the change at the top of the ticket could improve the Democrats’ fortunes in Florida — if the Harris candidacy translates into an influx of money in Florida.
More money coming into the Harris campaign “means there’s money that could come to Florida,” he said.
He pointed to the 2022 midterm elections, when national Democratic donors didn’t spend heavily in Florida. “Money went to all the other states, and Florida is the only state that took a turn for the right in 2022,” he said. “So that’s the case history of what happens when you don’t invest in Florida.”
Driskell said the Biden-turned-Harris campaign has “already been building up the infrastructure in Florida that we need to win.’ She said that includes the hiring of more than 30 campaign staffers.
Tempered expectations
State Rep. Robin Bartleman and state Rep. Michael Gottlieb, both Broward Democrats, didn’t offer the same assertions of a presidential victory in Florida as some of their fellow Democrats.
“We’ll definitely be able to deliver Broward County to her,” Bartleman said. (Broward is the most Democratic county in Florida.) Statewide, she said, “I’m hoping we can. Always hope.”
Gottlieb said anticipating a Harris win in the state is “a very optimistic outlook. Florida has unfortunately been trending red.”
“I think we live in the blue bubble here,” Gottlieb said, describing the “tremendous” energy in South Florida since the Biden-to-Harris switch.
“There’s a confluence of circumstances that suggests that she’s going to do very well in Florida. Whether or not she gets the electoral votes or not, remains to be seen. I think, unfortunately, outside of Palm Beach, Dade and Broward, I’m not sure if she’s going to get the votes that she needs to actually win the state of Florida, which is probably no longer a swing state,” Gottlieb said.
Harris isn’t a stranger to Florida. She’s made a dozen trips to the state as vice president to highlight several key issues, including abortion rights and climate change.
In her role overseeing the White House Office of Gun Violence Prevention, she toured the building at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School where a gunman killed 17 people and injured 17 others in a 2018 massacre. March For Our Lives, the political organization that emanated from the Stoneman Douglas massacre, endorsed her for president.
State Rep. Rick Roth, vice chair of the Palm Beach County Republican Party, said Florida voters won’t like what they see when they start to pay more attention to Harris and learn more about her.
Roth emphasized that she’s a Democrat from California. “She’s been — I hate to say the word — a woke liberal. She’s been a far-left liberal since she was first elected. The more that people dig into that, they’ll realize she’s not any better than Biden.”
Roth also said he thinks she’ll prove weaker than Biden because “she doesn’t really have much of a track record” and “doesn’t even have high likability.”
Jen O’Malley Dillon, the Harris national campaign chair, in a “path-to-victory” memo released by the campaign, emphasized Harris would take her message across battleground states and said there are “multiple pathways” to reaching the 270 electoral votes required to win the presidency.
Florida, the third-largest state, awards 30 electoral votes.
O’Malley Dillon wrote that the campaign would focus on Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Georgia, Arizona and Nevada. “We intend to play offense in each of these states, and have the resources and campaign infrastructure to do so.”
North Carolina, which a Democrat hasn’t won since 2008, was on the list. Florida, which last went Democratic in 2012, wasn’t.
Downballot prospects
Most realistic, to many, is the possibility Harris-generated enthusiasm could increase turnout among voters who weren’t excited about voting for Biden.
Some hope that Harris excitement — especially if it’s combined with voters drawn to the polls by referendums that would enshrine abortion rights in the Florida Constitution and legalize recreational marijuana — could change the composition of the people who actually show up to vote.
With a Harris-led ticket, Jewett said, “I don’t think Democrats will just give up and not show up.”
And if the Democratic base in Florida is actually motivated and shows up, the party is likely to do better in some contests for lower level offices than it did in 2022.
“My lane and my focus is breaking the Republican supermajority in the House. And I can tell you that having (Harris) at the top of the ticket absolutely helps us there,” Driskell said.
Roth leaves office in November because term limits prevent him from running for reelection. He’s a 2026 candidate for a state Senate.
He acknowledged Republicans face challenges in downballot races. He said it was “a little too early to make a judgment on that. Obviously the Legislature has a supermajority in the House and Senate. To maintain that, even to stay status quo, I would call that a victory. There’s always going to be the potential to lose some of the seats we barely won two years ago.”
U.S. Senate
Besides the presidential race, and contests for state Legislature and county offices, voters will decide whether to reelect U.S. Sen. Rick Scott, R-Fla.
Democrats will decide in the Aug. 20 primary if he’ll be challenged by former Democratic U.S. Rep. Debbie Mucarsel-Powell or by Stanley Campbell, a former Navy pilot and business owner. Rod Joseph and Brian Rush are also on the Democratic primary ballot.
Jewett said Harris leading the ticket could help the Democrats’ Senate nominee. “Is that going to be enough to win the Senate race? Maybe. But I’d still say from what I’ve seen in polling, money and what I’ve seen in electoral history, Rick Scott is still the favorite there.”
Campbell is confident that Harris would help flip the Senate seat by turning out more Democrats and more no-party affiliation/independent voters.
He said Harris would increase turnout of Black, Hispanic and white voters who’d vote for her and against Trump.
“We’re going to get a lot of women, particularly white women who know that a woman’s choice (abortion rights) is on the ballot and a woman is on the ballot,” Campbell said.
On Tuesday, he said, he was at several South Florida events “with majority Anglo women and they are freaking elated. … They know that (Harris) can take him down, and so they’re excited about it, and I guarantee you some of them are gonna bring some husbands with them.”
Anthony Man can be reached at aman@sunsentinel.com and can be found @browardpolitics on Bluesky, Threads, Facebook and Mastodon.
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