Can Democrats escape their Florida death spiral?

After alligators drag their prey into the water, they’ll perform what’s known as a death roll, repeatedly rotating their body 360 degrees to dismember the poor creature in their jaws. Being bitten by an alligator isn’t ideal to begin with, but the death roll makes an already bad situation worse because it disorients the prey animal and makes it harder to fight back or escape.1

The same sort of thing can happen to a political party. A short-term bad beat can easily become a death spiral that turns a well-funded, competent state party into a shell of its former self. The vicious cycle of losing races, losing money, and losing out on quality candidates makes a comeback harder and harder.

Take Florida (whose state reptile, of course, is the American alligator). Republicans have held a trifecta in the state since 19992 and Democrats won their last majority in Florida’s Congressional delegation in 1988. But 25 years ago, it was still the archetypal swing state.

George Bush won Florida by 537 votes in 2000 in a race that came down to butterfly ballots, overseas votes, and the Supreme Court stopping a recount.3 A decade later, Barack Obama carried Florida by not-much-less narrow margins of 2.8 and 0.9 points. But then the losses for Democrats started to stack up:

• 2012 was the last year Florida elected a Democratic U.S. Senator. Incumbent Bill Nelson even lost in 2018 in what was otherwise a strong Democratic year.

• Donald Trump has won the state three times in a row, and by a larger margin each time.

• Republicans have held two-thirds supermajorities in both chambers of the state legislature since 2022.

If you’re a Democrat, you might look at this data and be tempted to write off Florida as a permanent Republican stronghold. And that’s increasingly the consensus among nonpartisan political observers, too. On paper, Florida is one of a number of “reach states” that could be competitive if there’s a sufficiently large blue wave this November. Its partisan baseline based on our current generic ballot average and the results of recent elections is “just” R +4.9, similar to Iowa, Texas, and Ohio. However,