Where Trump showed strength, and weakness, as Florida Republicans gave him another big primary victory
Former President Donald Trump easily won Florida’s presidential primary, cruising to an overwhelming victory in his adopted home state. But the results show lingering doubts about his candidacy among some Republican voters.
Trump’s 81.2% of the vote was big. He won each of the state’s 67 counties; 24 of them with more than 90% of the vote.
And those numbers mean one in five Republicans voted for someone else — not their party’s presumptive 2024 presidential nominee.
- The number of Republicans who voted in the state’s presidential preference primary on Tuesday was 9.5% lower than the number who voted in the 2020 primary — even as the number of Republican registered voters in Florida increased 8%.
- Trump received 252,000 fewer votes this year, in unofficial results as of midday Wednesday, than in the 2020 primary — a decline of 21.7%.
- The other six candidates whose names appeared on the ballot collectively received 19%. The biggest share was the 13.9% that went to former Gov. Nikki Haley of South Carolina, who was the last remaining candidate before she dropped out in early March.
She was also one of Trump’s fiercest competitors, describing him as “not qualified to be president” and unable to win a November contest with President Joe Biden.
“The more significant number is former President Trump getting 250,000 less votes than he got in 2020, which was also an uncontested primary,” said Joe Budd, the elected Republican state committeeman for Palm Beach County. “There’s much less enthusiasm this go-around.”
Budd was an early supporter of Trump’s 2016 presidential candidacy and later founded a large South Florida political organization now known as Club 47 to support the former president. He supported Gov. Ron DeSantis for the party’s presidential nomination this year.
Richard DeNapoli, the elected state Republican committeeman in Broward and a former county party chair who was also an early supporter of Trump’s 2016 candidacy, said the overall result is the key takeaway.
“President Trump had a resounding victory in Florida, and Republicans have always united behind our nominee in even greater numbers for the general election,” he said via text.
His biggest pockets were in northern and central Florida, along or near the borders of Alabama and Georgia, with a pop of support in the central part of the state — plus, significantly, Miami-Dade County, the state’s largest.
Trump’s support was weaker mainly along the state’s coastal regions, from Broward and Palm Beach counties north to Indian River County along the Atlantic Ocean, and from Hillsborough County south along the Gulf Coast.
Significance
The Florida presidential preference primary was as close to a pure test of Republican sentiment as possible. Unlike some other states, only people who were registered Republicans four weeks before primary day were allowed to participate.
And Democrats painted the results in Florida, as well as other primaries held around the country on Tuesday and previously, as ominous for Trump.
“Donald Trump struggled in his adopted home state,” Florida Democratic Party Chair Nikki Fried said Wednesday in a video news conference. “Donald Trump is in trouble here in the state of Florida,” she said, arguing that the primary results “show that Donald Trump is weak and getting weaker by the day. He is in significant trouble, not just here in the state of Florida, but across the entire country.”
Eric Johnson, a Democratic strategist who has managed federal, state and local campaigns, said repeated rounds of voting this year have shown a “significant protest vote continuing to happen in Republican primary after Republican primary.”
“There is a canary in the coal mine for the Trump campaign,” Johnson said.
The question is what do those Republicans who didn’t favor Trump in the primaries do in November. “Do those voters go back to him in a binary choice? Some will. But to the degree that any of them switch over to Biden that’s a real problem for the Trump campaign,” he said.
Republicans scoffed at the notion that the results have any broader implications.
“Nikki Fried and the Democrats should focus on how to save their party from extinction in Florida. It’s normal in primaries to have some people vote for other candidates, but we are united and ready to send Joe Biden back to his basement in Delaware,” state Republican Chair Evan Power said via text.
And Sean Foreman, a political scientist at Barry University, said the lower turnout and the overall results were neither a surprise, nor an indication of how Republicans will do in Florida in November.
“I don’t think it’s cause for concern for the Trump campaign or that Democrats should be overjoyed by those numbers,” Foreman said. “The Florida primary just wasn’t significant this year.”
Foreman said some small but unknown share of the anti-Trump vote undoubtedly came from people who switched their voter registration to Republican just so they could participate in the primary.
Florida in play?
Florida once was the biggest swing state in the country, with the potential to have a major impact on presidential elections because its large cache of electoral votes could go to either candidate.
