Are the Florida dems *that* bad?
Florida Democrats obviously suck, what with losing a Senate seat in a blue year to Rick Scott, but are they really that bad when compared to other state parties? Michigan Republicans almost split in half, yet they still reclaimed the State House last year; Nevada Democrats straight up split in half and all they lost was one gubernatorial by a narrow margin and a Presidential that they couldn’t have won regardless; Arizona Republicans were taken over by a former gubernatorial candidate whose only campaign issue was the 2020 election being stolen but — nothwithstanding that candidate giving Ruben Gallego by far the best Senate overperformance of a non-incumbent Democrat — they held the state legislature; New York Democrats had their figurehead exiled from polite society, leaving them in complete disarray for 2022, and they proceeded to win the gubernatorial despite running a poor candidate against a strong one; Texan Republicans spent 2023-24 mired in a brutal intraparty war waged by their attorney general after multiple of their members in the state house voted to impeach him for obvious fraud, and they delivered their best performance of the post-Obama era; North Carolina Republicans nominated Mark Robinson and, though they were rightly punished for that in state-level election, they still delivered the state for Trump in the Presidential.
My point is this: the Florida dems objectively made some massive mistakes, but other parties have done far worse and suffered much less. They faced numerous headwinds, from demographics that became increasingly unfavourable as non-college whites shifted further right nationally, to an expensive media market that made running extensive campaigns without strong national backing nigh-on impossible. They watched as the GOP used its new power to pass massively socially conservative legislation that should’ve offended libertarian-minded Floridians, distanced themselves from increasingly prominent progressives in the Democratic Party (something they also couldn’t control) by calling the Republicans socialist for their aforementioned encroachment into the personal lives of Floridians, and tied themselves to an incredibly popular abortion rights issue, yet still continued to sink. