The 2024 election may be remembered as when the Florida Republican Party solidified its control over a once-fractious swing state and exposed its Democratic counterpart as a broken shell of a political party.
That’s according to retired University of South Florida political science professor Susan MacManus, who attended a Capital Tiger Bay Club luncheon Monday for an in-depth analysis of the election results.
“If there’s a state that’s showing the idea that universal advertising doesn’t work, you’re sitting in it,” she told an audience of nearly 100 people.
She set the stage: Democrats had run the state for a hundred years, but a resurgence of the Republican Party in the 1990s toppled the Legislature. While Republicans have led the state since then, Democrats have not won a statewide election since 2018, when Nikki Fried was elected agriculture commissioner.
