From Yellow Dog Democrats to Red State Republicans: Florida and Its Politics since 1940

Introduction

1 Introduction On election night in 2000, CBS television news anchor Dan Rather sounded lyrical as he announced, “Florida is the whole deal, the real deal, a big deal.”1 In this remarkably close presidential election, Florida stood at its epicenter; only hours earlier, the state’s diverse population of seniors, immigrants, and migrants had dutifully gone to the polls and cast ballots that would determine the next president of the United States. Almost lost in the gnashing of teeth about the election outcome was Florida’s new national prominence, which had resulted from its stunning population growth and diversity in the previous thirty years. Floridians may have made the presidential election of 2000 more unusual than it needed to be, but no one could dismiss the state’s remarkable ascendancy to a position of leadership among the states and to its place as a microcosm of the nation in the twenty-first century. 2 · From Yellow Dog Democrats to Red State Republicans Florida’s rise to national prominence took less than a lifetime, commencing with the onset of World War II. For much of its history, it had been an isolated, impoverished, segregated, southern frontier outpost. Whether it was under the Spanish, British, United States, or Confederate flag, Florida was an afterthought to the aspiration of each. Floridians struggled throughout this history to carve a place for themselves out of the piney woodlands of the Panhandle, along the lush coastline, and in the flatlands and swampy interior of the Peninsula. The state historian Michael Gannon wrote expressively of its traumatic early history: “Failure followed failure as a long succession of Spanish captains , beginning with Ponce de León, carried their proud lances into this wilderness only to see them broken by outrageous fortune.”2 What the Spaniards encountered typified the experiences of other Europeans and Americans who followed in their footsteps. Despite Ponce de León’s discovery of the Florida Peninsula at Eastertime in 1513 and the establishment of a small Spanish settlement in St. Augustine by Pedro Menéndez de Avilés in 1565, it took most of the intervening years up to World War II before Florida awakened an interest in others to invest their lives and their fortunes there. And it took until 1950 before one could be confident about either investment. On the eve of World War II, Florida remained little more than an intriguing footnote in the history of the United States. It was the place of both the oldest European settlement and the oldest free black community , but Americans not only failed to celebrate that history, most did not know it. And most Floridians were as oblivious to it as the rest of the nation. But as the historian Gary Mormino has written, “The march to and fro across Florida was irresistible and irrepressible, as orange groves became gated communities, small towns were transformed into cities, and big cities sprawled into metropolises and boomburbs.”3 Between 1940 and 1980, Florida gradually abandoned its southern past and its illiberal policies toward blacks and women and became a place where the northern and southern regions of the Western Hemisphere intersected and where the state’s newfound diversity changed it culturally , socially, politically, and economically. During this period and the years that followed, Florida rose from being one of the poorest, most isolated states in the nation, with the Introduction · 3 smallest population in the South, to the most dynamic state on the east coast and, alongside California, the most diverse state in the nation. Leading this change was a massive wave of migration and immigration that saw the state’s population increase from 1.9 million people in 1940 to 18.8 million people by 2010. The Hispanic population, which stood at less than 1 percent of the population in 1945, rose to 22.5 percent of the population in 2010, while the population of senior citizens over sixtyfive swelled from 6.9 percent to 17 percent.4 The sociologist John Shelton Reed and his colleagues at the University of North Carolina concluded in 1990 that, as a result of this population infusion from the Northeast, Midwest, the Caribbean, and Latin America, all of peninsular Florida had lost its Dixie characteristics, and by 1990 only a very small pocket of people in the Panhandle could still be called southern. A few remnants of the state’s southern past remained in the Panhandle...