March 29, 2024

Electorate Trends in Florida

Three trends in the next half-century will change the way Florida votes.

Amy Keller | 9/1/2008
Color Coded

Harris Mullen, the founder and publisher of Florida Trend, once wrote that he didn’t recall seeing a white Republican in Florida until the late 1930s, when he was about 14. By 1968, however, his world had changed dramatically. “All the black people have switched from Republican to Democrat, Florida is a two-party state and the Baptists are dancing and smoking cigarettes in public,” Mullen wrote at the time.

Only recently has the Republican drift moderated, with many describing Florida today as a “purple” state where a large swing-vote contingent can push the state into either camp.

How might Florida’s political landscape look a half-century from now? Here are several demographic trends that offer a clue.

Trend 1: The Graying Electorate

Florida’s electorate is divided more or less evenly among young, middle-aged and older voters. Over the next 10 to 20 years, however, Florida’s senior population is predicted to rise dramatically. While approximately 17.6% of Florida’s population was 65 or older in 2000, more than one in every four residents (27.1%) of Florida will be 65 or older by 2030, according to Census estimates.

Those seniors “may be a different kind of retiree,” says Susan MacManus, a political science professor at the University of South Florida. Should the Baby Boomers squander their wealth, she says, they would be “different than the older people moving here over the last 20 to 30 years who’ve been more affluent than older people in general.”

One question is whether so many new seniors will create political friction along generational lines. Grant Thrall, a University of Florida professor who specializes in business geography, suspects the political parties will try to straddle any potential division. “I don’t see one party becoming the party of the elderly and the other becoming the party of the young, but within each party, at their conventions, and perhaps within their legislative caucuses, there’s going to be frictions between people who represent large elderly districts and those who don’t.”

Neither party has a lock on Florida’s senior vote anymore. Baby Boomers, who range from 44 to 62, are more concerned about Social Security and Medicare than elderly voters are, polling suggests.

Lifestyle tends to be a better predictor of voting habits than age, and one thread that seems to run through both Baby Boomer and elderly voters is concern about crime and children. “There’s tremendous worry about the economic and moral future of their grandchildren. I hear this all the time when I speak to Rotary clubs,” says MacManus.

Tags: Politics & Law, Government/Politics & Law

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