Florida’s Hispanic voters have emerged as the state’s most unpredictable electoral force, with dramatic swings between parties reshaping the battlefield for 2024’s presidential election.
The scope of these shifts is staggering.
In Miami-Dade County’s House District 111, where nine in 10 residents are Hispanic, voters have careened from supporting Hillary Clinton by 19 points in 2016 to backing Gov. Ron DeSantis by 40 points in 2022 — a 59-point swing that transformed the district from more Democratic than Illinois to more Republican than every state but one: Wyoming.
Such volatility isn’t isolated. A Tributary analysis of election data shows Hispanic-majority districts across Florida have undergone similar, if less dramatic, transformations. The shifts are most pronounced in South Florida but echo differently through Hispanic communities from Tampa to Orlando.
The rightward swing in 2020 and 2022 followed an earlier dramatic rise in Democratic voting in these same districts.
The voters in House District 111 re-elected then-Gov. Rick Scott by a 15-point margin in 2014. Two years later, it swung 34 percentage points to the left when the district overwhelmingly voted for Clinton.
In Florida’s often unpredictable political environment, few groups exert as much influence—or display as much volatility—as Hispanic voters. This group’s unpredictability has transformed some parts of the state, reshaping the electoral battleground in areas like the suburbs of Miami-Dade, Kissimmee and Tampa.
“If you use the term Hispanic, you’ve masked a whole lot of differences because there are 10 or 15 countries of origin,” Susan MacManus, a distinguished professor emerita of political science at the University of South Florida, said of the danger of oversimplifying Florida’s Hispanic voters. “Their politics and their backgrounds and their political priorities are very different.”
In different regions of the state, these distinctions are even more pronounced, she said, with varied national backgrounds shaping political affiliations and issue priorities.
Miami-Dade’s Sharp Swings
Miami-Dade’s House Districts 111 and 112 exemplify the dramatic shifts in Hispanic voter sentiment. These neighboring districts, capturing the county’s westernmost suburbs, are some of the most densely Hispanic, with more than nine out of every ten voting-age residents identifying as Hispanic.
Both districts include Hialeah. District 111 also includes Doral, Medley, Hialeah Gardens and Miami Lakes. Voters there handily rejected first-time presidential candidate Donald Trump in 2016, with a margin of victory for Clinton of about 19 percentage points. By 2020, then-President Trump flipped the district into a nearly mirror image, winning over voters there by 18 percentage points. And in 2022, Gov. Ron DeSantis won District 111 by a more than 2-to-1 margin.
District 112, which includes the southern half of Hialeah, Miami Springs, Virginia Gardens and a portion of Miami’s Little Havana, followed a similar trend. Trump narrowly won here in 2016 by 2.5 percentage points, but by 2020, his support surged to nearly 30 percentage points. DeSantis won this district 3-to-1, a 75% to 25% blowout, in 2022.
To track voting patterns consistently over time, The Tributary analyzed how current legislative districts would have voted in past elections, even before they were drawn. This required recalculating previous presidential, gubernatorial and U.S. Senate results within today’s district boundaries.
While Florida hasn't shaped up to be a priority for either presidential campaign, Republicans are fighting to keep their supermajorities in the Florida House and Senate, so The Tributary focused its analysis on the state House districts for the most detailed view of these political shifts.
One main reason for these swings is the Republican Party's success in framing the Democratic Party, according to MacManus. They've done this, she said, by “labeling them socialist.”
The label has proven hard for Democrats to shake, she said, particularly among voters with personal or familial histories of fleeing socialist countries.
Aubrey Jewett, a political science professor at the University of Central Florida, who specializes in Florida politics and voter behavior, agreed.
"The effort by Trump and other Republicans to label Democrats as socialists seems to have resonated, especially with voters like Venezuelans and Cubans who didn’t come to the U.S. for ‘some sort of a socialist system,’” Jewett, who has extensively studied the state's shifting partisan dynamics, explained.
Trump's gains in Miami-Dade in 2020 helped him win Florida by a larger margin than in 2016, suggesting a deeper alignment of some Hispanic groups with the Republican Party.
But a generational divide complicates this picture.
"Third-generation Cuban voters tend to be more progressive," Jewett noted. "They care about civil rights and environmental issues, unlike the older generations who were staunchly anti-communist and leaned Republican."
This creates a fractured political landscape, where voting patterns can shift rapidly between election cycles, partly depending on how many young voters turn out compared to older voters.
Northeast Florida and Orlando Buck the Trend
While South Florida's Hispanic districts have swung dramatically toward Republicans, a different story is unfolding in Northeast Florida and Greater Orlando: Democrats have actually gained ground.
In the Jacksonville and Orlando metro area, some districts performed better for Democrats in 2022 than they had in past elections, even as DeSantis won his historic landslide re-election.
Four districts — two in Orlando's Orange County and two in the Jacksonville area — gave DeSantis lower margins in 2022 than Mitt Romney achieved in his 2012 presidential bid.
Nine districts saw DeSantis perform worse than Rick Scott's 2014 re-election victory, including six Northeast Florida districts.
And in 15 districts, DeSantis' margins fell short of Sen. Marco Rubio's 2016 re-election numbers, with eight of those districts in Northeast Florida and three near Orlando. All of those districts had a smaller Hispanic voting-age population than the state as a whole.
Kissimmee and Tampa: Economic Drivers and Diverse Voters
Kissimmee’s population surge, driven largely by Hispanic residents of Puerto Rican descent, as Jewett described, has also shaped its political dynamics differently from South Florida's.
House Districts 46 and 47 split Kissimmee roughly in half. District 46 covers the western portion of the city, while District 47 encompasses the eastern half along with Buena Ventura Lakes and southern Meadow Woods. Both districts are about 60% Hispanic.
