Florida’s Miami-Dade County Flips Red In Voter Registration For First Time In History

For the first time in history, there are more registered Republicans than Democrats in Florida’s Miami-Dade County.

Florida’s Voice reported 464,370 Republicans and 440,790 Democrats are now registered to vote in Miami-Dade County, one of Florida’s blue strongholds, as of Monday morning. That means a whopping 59 of 67 counties in Florida are now red.

“Miami-Dade County has completed its off-year voter roll maintenance, and this morning, it shed 172,747 voters from its active rolls,” Michael Pruser, Decision Desk HQ’s director of data science, stated. “The change netted Republicans more than 38,000 voters compared to Democrats, and the county has now flipped to Republican by registration. Today marks Republicans’ first-ever lead in voter registration in Miami-Dade.”

Florida’s remarkable change from an evenly divided state to a red one is largely attributed to the success of Florida’s Republican governor, Ron DeSantis. In 2021, a poll conducted by the Florida Chamber of Commerce showed that the 14.5 million registered voters in Florida were almost exactly split between Republicans and Democrats. According to the Florida Department of State, there were 5,290,465 registered Democrats, 5,185,744 Republicans, 3,832,070 independents with no party affiliation (NPAs), and 247,108 voters affiliated with another party.

By November 2021, fully one year before the reelection of DeSantis, who had narrowly won the governorship in 2018, POLITICO reported that the Democratic Governors Association would not give any significant financial aid to any Democrat opposing DeSantis’ re-election in 2022, choosing to focus on races it thought Democrats could win. On October 31, POLITICO admitted, “Gov. Ron DeSantis appears unstoppable.” Indeed, he was, winning virtually 60% of the vote in November 2022 in a landslide.

President Donald Trump, who won the state narrowly in both 2016 and 2020, ran away with it in 2024, ultimately winning by double-digits. The Associated Press said it was comfortable calling the race when it saw that Trump was on track to win Miami-Dade County. Trump built on the success of DeSantis, who two years earlier became for first Republican to carry Miami-Dade in a statewide contest in two decades.

Last week, the Florida Department of State reported that there were now 5,578,457 registered GOP voters in Florida and 4,329,271 registered Democrats. That means that the GOP went from 50.5% of registered voters in 2021 to 56.3%, a massive 5.8 point shift in less than four years, with virtually all the time being during a Democratic presidential tenure.

In his tenure as governor, DeSantis has governed as a staunch conservative; he took massive heat for keeping the state open during the COVID pandemic, signed legislation requiring government employers and contractors to use E-Verify, terminated cooperation with a program to relocate illegal immigrants, advocated for more school choice, banned the teaching of Critical Race Theory in schools, banned China from buying land in the state, handled disasters such as Hurricanes Ian and Nicole with aplomb, for which he was widely praised, banned men from competing in women’s sports as far back as 2021, and introduced a $5,000 signing bonus for those wanting to be Florida police officers.