As temperatures fell to the 30s at sunset on a dreary damp January day, about a hundred Tallahasseeans huddled together at a lakeside gazebo to hear Leon County Commissioner Bill Proctor eulogize former President Jimmy Carter at a candlelight vigil.
Proctor, Tallahassee-born and -bred, said the Plains, Georgia, native was an inspiration when he left home in 1977 for Howard University in Washington, D.C.
“I always felt good about the White House and being downtown, because I felt that Plains was close enough to my house that Jimmy Carter understood my world,” Proctor said.
But such a connection between a Florida voter and the Florida Democratic Party no longer exists – if election results are an indication.
Still, some provocative ideas are circulating among Democrats to reestablish a connection as they prepare for the 2026 election, when the governor’s and Cabinet offices and a U.S. Senate seat will be on the ballot. Democrats need to erase an 8-point Republican advantage in voter registration.
Among the ideas to close the gap: Invite no-party affiliated voters to vote in Democratic primaries. Others include innovative use of social media and aggressive year-round outreach at the neighborhood level.
“Meet people where they are,” said former Senate Democratic Leader Audrey Gibson of Jacksonville. “I call it cultural competency” in organizing.
Democrats need to listen to what is happening in voters’ lives and respond with the kind of proposals and ideas “that brought us so much success last century,” said current Senate Democratic Leader Jason Pizzo of Sunny Isles Beach.
Out of power in Tallahassee since 1998, Democrats watched in November as the GOP solidified supermajorities in the Florida House, Senate and congressional delegation. President Donald Trump and U.S. Sen. Rick Scott scored double digit wins.
Across the ideological spectrum, from the door-knocking neighborhood canvasser and up through current and past elected office holders and leaders, Democrats agree they need to change the way they do politics if they are to regain relevance at the Capitol in Tallahassee.
“We need to do a deep dive into what happened,” said John Hedrick, a state committee member from Tallahassee. “Clearly we have to do something different because to keep doing the same thing over and over and getting the same results is insane.”
When Florida Democrats gathered in Orlando in January to reelect Nikki Fried as party chair to lead them into the 2026 election, discussions included how to rebrand – that is, change the public perception of Democrats – and how to recruit more voters.
Fried thinks year-round community-level organizing and innovative use of social media are how to grow the Democratic base. And she endorsed expanding eligibility of who can vote in Democratic primaries to chip away at Republican dominance of state government.
“We as Democrats have to recognize the current state of affairs in Florida. One-third of voters are independent and we’ve got to find a way to make sure that they’re under our umbrella as well,” Fried said.
A numbers problem
Democrats have been in a 15-year freefall, losing voters and officeholders while the GOP continues to grow in both categories.
Starting with U.S. Sen. Rick Scott’s election as governor in 2010, Republicans have won 15 of 17 statewide races, with former Democratic U.S. Sen. Bill Nelson’s 2012 reelection and Fried’s 2018 victory in the agriculture commissioner race being the Democrats’ two wins.
In that time, the GOP went from trailing Democrats by a half million registered voters to having a 1.2 million voter advantage, while no-party-affiliated voters, or NPAs, and minor parties increased their ranks by 1.6 million voters.
State records show the current breakdown: Republicans are 39% of registered voters, Democrats 31% and NPA/others 29%. That’s a 9-point gain for NPAs since 2014 and a 10-point decline for Democrats.
“Every month for the past three years I have checked the new voter registration numbers, thinking things can’t get worse for Democrats,” University of Central Florida political scientist Aubrey Jewett said. “And every month I’ve said, ‘Well, I guess it can get worse, because it’s just did.’ “
A quick and stunning fall
Florida was a battleground state as recently as 2018, when three statewide races were decided by less than 1 percentage point and the most frequent question out-of-state political reporters asked Jewett was, “Is Florida turning blue?”
But Democrats have fallen to their lowest number of state legislators ever and their voters are outnumbered by no-party-affiliated and other voters in 27 counties – making Democrats essentially the third party in 40% of the state. “Such a big change in such a small period of time really is historic,” Jewett said.
Jewett said Gov. Ron DeSantis’ “Free State of Florida” policies during the COVID pandemic enticed Republican voters to move here. Moreover, an aggressive GOP voter turnout program and fears among Hispanics and Blacks that the national Democratic Party has drifted too far left all are factors in the Democrats’ decline.
And then there is the popularity of President Trump.
Jewett said a state party’s identity is set by the national party and, of late, the national Democratic Party has not been much help to the state party.
“I don’t want to let the state party totally off the hook but the last time the national party was a big help to Democrats was 2012,” Jewett said. “Meanwhile, there’s the Trump factor. He actually moved here and now is a Florida man. I think that helps.”
The Trump factor is dramatically apparent in election night numbers out of what was once Democrat-rich Miami-Dade County. Former President Barack Obama, a Democrat, carried it by 208,000 votes in 2012. That margin was reduced to 85,000 votes for former President Joe Biden in 2020. Trump carried the county by 126,000 in 2024.
Back to basics
State Sen. Shevrin Jones, D-Miami Gardens, is the former chair of the Miami-Dade Democratic Executive Committee. He said the decision to suspend door-knocking campaigns and opt for virtual events during the pandemic haunted Democrats last year. That’s because the GOP had maintained an aggressive voter registration effort and social calendar.
