FL-GOV 2022 Democratic Underperformance

[Pollster]

Re-upping these posts from the election night thread, bolded the key part:

I know we've mostly moved on from Florida, but I took a look this morning and it seems like DeSantis added about 500k votes to his 2018 total (not nothing!) whereas Crist fell an absolutely stunning 1 million+ votes short of Gillum's total.

Democratic turnout failure in the state really can't be overstated. The flip side of the coin also suggests that DeSantis is potentially not the driver of Democratic base anger that some think.

I’m not sweating it. You can’t extrapolate too much from Florida. It’s not very representative of the country. Democrats there are pretty conservative even. I can tell you don’t say gay would be taken a lot worst out west or in the Midwest than it would be in florida

I've conducted more research in Florida than any other state in my entire career and can tell you that this is decisively not true. With the exception of the Cuban population there is both fundamentally and functionally nothing different about Florida's electorate than other states with similar profiles.

The Florida Democratic Party's incompetence has become a meme but for good reason - and I worry that the "memeification" of it is actually causing people to not fully understand the problem. The party's strategic leaders are completely disconnected from reality with regards to fundraising and resource allocation, horrible at identifying and recruiting candidates, and have completely disregarded building any kind of turnout infrastructure. Politically, the party's legislative leaders and other key figures are feckless and inspire no confidence in voters, donors, or national party decision-makers. These two things are particularly detrimental because they only serve to feed each other and cause a doom loop rather than having one make up for the other. The Texas Democratic Party had similar problems for a while, but the difference is that in Florida there is no end in sight.

I don't mean to lash out and this isn't directed at you at all - I've just been watching this state party fail for so long despite so many people (myself included) shouting at them that the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result.

[Pollster]

I don't realy think you could say that it was down to democrats being uninspired. Desantis was a polarizing national figure, if it was a 9-10 point loss that could he been plausible but Christ lost by more than 20 points. There has to be something deaper beyond him simply being an uninspiring canidate.

As noted above, DeSantis added about 500k votes to his 2018 total while Crist fell just short of a million votes of Gillum's total. Even if we assume those ~500k new DeSantis voters all voted for Gillum in 2018 (extremely unlikely given the state's notably rapid growth), the remaining dropoff and frankly pitiful final vote count for Crist (a statewide Democrat barely breaking 3 million votes in post-2016 Florida in a high turnout election is simply embarrassing) represents a catastrophic turnout failure. No other real way to look at it. Whether it's Crist being uninspiring or the state party not knowing its right hand from its left is certainly worth a conversation, though.