While Osceola County has trended Democratic, voter turnout remains unpredictable. The region's tourism-dependent economy, anchored by Disney World, makes it especially vulnerable to economic swings, according to Jewett.
When tourism thrives, he said, economic stability can lead to higher voter turnout and Democratic gains, but downturns may drive disillusionment and reduce voter participation.
"For Kissimmee, tourism is a huge issue in that district, much more so than in Miami. The economy there is just different," Jewett said.
And the Hispanic population in Kissimmee is markedly different from Miami's. Puerto Rican voters are more likely to align with Democrats. This introduces a level of unpredictability into local elections. When they do turn out, he said, Democrats perform better in the area, but lower turnout often benefits Republicans.
A survey conducted by the Puerto Rico Research Hub at the University of Central Florida in late October found that 85% of Puerto Ricans in Florida support Vice President Kamala Harris, with only 8% backing former President Donald Trump. The poll, which surveyed about 150 Puerto Ricans predominantly residing in Central Florida and has a margin of error of plus or minus 8 percentage points, highlights the strong Democratic leanings among Puerto Rican voters.
In Tampa's northern suburbs, House District 64 tells yet another story of political transformation. The heavily Democratic district, which includes Town 'n' Country, Greater Carrollwood, Citrus Park and areas around Tampa International Airport, has shifted sharply rightward since 2016.
The district's Democratic edge has begun to erode. Clinton carried it by 47 points in 2016, but Joe Biden's margin shrank to 31 points in 2020. DeSantis cut the Democratic advantage even further, turning a 43-point deficit in 2018 into just a 12-point gap in 2022, a swing of 31 percentage points.
Hillsborough County's Hispanic community is more diverse than Miami-Dade's.
In Miami-Dade, Cubans make up about half of the Hispanic population, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. In Hillsborough, Cubans and Puerto Ricans each make up a quarter of the Hispanic population, and Mexicans make up another fifth of the Hispanic population.
"Tampa has always had a fairly sizable Hispanic population," Jewett explained, "but it's more diverse than Miami-Dade in terms of the percentages of different Hispanic subgroups."
This diversity presents challenges for both parties as they compete for support across cultural and socioeconomic lines, he said. The region’s electoral outcomes often reflect broader trends in Hispanic voter behavior, with shifts depending on which issues resonate most during a given election cycle.
Unpredictable Swing Factors Affecting Hispanic Voters
In 2016, Clinton dominated in Miami-Dade with 63% of the vote to Trump's 34%, the best Democratic showing since Franklin Delano Roosevelt's 1944 re-election. But that overwhelming success — earning 290,000 more votes than Trump — was not lasting.
In 2020, Biden's Miami-Dade advantage shrunk to just 85,000 more votes than Trump, a swing that helped nearly double Trump's statewide margin of victory.
"Hispanic communities in Florida are not a monolith," said Michael Binder, who directs the Public Opinion Research Lab at the University of North Florida. "There are cultural cross-pressures. Some align more with Republicans on social issues, but lean toward Democrats on other policy issues."
Socially conservative values, for example, may lead some Hispanic voters to support Republican candidates, Binder explained, while economic policies favoring expanded healthcare and social services might attract others to the Democratic side.
Some Hispanic groups, like Cuban-Americans, have long leaned Republican and have higher voter turnouts, he said. But Puerto Ricans, who have a stronger Democratic tilt, have been less engaged politically.
"The notion that Hispanic voters are consistently moving in one direction is a misconception," Binder said. "Different communities are influenced by distinct issues, and what matters in one election cycle may not hold in the next."
And redistricting has added another layer of complexity.
A recent federal lawsuit filed by community organizations like Cubanos Pa’lante has challenged Florida’s recent redistricting of four congressional seats and seven state House districts. The plaintiffs argue the state’s approach to redistricting treated Latino voters as a political monolith, ignoring the diverse priorities within South Florida’s Hispanic communities.
The suit accused the Legislature of grouping Hispanic voters into sprawling, noncompact districts—some stretching from the farmlands of Immokalee to the urban centers of Miami—without regard for the distinctions between various Hispanic communities.
"With the recent maps, a lot of safe Republican and Democratic districts were created," Binder noted. "But as Hispanic populations bleed into suburban areas, it becomes harder to draw districts that clearly favor one party."
This integration challenges traditional political strategies and suggests that future elections could see even more fluctuation in heavily Hispanic districts.
Just as House District 111 may have seemed intractably Democratic after 2016 before it swung hard to the right, it's possible districts that now seem permanently Republican could swing the other way in the right environment.
Future Implications for Florida Politics
The question remains: will Florida’s Hispanic voters continue to shift, or will they settle into a predictable pattern?
Jewett and Binder warned against reading too much into recent trends. Florida has swung back and forth before.
Obama’s 2008 election saw a surge in Democratic registration, which later receded. Today, Republican registration far outpaces Democrats.
Turnout, as always, will be crucial. Hispanic voter behavior hinges on mobilization efforts rather than party loyalty. The lack of large-scale outreach by either state party could limit the potential for significant shifts.
"It’s not so much that Hispanic voters are switching parties; it’s whether they’ll show up to vote," Binder argued. "Mobilization will determine the outcome more than persuasion this cycle."
The focus will be on whether these efforts can activate sporadic voters, particularly in Hispanic-majority districts.
Jewett and Binder agree: Florida’s Hispanic voters are reshaping the state’s politics. While past trends can guide expectations, the behavior of Florida's Hispanic voters will continue to be a wildcard.
"If you’re expecting 2022 to be the start of a Republican wave, you might be surprised," Binder said. "But if you’re anticipating a return to the Hillary Clinton-era margins in Miami-Dade, you’ll also be surprised."
