GOP Reaps Rewards of Party Switchers

Somehow things keep getting worse for Florida Democrats. If Harris’s 13-point thrashing in November wasn’t bad enough, December brought another twist of the knife: two members of the State House switched their party affiliation to Republican, dropping Democrats further into a superminority in the state government.

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In all but two years since 2010, more legislators have switched from Democrat to Republican than from Republican to Democrat. As you might expect, the number of party switchers closely tracks the prevailing political mood. Republicans dominated the back half of Obama’s first term, Democrats briefly pulled ahead during 2018’s blue wave, and in recent years, Republicans are once again on top. In 2024, Republicans claimed more than five party switchers for the first time since 2011 {snip}

Though both heralded new political moments, the Tea Party-era switches and the MAGA-era switches were driven by different motivations. The early Obama years marked the end of a decades-long political realignment in the Deep South. Conservative Southern Democrats—some of whom were first elected when the GOP was functionally nonexistent in their states—had for decades coasted on their local brands and residual party loyalty. By 2010, however, blood was in the water. No matter their ideology or vote history, the “D” next to their name was a scarlet letter.

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Neither Valdes or Cassel are particularly conservative at all. In fact, both voted like regular mainstream Democrats right up until their party switch. Florida politics guru Matthew Isbell notes that Cassel had been a “vocal opponent” of restrictions on transgender care and pushed back on abortion restrictions. “To say that Cassel’s public posture NEVER pointed toward a Republican switch is an understatement,” he writes.

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{snip} Valdes and Cassel are symptoms of a larger problem: Democrats have collapsed in places they used to carry comfortably. The road back is not shaming self-interested legislators, but winning back the thousands of voters who prompted them to consider a party switch in the first place.