“Welcome to the Free State of Florida”: In-Migration and Rising Republicanism in the Sunshine State

Abstract What explains the Republican shift in Florida? Drawing on an original dataset—the result of processing and deciphering millions of registered voters' place of birth as recorded on their voter registration forms—we consider the party registration of migrants to the Sunshine State over each of the past dozen years. In addition to documenting that more recent voter election cycles reflect a growing trend in favor of GOP registration in Florida by those not born in the state, our findings are reinforced by logistic regression models controlling for demographic characteristics of registrants who migrated to Florida from 2012 to 2024. We also examine survey data to show Sunshine State newcomers are more aligned with the Republican Party. The recent shift to GOP registration in Florida is remarkable and uniform: migrants from Democratic northeastern states are now nearly as likely to register as Republicans as midwestern migrants who have long been more likely to register with the GOP upon moving to Florida. Notably, we find a sharp increase in Republican registrations occurring after the election of Governor Ron DeSantis in 2018—who was elevated by Donald Trump's endorsement—indicating that rising in-migrant GOP registration may be as predicated upon DeSantis' promise of a “Free State of Florida” as the perennial search for Ponce de León's mythical “Fountain of Youth.”