And for a generation that meant the state’s voters were courted, with candidate campaign visits, advertising and targeted messaging that sought to appeal to Floridians. But it’s become increasingly Republican red.
Few independent analysts — and privately, many Democrats — see Florida within Biden’s reach in 2024.
“Florida continues to be in play,” Fried declared.
Johnson was somewhat more cautious in his assessment.
“Trump only won Florida by 3 (percentage) points” in both 2016 and 2020, he said, so there is potential. It’s an expensive state for either side to campaign in. He said the Biden campaign is “putting in groundwork for a campaign. They’re preparing for one.”
Budd said there is no scenario for a Biden victory in Florida. “I think Florida’s securely red,” he said, pointing to the surge in Republican voter registrations in recent years. “The enthusiasm gap is not going to help Joe Biden in Florida, no way.”
DeSantis, at a Miami Beach news conference Wednesday, said the state is so sure to go Republican that the candidates won’t devote much time or advertising to the state this fall.
“This is not going to be a state that’s competitive in November. And that’s just the reality,” DeSantis said.
Foreman, too, said most of the Republicans who didn’t vote for Trump in the primary will in November.
Republicans will “come home in the fall and vote for Trump or Biden despite all the grumbling to the contrary that we will hear through the summer,” he said.
Widespread win
Trump won big everywhere, but his performance wasn’t uniform.
His statewide total was 81%. In 16 counties he received a smaller percentage of the vote.
In 50 other counties he received a higher share of the vote.
Trump received 79.8% in Broward and 78.2% in Palm Beach County, slightly less than his statewide average.
He received 86.7% of the vote in Miami-Dade County.
Voters’ views
Most primary voters willing to speak to reporters outside polling places Tuesday said — as the results showed — they were voting for Trump.
Dominick Casale, voting in Lauderdale-by-the-Sea, cast his ballot for Trump. “He’s the best,” Casale said. “We’ve got a mummy for a president right now. He’s destroying our country, every second.”
Alan Waxman, of Delray Beach, said he voted for Trump “because I love this country. I’m a patriot. And there was a time I was a Democrat, and then there was a time I was a Republican. And now I just care about this country.”
Joyce Holzapfel, a Lauderdale-by-the-Sea Republican and Trump supporter, said she believes he’ll win in November, though she expressed a hint of concern.
From her home overlooking the Intracoastal Waterway, she said she used to see far more boaters flying Trump flags. Lately, she said, she’s seen fewer.
Lauren Douglas, of Lauderdale-by-the-Sea, said she was “really frustrated that I don’t have any options” since all the non-Trump candidates dropped out.
Douglas said she was voting for Haley. “We need a female in office and somebody who’s not over 80,” she said. Trump is 77 and Biden is 81.
She declined to say if she’d vote for Trump, Biden, or another candidate in November. “It’s personal.”
Haley
Haley, the former South Carolina governor and former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, was the last candidate in the contest against Trump — and mounted the most explicitly anti-Trump campaign in its final weeks, arguing he wasn’t fit for the presidency and couldn’t win in November.
She received 13.9% of the statewide vote.
Haley did notably better in Broward and Palm Beach counties, receiving 16% in both.
She did worse than her statewide share of the vote in Miami-Dade County where she received 11% of the vote.
Budd said he wouldn’t read too much into the Haley vote because most of the state’s vote-by-mail ballots went to voters by Feb. 8. Haley was a candidate until March 6.
DeSantis
Fried — nemesis of DeSantis when she was state agriculture commissioner from 2019 to 2021 and unsuccessful candidate for the 2022 Democratic nomination to challenge him — mocked him for receiving just 3.7% of the vote in the state he leads. He dropped out on Jan. 21, after months of personal attacks from Trump and failing to catch fire as a candidate.
Florida records all the votes from candidates who are on the ballot, even if they dropped out.
DeSantis received 2.9% in Broward, 17% in Miami-Dade County, and 3.7% in Palm Beach County.
During his news conference Wednesday, he spoke at length about, and took credit for, the state’s increasing Republican tilt.
But he avoided one question: who did he vote for in the primary?
Staff writers Danica Jefferies and Abigail Hasebroock contributed to this report.
Anthony Man can be reached at aman@sunsentinel.com and can be found @browardpolitics on Bluesky, Threads, Facebook and Post.news.