FL-27: Ileana Ros-Lehtinen to retire from Congress

[ajc0918]

http://www.miamiherald.com/news/local/community/miami-dade/article147718764.html

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[ajc0918]

This probably also kills Scott Fuhrman's chances of winning the primary, since this will open the floodgates for first tier Democrat candidates to jump in.

JJR's Senate seat isn't up till 2020. Hard to see why he wouldn't make the jump. Still no more than tilt D, though.

Didn't Florida recent pass a resign to run law for federal offices?

[ajc0918]

It will be interesting to see how FL-27 and FL-26 vote in 2018. I would not be surprised to see both flip although I always thought IRL would hold on. There's definitely a shift happening with Hispanic(Cuban) voters in South Florida.

[ajc0918]

Dems currently hold 11 seats in Florida versus 16 for the GOP.

What are the odds they can get a majority of Florida seats? It would require them to flip FL-27 (IRL), FL-26 (Curbelo), and one of either FL-25 (Diaz Balart) or FL-18 (Mast). Thoughts?

[ajc0918]

Seems unlikely, but possible. Are there any other R seats that could flip or are those the only ones?

The next closest seats would be FL-06, FL-12, FL-16, and FL-03. All of those are pretty damn unlikely.

Eh, I think FL-16 and FL-03 are just about as much on the table as a seat like FL-18 (though of course 25-26-27 is the easiest path). Dems have been competitive in FL-18 b/c it contained St. Lucie, which provided a lot of Dem votes, but St. Lucie went heavily for Trump (a 10-point swing). This is a nice microcosm of a broader Democratic problem with working-class whites that simply isn't being compensated for with shifts in, say, solid-GOP Martin County or the Republican-leaning northern suburbs of Palm Beach. The 3rd is probably harder to pull off, especially in a midterm year given the extent to which the Dem base relies on young voters, but I'd think the 16th is about on par with the 18th in terms of pickup odds.

A little off topic but it will be interesting to see how FL-16 looks like after 2020, after 2010 it lost  a lot of its rural voters and with the growth in Manatee and South Hillsborough I would expect any new rendition of this district to be more democratic. Of course the GOP will be creative I'm sure but the growth in this district seems to favor Democrats as suburbs like Brandon/Riverview have become pretty solid for Dems.