NY Times: “Florida’s days as a presidential battleground are bygone. No longer do candidates drop in every few days during campaign season. No longer do voters get bombarded with their ads. Nor is there more than a whisper of doubt that the state will vote Republican.
Presidential elections in Florida used to be decided by the slimmest of margins — none slimmer than the 537 votes that, after an infamous recount, won George W. Bush the White House in 2000. Republicans and Democrats waged fierce campaigns during the two decades that followed as Florida, rich in electoral votes, became the largest swing state.
In the past four years, the Florida Democratic Party has withered and struggled to rebuild. Democrats have lost their edge in registered voters and are now outnumbered by more than one million Republicans. They have not won a statewide seat since 2018. National fund-raising has all but dried up…..
The reasons are in some cases structural and longstanding: demographics, partisan gerrymandering and legislative term limits. But others are of Democrats’ own making: an unwillingness to invest enough in the nuts and bolts of winning elections; fund-raising divisions; and flawed assumptions about the growing Hispanic vote, according to an examination of voter registration numbers, campaign spending and more than two dozen interviews with political operatives from both parties.”