Florida’s Democrats were in chaos. Then the abortion bans came along

At the beginning of April, Joe Biden’s campaign manager made a bold proclamation: the state of Florida was winnable for the president in 2024.

Julie Chávez Rodríguez’s claim raised eyebrows for a few reasons: for one, the former president and Biden’s opponent, Donald Trump, is now a permanent resident of the Sunshine State. Then there’s the voter deficit – between 2020 and 2022, the number of voters registered as Democrats in Florida dropped by 331,810. Over that same period, the number of Republican voter registrations in the state increased slightly. Currently, Republicans hold an advantage among active registered voters to the tune of 892,034 registrations.

The resulting electoral drubbings were predictable. After the state chose Trump over Hillary Clinton by just over 100,000 votes in 2016, voters backed him by a margin of more than 300,000 four years later. The same trend bolstered Ron DeSantis, the state’s governor who had squeaked into office in 2018 by just over 30,000 votes: he won re-election in 2022 by a staggering margin of 1.5 million.

To put it simply: Democrats in the state of Florida, over the past four years, have dug their way into an incredible hole – and they haven’t found their way out.

Enter 2024. The political landscape has shifted once again. Trump now faces 88 felony charges. DeSantis has slinked back to the state after an embarrassing rout in the presidential primary. And Florida’s Democratic Party finds itself under the new leadership of Nikki Fried, who has launched a “Take Back Florida” campaign – a bold effort to reverse Florida’s unmistakably reddening politics and keep it within the realm of “battleground” swing states.

Formerly the state’s commissioner of agriculture, 46-year-old Fried