United States presidential elections in Florida

Florida is a state in the South Atlantic region of the United States.^[1] Since its admission to the Union in March 1845, it has participated in 43 United States presidential elections. Florida participated in the presidential election for the first time in 1848. In this election, the Whig Party won Florida's three electoral votes with 57.20% of the vote, the only time the Whig Party won in Florida.^[2] In the realigning 1860 election, Florida was one of the ten slave states that did not provide ballot access to the Republican nominee, Abraham Lincoln.^[3] In the 1860 presidential election, John C. Breckinridge emerged victorious in Florida, winning 62.23% of the vote.^[4] Shortly after this election, Florida seceded from the Union and became a part of the Confederacy.^[5] Due to the secession, Florida did not participate in the 1864 presidential election.^[6] With the end of the Civil War, Florida rejoined the Union and participated in the 1868 presidential election. The 1868 election was the sole presidential contest in Florida not decided by popular vote, but instead by the state legislature.^[7] Florida voted for the Republican nominee in all three presidential elections during the Reconstruction era.^[8][9]

Presidential elections in Florida

Number of elections	43
Voted Democratic	25
Voted Republican	17
Voted Whig	1
Voted other	0
Voted for winning candidate	31
Voted for losing candidate	12

Shortly after the Reconstruction era, white Democrats regained control of the Florida legislature. In 1885, they created a new constitution, followed by statutes through 1889 that disfranchised most blacks and many poor whites.^[10][11] From the end of the Reconstruction era until the 1952 presidential election, the Republican Party only won Florida once, in the 1928 presidential election. According to historian Herbert J. Doherty, Republican victory in that election was mainly due to the fact that its Democratic opponent Al Smith was a Catholic and opposed to Prohibition, which caused many members of the Southern Baptist Convention to switch to the Republican Party.^[12]

From 1948 to 1952, the emergence of the Pinellas Republican Party attracted a lot of voters.^[13] Since the presidential election in 1952, the Democrats have won Florida in only five presidential elections: 1964, 1976, 1996, 2008, and 2012. In the 2000 presidential election, George W. Bush led Al Gore by less than 2,000 votes on election day, but as the recount proceeded, the gap between the two sides continued to narrow.^[14] In Bush v. Gore, the Bush campaign filed a lawsuit against Gore in the U.S. Supreme Court, arguing that the recounting of votes in certain counties violated the Equal Protection Clause of the U.S. Constitution. The Supreme Court announced the halt of vote recounting.^[15] After a lengthy judicial process, Bush eventually won Florida's electoral votes by a margin of only 537 votes out of almost six million cast (0.009%) and, as a result, became the president-elect.^[16] However, the result sparked controversy.^[17]

Florida was long a swing state, and furthermore, it had been seen as a bellwether in presidential elections since 1928 (only missed in 1960, 1992 and 2020).^[18] However, with the Republican Party's performance in Florida far exceeding its national average in the 2022 midterm elections, many analysts believe that the state has transitioned from being a Republican-leaning swing state into a reliable red state, with Democratic-leaning trends in Hillsborough County, Orange County and Osceola County not being able to offset Republican gains in Miami-Dade County, Broward County, and Palm Beach County ^[19][20]