Opinion Columnists | Florida Democrats are dwindling. Why? | Steve Bousquet

BOCA RATON — It wasn’t long ago that Joni Albrecht walked door-to-door for Barack Obama. But she’s not a Democrat anymore.

Albrecht, 63, a physician and a highly active and reliable voter, sounds disillusioned with the state of partisan politics generally, and has re-registered as an NPA voter with no party affiliation. She said she may return to her old party as the 2024 election draws closer.

“We don’t have a democracy in this country, and neither party is representing the people,” Albrecht said. “They’re funded and indebted to big money corporations and they forgot their purpose.”

Plenty of voters are turned off by extreme partisanship on both sides, and the number of voters nationally who call themselves independents is at an all-time high, according to a recent Gallup survey.

For years, NPAs in Florida have grown steadily and at a much faster rate than in either party — even though the state’s closed primary system systematically shuts out NPA voters.

Albrecht, and many others like her, are part of a troubling trend that Democrats need to study closely. In Palm Beach, a solidly Democratic county where Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis pulled off a surprisingly impressive victory last November, Democrats are leaving their party to become NPAs twice as often as Republicans.

The numbers aren’t huge, but the trend is clear. In the 10-week period between Feb. 1 and mid-April of this year, 1,537 Democrats in Palm Beach re-registered as NPAs, while 864 Republicans made the same change, according to the county elections office.

Kim Mann, 66, a Boca Raton accountant, said she became an NPA voter because she feels safer, considering the highly tense political climate. “It hasn’t changed my political views,” Mann said. “For right now, I just feel it’s prudent to do this.”

Cary Glickstein, 64, a Delray Beach lawyer, was a lifelong moderate Democrat before he switched. A former Delray Beach mayor, he’s also from a family of llfe-long Democrats, but he sees the party moving more to the left and that public safety isn’t enough of a priority.

“I’ve always been a moderate Democrat,” Glickstein said. “But I haven’t felt close to the party like I used to feel. I feel more comfortable calling myself an independent.”

Mindy Koch, the chairman of the Palm Beach County Democratic Party, has many ambitious plans to rebuild the party, expand youth outreach, train volunteers to register voters, create a vote-by-mail task force. They may be quitting, but Koch believes they’ll still vote for Democrats.

“They may be leaving the party, but they’re not going to leave us on the issues,” Koch said, citing abortion, climate change and gun control. “I believe they’re still going to vote Democratic.”

Our focus is on Palm Beach because DeSantis did so well there, and the county is critical to Democrats in statewide elections. One hopeful sign was that voter turnout in Palm Beach in the 2022 midterm (54.4%) was higher than the state as a whole and much higher than either Broward or Miami-Dade.

The Florida Democratic Party’s long, slow descent is a result of many factors. After two decades of Florida having premier battleground state status, the national party wrote off the state in the 2022 cycle. The lack of money makes it harder to recruit candidates, and the accumulation of losses naturally is discouraging to rank-and-file activists.

On top of that, Republicans have repeatedly enacted measures designed to make it more difficult for people to vote and to register new voters. The latest changes, in the 2023 legislative session, are the focus of multiple lawsuits in Florida courts. Local activists say state party chair Nikki Fried wants detailed plans from all 67 county organizations on how to register voters.

Republicans have steadily grown their statewide voter registration advantage over Democrats. It stood at 473,000 as of April 30. In yet another sign of trouble, routine list maintenance work by counties is resulting in more Democratic losses and an increasing Republican advantage in both Palm Beach and Broward counties.

List maintenance is required to keep the voter rolls as accurate as possible. Voters who die or move away are scrubbed from the rolls and voters who do not vote in two consecutive general elections and do not respond to a mailing can be moved to inactive status, a preliminary step to being removed from the rolls (any contact by voters with the elections office will restore their status to active).

The Sun Sentinel compared the party voters from October’s deadline to vote in the November election to the figures on election websites as of June 1. The number of active Democrats in Palm Beach was 398,918 in October and is 383,119 now, a decrease of 15,799. By comparison, the number of Republicans in Palm Beach has dropped by only 2,073, from 290,623 to 288,550. Democrats are dwindling. Republicans aren’t.

In Broward, the number of Democrats has fallen by 5,118 since October, while the number of Broward Republicans has increased by 4,063 in that same period. Democrats still have an overwhelming advantage in Broward, and will for a long time to come. But those numbers cry out for an explanation.

Statewide, there were 36,650 fewer active registered Democrats in May than there were in October — in a state that attracts a thousand new residents a day. These numbers are worrisome but they should motivate true Democrats to work harder than ever before. A Democratic turnaround needs a lot more voters — not fewer.

Steve Bousquet is Opinion Editor of the Sun Sentinel and a columnist in Tallahassee and Fort Lauderdale. Contact him at or (850) 567-2240 and follow him on Twitter @stevebousquet.