MIAMI-DADE COUNTY – Just days before Florida’s August primary, county Mayor Daniella Levine Cava’s campaign was convinced Florida Democrats would show the country that they’ve turned things around.
“What Aug. 20 is going to show us is that unlike August ’22 where you had a bottom fallout of turnout for the precursor of what was going to be a bloodbath of turnout in the general election,” Christian Ulvert, Cava’s campaign manager and a longtime political operative in Miami, told NOTUS. “It’s the opposite right now. Democrats lead turnout so far by 4 to 5 points as we sit here today, vote and vote by mail.”
Cava, a Democrat, did handily win 58% of the vote in the nonpartisan race, avoiding a runoff. As for Ulvert’s prediction that Democrats in the state would buck the party’s 2022 turnout problem? They didn’t come close.
Just 23% of the half-a-million registered Democrats in Miami-Dade County turned out to vote in this primary. That’s down slightly from the 23.4% of the more than 575,000 registered Democrats who voted in the 2022 primary. With Republican voter registration up, and their turnout about the same, Miami-Dade Democrats’ 9-point turnout advantage in the 2022 primary dropped to less than a single point this time around.
As insiders look to Miami-Dade as a bellwether for whether Democrats can actually make a comeback in Florida, some Democrats say the party is “gaslighting” voters and donors about the state being in play for Kamala Harris — and missing out on the work needed to register Democratic voters and drive them to the polls.
Ulvert texted an emphatic “NO” when asked if August’s turnout numbers foreshadow another poor showing for Democrats in November, arguing that no-party-affiliated voters, almost a third of registered voters in Miami-Dade, will make the difference. “We had good turnout and excitement and NPAs are clearly going strong for Dems with the Mayor winning NPAs at 65% margin,” he wrote. There was a significant uptick in NPA voters, with more than 17% of turnout compared to just less than 15% two years ago.
Others are much less confident.
“The constant ‘👀 shhh…Florida is in play’ gaslighting is counterproductive,” Robert Dempster, former Miami-Dade County party chair and executive director of a new voter outreach nonprofit, Just Vote Period, told NOTUS via text. “The people who buy it will be crushed and disengage when reality finally hits, and the people who really know what’s going on will just look at us as deeply unserious (making them less likely to invest money in a delusional at best, dishonest at worst leadership).”
Primary turnout, for both Republicans and Democrats, has foreshadowed November turnout in Florida in recent presidential elections. In 2016, primary turnout went up by 3 points from 2012 — and so did the general election turnout. In 2020, primary turnout increased by another 4 points, and general election turnout went up by another 3 points.
Florida Democrats’ existential crisis is nowhere more pronounced than in Miami-Dade County, where Gov. Ron DeSantis won by more than 10 points in 2022 despite Democrats having a voter registration advantage in the county.
Republicans have run victory laps with the 2022 race, using it to claim Republicans have an edge with Latino voters. Democrats are working to reframe the narrative by calling that election a fluke.
“Obviously, DeSantis won big time in Miami-Dade, but it’s also true that when you see the turnout, Democrats didn’t go to vote — in big numbers,” Latino Victory Fund’s Adelys Ferro, who’s based in South Florida, told NOTUS.
Since the start of the year through the end of July, the number of active, registered Republican voters in Miami-Dade County increased by almost 24,000 and no-party-affiliated voters increased by about 10,000. Democrats, meanwhile, added just about 2,000 voters. (The state party has countered that a new Florida law removing people who haven’t voted in two cycles is also influencing the numbers.)
“You look at the voter trend data, Florida is trending badly, and they’re gaslighting a bunch of people and donors into a misleading narrative,” Thomas Kennedy, a former DNC member from Florida who recently left the party, told NOTUS.
Florida Democratic Senate candidate Debbie Mucarsel-Powell, who was born in Ecuador and raised in Miami, said voters shouldn’t take much away from the primary. On the Friday before the election, she canceled a planned canvassing event in Miami because of scattered rain — a dreary foreshadowing of the following week’s turnout.
“I wouldn’t read too much into the August primary. What I’m seeing is people getting ready for November,” Mucarsel-Powell told NOTUS. She said the state’s new vote-by-mail laws mean voters may not realize they needed to request a ballot in time. “It’s a different year, and it’s going to be very difficult to try to compare it to anything else we’ve seen before.”
There is some evidence of growing energy around Kamala Harris, with almost 40,000 volunteers signed up across the state, according to the Florida Democratic Party.
Democratic Party Chair Nikki Fried told reporters Tuesday that she and candidates this cycle “understand what it means to have a diverse Miami-Dade County.” They have focused on abortion and marijuana ballot initiatives and recently messaged around the contested election in Venezuela.
“I can tell you, on behalf of the Florida Democratic Party, we will always stand up for democracy. We will always stand up for freedom, and you’ve seen all of us coalesce around Venezuela and the Venezuelan people,” Fried said. “You saw us protesting with the Cuban community years ago and standing because we’ve got to fight for democracy here in this country.”
There is at least one year where primary turnout wasn’t reflected in November, the kind of historic year Florida Democrats are hoping for again: 2008, when Barack Obama flipped Florida after two previous cycles of Republican presidential wins.
Just 18% of Florida voters turned out in the August primary in 2008, and then 75% turned out in November.
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Claire Heddles is a NOTUS reporter and an Allbritton Journalism Institute fellow.