Are the Reagan Democrats back? The Rise of the DeSantis Democrats. It’s been a while since Democrats have really rallied around a Republican movement. But the DeSantis movement looks real. Sure Trump brought in more Blacks and Latinos, but when Biden upped the freebies, many may have run back. But this Florida election was something.
It’s unclear how many DeSantis Democrats there are: DeSantis’ vote count jumped from roughly 4 million in 2018 to 4.6 million in 2022. Lots of those voters are presumably independents or Republicans who didn’t vote last time.
Some are disaffected Democrats alienated from the party they once belonged to. That’s evident from the longtime Democratic strongholds that DeSantis flipped, including Hillsborough, Palm Beach and Miami-Dade, where DeSantis skyrocketed from a 21-point loss in 2018 to an 11-point win in 2022—a net gain of more than 30 percentage points.
Time will tell.
