We know what you’re thinking. How can it be that after several brutal cycles for Democrats in the Sunshine State, we still give Republicans a chance of losing? Have we not been fooled enough? 

Florida has moved towards Republicans in the 21st century, in which Barack Obama has been the only Democratic presidential candidate to win it. So obviously that trend will continue, right? Well, probably. But Florida’s trend mirrors that of Nevada or North Carolina more so than it does Iowa or Ohio: it’s not that it’s swung dramatically, it’s just that it’s remained close (really close, just ask former Democratic Senator Bill Nelson, who lost the reelection in 2018 by about 10,000 votes and a margin of 0.1%) and Republicans tend to end up on top. Florida is a big state from a population standpoint (now the nation’s third largest, having surpassed New York in the past decade); that makes dramatic swings more difficult to pull off – so while Iowa (a much smaller state) faced less of a hurdle to swing dramatically, Florida also hasn’t behaved like Ohio (a large state that swung violently towards Trumpism in the last couple cycles). In fact, once you consider that Trump was “from” Florida, Ron DeSantis eked out a victory in the closest governor’s race last midterm, and still note that Florida didn’t behave like Ohio, you may question whether it’s a reliably Republican state or just a circumstantially Republican state.

Now that Democrats have raised an eyebrow, let me be the first to dash those hopes. In 2020, Florida may have only gone for the incumbent president by 3%, but in a year where the Democratic presidential candidate won the national vote by over 4%, that gave Florida a lean of almost 8% Republican; more to the right of the nation than it’s voted since 1988. In 2020, Joe Biden won 54% of Latino voters, carrying Miami-Dade County by just 7% compared to Hillary Clinton’s 30% margin in the county just four years earlier. Sure, incumbent presidents tend to do better with Latino voters (and voters in general), but that’s pretty stark. Then recall that in 2018 – a midterm cycle which favored Democrats by around 8% nationally – Republicans defeated an incumbent Democratic senator (Bill Nelson, who we mentioned above) and won the governor’s election; narrow victories to be sure – but still about 9% overperformances compared to Republicans elsewhere. 

So what should you expect in 2022 and why are we only rating this “Likely Republican”? Well after a “good on the surface” but not so good in practice presidential campaign in 2016, Florida’s two-term incumbent Republican Senator Marco Rubio is back on the ballot. After an 8% margin of victory in 2016 (despite the fact he faced a somewhat serious primary challenge that year because he initially said he wouldn’t seek another term, presumably because he thought he’d be the Republican nominee for president…), Rubio’s sitting pretty comfortably this November. Despite being one of then-candidate Trump’s most notable antagonists in the 2016 Republican primary, “Little Marco” eventually ingratiated himself with the big government conservative orthodoxy of the new GOP and emerged as a vociferous China hawk, accusing Wall Street of enabling integration with Beijing, a far cry from 2012’s Republican Party.

Rubio will be challenged by Democratic Congresswoman Val Demings, who served as an impeachment manager during Trump’s first impeachment and used to serve as the police chief of Orlando. Demings, who is Black, was a finalist on Joe Biden’s vice presidential shortlist despite being a relatively junior member of the House (she first took office in 2017) but managed to strike a line close to Biden’s own on the obvious disparities in race and law enforcement and the need for better policing. It’s possible that – like Biden – her avoidance of the more leftist “defund the police” rhetoric could present her as a credible, moderate option against Republicans who have deviated from their support for law enforcement as of late. But, it’s hard to see how Florida – after supporting Republicans even in 2018’s midterm – will backpedal in a less Democratic-leaning year like 2022. A weak state party, Republican improvements with Latino voters, a highly transient population, and a lack of successful fundraising pose challenges for Democrats – even if these are also all things that could improve over a few cycles if they reinvested seriously in the state. 

There have been some close polls between Demings and Rubio but most nonpartisan polls pretty clearly give Rubio the edge. And, the fact that polling in Florida has been a narrow miss (giving Biden the edge in 2020, for example) for a while probably doesn’t work out in Democrats favor, even if they claw back some Latino voters in the immediate future. Could Demings still win? Absolutely. There’s probably a 5-10% chance – about the same odds Trump had to win reelection in 2020, and that came down to about 40,000 votes in just three states. Don’t count it out, it’s not something Rubio can sleep his way through; but we’d caution that you should have a high degree of skepticism that Democrats will suddenly reverse their fortunes in the Sunshine State.

See all 2022 Senate Ratings | Methodology