SEBASTIAN, Florida — Florida used to be an eastern political version of Nevada. Now it is a southern political version of Idaho.
Florida once was regarded as the prototypical swing state, much like Nevada, which voted Republican six times in the past dozen presidential elections and went Democratic six times in the same period. Now it more nearly resembles Idaho, which voted Republican in 18 of the last 19 elections.
For a time, in the period between 1992 and 2012, Florida carried a purple hue, voting for the Republican presidential nominee three times and the Democratic nominee three times. In 2000, the battle for the White House turned on Florida, where a spectacle involving recounts and disputes over hanging chads on ballots delivered the state — and the presidency — to George W. Bush by a victory margin of 537 votes in a contest essentially ended by a Supreme Court ruling.
But Florida has turned not only red, but brilliant, scarlet red since Donald Trump burst on the American political scene. It sided all three times with the Manhattan billionaire-turned-Palm-Beach-plutocrat. Two-thirds of the current Trump cabinet — including Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Attorney General Pam Bondi and national security adviser Mike Waltz — have Florida ties.
It’s not only in presidential races that Florida has turned from violet to vermillion. It hasn’t had a Democratic governor in the 21st century. Republicans have controlled both houses of the state legislature all century long, with GOP margins approaching 3 to 1 in both houses and with Republican lawmakers having the highest Florida House representation that any party has achieved in this century. Both its senators in Washington are Republicans, and so are more than 70 percent of its House members.
Barack Obama devoted considerable campaign resources to Florida in the 2012 election and won it by less than a percentage point over Mitt Romney. Mr. Trump won Florida a dozen years later by 13 percentage points.
The progression from Jeb Bush, who was the Republican governor of the state from 1999 to 2007, through Charlie Crist and Rick Scott, to Ron DeSantis, who has occupied the governor’s mansion since 2019, is a measure of how the shade of red has darkened in this state.
Mr. Bush was the very model of a conventional, mainstream Republican: a tax-cutter in the modern GOP way, but also with an emphasis on education and the environment. Mr. DeSantis encouraged and signed legislation banning abortion after six weeks of pregnancy, and backed a ban on discussion of sexual orientation and gender identity in schools, along with measures to permit those allowed to carry a weapon to do so without a permit. Just last week, Mr. DeSantis, who in 2024 signed a bill loosening restrictions on construction work for youth aged 16 and 17, asked the legislature to permit 16- and 17-year-olds to work overnight shifts during school weeks.
Mr. Trump’s decision to move his official residence from his gilded penthouse apartment on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan to Mar-a-Lago on South Ocean Boulevard in Palm Beach is not the cause of the reddening of Florida but, more accurately, a reflection of the deepening conservative coloration of the state. Explaining the change in the hue of Florida is basically a jobs program for historians, political scientists, sociologists and real estate agents here.
All have their statistics and their theories, but the best way to measure the change in Florida is to park in a highway rest stop near Jacksonville and count the moving trucks traveling south. U-Haul reported that 467,347 people rented one-way moving vehicles to Florida in 2023, the equivalent of the entire population of Omaha packing up and moving to the Sunshine State.
Migration has eased somewhat since then, but a large portion of the people who moved here remain here. The state’s population has grown by more than 1.1 million since the beginning of the decade, according to the state legislature’s economic and demographic research bureau. Four of the five fastest-growing metropolitan areas in the country from 2022 to 2023 were in Florida, with the retirement community around The Villages leading the country with 151,565 new residents — the equivalent of the entire city of Dayton, Ohio, settling in an area where Mr. Trump carried more than two-thirds of the vote.
Hillsborough County, which includes Tampa on the west coast of the state, is, after Miami-Dade, the second-fastest-growing area in Florida. In the deadlocked 2000 election, Hillsborough sided with the Republican George W. Bush by 497 votes over Democrat Al Gore. Last year, Mr. Trump won the county by 21,455 votes over Kamala Harris, a margin of about 3 percentage points. Democrat John F. Kennedy won the county over Republican Richard Nixon by 12 percentage points in 1960.
As recently as the 2000 overtime election, Democrats outnumbered Republicans in the state by 370,089 voters, according to the Florida Division of Elections. Now the Republicans outnumber Democrats by 1,210,883 voters. The flip in party registration came between 2020 and 2021.
But it is not only population growth that has changed Florida. It is also the composition of that growth.
Without an income tax, Florida has been a magnet both for retired people on fixed incomes and for wealthy people seeking to preserve the value of their portfolios. Such migrants tend to lean to the right. Located 90 miles from Cuba, it has long been a haven for refugees from the Castro regime, new Americans with deep-seated opposition to communism and thus a natural constituency for Republicans. Mr. DeSantis’ political profile, and his resistance to pandemic school closures and mask mandates, identified the state as a sentinel of freedom that appealed to right-leaning Americans.
Alexander Lowie, a University of Florida postdoctoral political anthropologist, has spent five years doing fieldwork tracking the growth of two Florida-based conservative activist networks, the Proud Boys and Moms for Liberty, both of which contributed members to the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection at the U.S. Capitol. He found that the state accounted for almost an eighth of those initially charged in the insurrection. One of them: Miami native Enrique Tarrio, the most visible member of the Proud Boys. He was convicted of seditious conspiracy, but was pardoned by Mr. Trump.
“I’ve seen firsthand how conservative activist networks and the growth of culture war politics, among other factors, have reshaped Florida’s political identity,” Mr. Lowie wrote late last month in an article for the online journal The Conversation. It’s now hardly recognizable.
David M. Shribman is the former executive editor of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.
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