Source: Mayo Clinic. This map shows average daily COVID cases per 100,000 people for Florida as of August 3, 2021.
This week, an interesting poll in Florida was released that should concern Republicans (unless, of course, it turns out to be an outlier). St. Pete Polls is a B+ pollster and focuses largely on Florida politics. The sample size for this poll was huge; over 3,900 respondents. This gives the poll as low a margin of error as you’re likely to get: 1.6 points. While it has a seriously big sample, it also has a methodological concern that might skew the results in a direction not favorable to the GOP.
The pollster used IVR (robocalls), which only target landlines and therefore require heavy weighting to get a representative portion of the sample for voters under 50 - a significant portion of which do not have or use landlines. The survey methodology is a bit problematic, but the error is typically skewed against younger voters which does not mitigate any potential concern for Republicans.
The poll surveyed registered voters, which at this far out from an election is probably the better strategy than using some likely voter screen. It is hard enough to determine likely voters a week out from an election, let alone fifteen months. It can be done, but at this point it probably does not add much to our thinking about how the candidates are doing in the public imagination. The demographics of the registered voters in this sample are very similar to those of “active” voters, defined by St. Pete Polls as someone who has voted in an election in the past four years. So, a case could be made that these registered voters are representative of active voters – which is a looser definition than most pollsters use for likely voters.
As discussed below, this poll is mostly bad news for Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R), who is running for reelection in 2022 and is considering a run for the Republican presidential nomination in 2024. The responses to one question on the St. Pete Poll suggest that Sunshine State voters might be less amenable to right wing anti-vaxxing and anti-masking rhetoric and positions than the conventional wisdom would tell us. The poll finds that 62% of Florida voters think masks should be mandatory for children at school. This number tracks Independents (which support a mandate by 66%). Over half of Republicans oppose such a mandate at a rate that roughly tracks with white voters (53.4 to 54.9). There is geographic variation on this question, but very little variation by demographic category except Republicans and white voters. Every other demographic category supports the mandate with about 60% or more support (70 and over category is 58.3%).
DeSantis’s approval rating is underwater by five points (43.7 approve; 48.5% disapprove). A fifth of Republicans and over half of Independents disapprove of DeSantis. Whites are the only racial demographic that approves of DeSantis (51 to 43). There is no variation gender. The governor is underwater with both male and female voters. Voters under 50 more strongly disapprove DeSantis than older voters, but the governor only has net positive approval among the 50-69 age group.
Biden’s approval rating is positive by three points (48.8% approve; 45.7% disapprove). The margin of error is so small in this poll that we can conclude that Florida voters approve of Biden and disapprove of DeSantis outside of that error. Even though the numbers are close, neither metric is statistically a tie as we could assume with a higher margin of error that is typical of most polls (most polls survey far fewer than 3,900 voters and MOEs of 4 or 5 points are more common).
There are two major Democratic candidates for governor in the Sunshine State: Republican-turned-Independent-turned-Democrat Charlie Crist, a former governor and current Congressman, and State Agriculture Commissioner Nikki Fried. DeSantis is losing to Crist by 2.5 points (45.8 to 45.3) and ahead of Fried by just over three points (45.1 to 41.8). In both cases, there is a large, but not significantly so at this point, number of undecideds (nearly 11% in the Crist match-up and 13% in the Fried match-up). If Florida undecideds behave in the gubernatorial contest the way they did in last year’s presidential election, they will probably vote Republican. That is something to watch, but I would not place too much emphasis on undecided voters until next summer. One could argue at this point we would expect as many or more undecideds, but at the expense of Democratic support (since the Democrats are the challengers to the incumbent in this race).
Independents support for Crist by six points, but over 14% of them are undecided. Sixteen percent of Democrats support DeSantis and 12% are undecided, which may be related to Crist’s history of fluid partisanship. However, Fried does worse with Democrats, with almost 17% supporting DeSantis and over 15% undecided. Independents are tied in the Fried match-up with almost 18% undecided. DeSantis loses similar amounts of Republicans to Crist and Fried. This may signal that a level of potential ticket-splitters among Florida voters that was not otherwise evident in recent elections, but it’s too early to conclude that.
The St. Pete Poll shows a dramatic change in support for DeSantis from recent polling. In April and May had DeSantis had double-digit leads against Crist, Fried, and Rep. Val Demings (who is now a candidate for US Senate). The three polls in this timeframe found DeSantis with job approval ratings of 53 (internal Democratic poll), 55 (Chamber of Commerce poll), and 60 (Restaurant and Lodging Association poll). The governor’s approval rating has dropped significantly since then if this St. Pete Poll is accurate.
It is unclear what is causing DeSantis’ fall in the polling. One reason could be that Florida is nearly a 50-50 state when it comes to statewide elections. Many of those contests come down as wins for Republicans, but the margins have been very close. We would expect from the last few election cycles that next year’s governor election will also be close. The other obvious contender explaining DeSantis’ problems was referenced above: COVID. DeSantis has done a fairly bad job at dealing with the pandemic, choosing to throw red meat to his anti-vax and anti-mask base rather than govern responsibly. The consequence of this has seen Florida continue to suffer from very high rates of COVID, particularly as the Delta variant has taken hold in the US.
It’s not clear that DeSantis’ polling troubles are the result of incompetent governing. California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) has consistently been out in front of the pandemic and has largely favored protecting the public health even when the anti-vax and anti-mask crowd collected enough signatures to recall him from office. Until just a week ago or so it was not crazy to think the recall would fail and by a big margin. However, a number of recent polls show the recall close or Newsome losing. It may be that voters around the country are so fed up with the pandemic they are going to take it out on incumbents whether they are doing their job well or not.