2024 United States presidential election in Florida
Updated: Wikipedia source
The 2024 United States presidential election in Florida was held on Tuesday, November 5, 2024, as part of the 2024 United States presidential election in which all 50 states plus the District of Columbia participated. Florida voters chose electors to represent them in the Electoral College via a popular vote. The state of Florida has 30 electoral votes in the Electoral College, following reapportionment due to the 2020 United States census in which the state gained a seat. This gave Florida the third-most electoral votes in the country, which marked the first time it carried more weight than New York (28 electoral votes) in a presidential election. A heavily populated South Atlantic state, Florida had previously been considered a crucial swing state and a bellwether in past elections, but has shifted significantly to the political right since the 2022 gubernatorial election where incumbent Governor Ron DeSantis won re-election with a 19.4% margin of victory. Trump's double-digit margin of victory solidified Florida further as a safe red state. Florida has two large distinct cultural areas: North Florida and the Florida Panhandle are part of the conservative Deep South, and South Florida has a heavy Latin American influence with large Catholic Cuban, Haitian, Nicaraguan, and Venezuelan populations in the Miami metropolitan area. Trump defeated Harris in Florida by 13.1 percentage points, the biggest margin of victory for a candidate in the state since 1988. Trump won all three of the state’s majority-Hispanic counties. Per exit polls, Trump won 63% of White voters, 58% of Hispanic voters, and 15% of Black voters in the state. Trump received the most votes for a political candidate ever in the state, breaking his previous record from 2020, and marking the first time since 1984 that a Republican won the state with a margin of over one million votes. Trump's overall total of 6.1 million votes was the second-highest total number of votes he received in any state in the country in 2024, only behind his 6.4 million in Texas. In 2016, Trump was elected as a candidate from New York; in 2019, he formally changed his primary residence to Mar-a-Lago, becoming the first Floridian to serve as president. However, it was not until 2024 that Trump would become the first presidential candidate from Florida to be elected. Kamala Harris did not flip a county Biden had lost in 2020, but she was able to carry Palm Beach County, which had voted for Governor Ron DeSantis in 2022, narrowly keeping it in the Democratic column.