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According to Joshua Chaffin, Florida “is now the spiritual heartland of the MAGA movement.” In The Wall Street Journal, Chaffin describes the Florida miracle, writing:
Four years ago, MAGA caravans roared through the streets of South Florida, voters were inundated with campaign mailers, and Donald Trump and his surrogates barnstormed the state in a desperate hunt for an election victory. This time, the presidential contest felt to many Floridians more like a yawn than a fight.
Trump easily captured the state’s 30 electoral votes while fellow Republicans made further inroads. Amped up on wine, triumph and patriotism, his supporters romped through West Palm Beach into the small hours of the night.
There is no mistaking it. Florida has turned not just red, but ruby red. Once a vital swing state, it is now the spiritual heartland of the MAGA movement—a place that rejected Covid restrictions, that celebrates low taxes and welcomes newcomers fleeing blue bastions like New York. Most notable among the latter are the former president and several of his children.
“Florida is the American dream. It’s the new California,” George Antonopoulos, another New York transplant, said on Wednesday morning over breakfast at a West Palm Beach hotel as he basked in the glow of Trump’s victory. He was clad in a Wharton T-shirt—from Trump’s alma mater—and a MAGA cap. While roughly half the nation was plunged into despair, Antonopoulos and other Trump supporters appeared exhausted but elated. The stock market, he noted, had soared by more than a thousand points early Wednesday. Good things were coming.
Nowhere has the Republican conquest been more startling than South Florida’s Miami-Dade County, a longtime Democratic stronghold that is the state’s most populous. In 2016, Hillary Clinton won it with 63% of the vote. Four years later, Joe Biden claimed victory with 53%.
On Tuesday, Trump won it by 11 percentage points over Vice President Kamala Harris, the first time Miami-Dade went for a Republican presidential candidate since 1988. He was powered by Hispanic voters who were in no way repelled by his vow to enact the largest deportation of undocumented immigrants in American history.
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