“There are communities where (a) ‘Ms. Johnson’ still wants you to come knock on her door. There are communities where individuals still want you to call their phone to get their support,” Jones said.
And personal encounters can be opportunities for Democrats to showcase their accomplishments and show their campaign pitch people are “not selling pipe dreams,” he added.
Democratic drop-off wasn’t isolated to Miami-Dade.
Last November, more Republicans cast ballots than Democrats did. Jones wants an increased effort to reach the estimated 5 million Floridians the Electronic Registration Information Center said are eligible but not registered to vote.
“There are voters … who are no longer participating in the process, and we have to ask the question, ‘are we speaking to the individuals who are not showing up? Are we talking to the needs of those people who were not participating in the process? Are the kitchen table issues actually reaching the kitchen table?’ ” Jones said.
He does not oppose Democrats inviting everyone except Republicans to their primaries but also wants to convert unregistered voters into the party: “We can walk and chew gum at the same time. We can do both,” Jones said.
Can Democrats flip NPAs?
The NPA voter is key to building a new majority, according to past leaders like former House Speaker Tom Gustafson (1988–90), and former state Sen. and Palm Beach County State Attorney Dave Aronberg.
Gustafson said NPAs are up for grabs because they have already rejected both the Democratic and Republican parties but still vote for one of the two parties’ candidates. If Democrats can pull in 70% of the NPA vote, they break the GOP control of the statehouse, Gustafson said.
“It can be done. You just have to start talking to them and find what will float their boat and what will get them excited,” Gustafson said.
Gustafson had a reputation as a creative thinker – and maverick – when he ran the House. He believes a “poly-partisan” appeal will lure the independents into the Democrat’s tent.
A blueprint for a poly-partisan platform includes broad planks that address issues affecting people’s daily lives, Gustafson said. The economy includes a silo of pocket-book issues that cuts across regional and philosophical lines. It takes in wages, worker safety, healthcare, and so on, he explained.
And both he and Aronberg said that approach provides the opposition with fewer opportunities to split the Democratic base over culture-war issues at the expense of their agenda.
“Republicans are very good at making big election issues over little things and we should not be distracted by red herring issues that really don’t affect many people,” Aronberg said. That enables extremist on both sides to grandstand, he said, but for the Democrats in the minority it comes at the expense of alienating support for their agenda.
“Some people would rather be purists and lose elections, then get most of what you want and be able to enact meaningful change,” Aronberg said. He led the Main Street Democrats Caucus in 2002–2010, aiming to strengthen the party’s infrastructure at the county level.
The animating priority for the Democratic Party needs to be winning elections, Aronberg said. “And, to be a big tent party means including people who may not agree with us on every social issue, because unless we win elections, none of our principles, ideals or positions will ever amount to anything.”
Narrower focus, fewer internal arguments
Democrats appear to have little or no disagreements on core economic beliefs. And a second plank that would also gain widespread support, Aronberg and Gustafson propose, is environmental protection.
“Look at the backlash when Gov. DeSantis tried to put pickleball courts in our state parks. That just tells you that there’s a strong conservation movement in our state. No one wants overdevelopment and uncontrolled growth,” Aronberg said.
Former Tallahassee Mayor John Marks, a past president of the Florida League of Cities, said a strategy rooted in primaries open to NPAs and campaigns focused on three issues “is something I can get behind.”
Armed with a three-plank policy program, Aronberg, Pizzo and Gustafson said Democrats need then to take a play out of the Trump media play book and promote the program constantly.
Trump’s social media strategy was to provide constant feedback to keep supporters engaged and the campaign narrative in news reports on track.
“Trump won because they used entertaining videos from rallies, like they were episodes in a sitcom. He’s a good showman, top drawer,” Gustafson said.
A showman who sticks to his talking points to sell his agenda and ignores opponents’ counter attack and media narratives, he added.
“Trump did a master class at this. He made middle- and lower-middle class white patriarchs feel that their kids’ GPAs, that their station in life, that the health and viability of their marriage and their neighborhood, their salary, was somehow intrinsically, intimately intertwined with high school transgender athletes,” Pizzo said.
Jewett, Gustafson and Pizzo said part of the Democrats’ challenge is to establish a social media presence. Traditional news media has lost prestige and importance. Newspapers, broadcast networks and news magazines have all lost audiences while people turn to social media for political news.
Gustafson experimented with the idea of an army of social media content providers to produce high-quality videos explaining the issues at play in the 2024 election: “People react to video. They don’t react just to audio, and they don’t react at all to print, but they will react to a video. Through social media messaging, Instagram, etc., you build a community,” Gustafson said.
He incorporated the idea as the non-profit Florida Friends Network, with a board of directors and Facebook page, but the effort to activate the plan failed.
Fried said she plans an aggressive media strategy that employs similar tactics and uses a variety of social media to push the Democratic agenda and counter how the GOP and traditional media define Democrats to voters.
“We need to know their centers of influence and make sure that we’re there. Whether it is religious organizations, whether it is on podcasts, whether it is just in communities. We have to show up, spread our message and show the path forward to economic opportunities is with Democrats,” Fried said.
James Call is a member of the USA TODAY NETWORK-Florida Capital Bureau. He can be reached at jcall@tallahassee.com and is on X as @CallTallahassee.
