‘All hands on deck’: Florida Democrats to drop $1 million on voter registration push
The Florida Democratic Party is injecting $1 million into voter registration efforts through the end of the year as it looks to make up a growing gap with Republicans ahead of the 2024 election cycle.
The seven-figure investment, which was reported first by the Miami Herald, coincides with the launch of an 17-plus county “Take Back Florida” tour by the party’s chair Nikki Fried and Executive Director Phillip Jerez, who joined the operation last month after serving as political director for former U.S. Rep. Charlie Crist’s 2022 gubernatorial campaign.
The tour and voter registration push is set to launch next Wednesday with an event in Orlando. But the initiative will also focus heavily on South Florida, most notably in Miami-Dade County, where Democrats are scrambling to bounce back from a series of high-profile losses in 2022.
“It is all hands on deck in Miami,” Nikki Fried, the chair of the Florida Democratic Party, said. “We have not just the Florida Democratic Party, but a lot of our partners that are going to be spending significant resources on voter registration, vote by mail, re-enrollment, as well as messaging.”
Fried is set to travel to at least 16 other counties in August, including Broward and Palm Beach, according to an announcement shared with the Herald. The party is also planning a few more stops in September, a spokesperson said.
The goal, Fried said, is to deploy paid staffers and an expanded volunteer network to engage with and register voters in traditionally Democratic parts of the state and in Republican-leaning counties in hopes of minimizing Democrats’ margins of defeat there.
The new voter registration spending is part of a broader effort to revamp the Florida Democratic Party after a brutal 2022 midterm election cycle that saw Gov. Ron DeSantis win reelection by nearly 20 percentage points and Republicans capture supermajorities in both chambers of the state legislature.
Democrats held a sizable voter registration advantage over Republicans in Florida for years. But a turning point for the party came in late 2021 when the GOP gained the edge in registered voters. That lead has only continued to grow. There are now more than half-a-million more registered Republican voters in the state than Democrats, according to the latest data released by the Florida Division of Elections.
By Fried’s own admission, closing that gap entirely isn’t the goal. She said that the party’s aim is to cut the GOP’s current voter registration advantage by about 35% – about 190,000 voters.
The problem for Democrats isn’t just statewide. The party was alarmed in November when DeSantis and Republican U.S. Sen. Marco Rubio both carried Miami-Dade County, a key population center that Democrats have long banked on to deliver them statewide victories.
Fried, a Miami native, acknowledged that Democrats’ problems in Miami run deep, but said that the party sees the voter registration investment as part of an effort to re-engage with South Florida voters, especially new voters and independents who she said have been overlooked by Democrats.
“What is the message of the Democratic Party? Who are we?” Fried said. “And unfortunately we lost our way. And this is an opportunity to restart the conversation with so many of our electorates down in Miami-Dade.”
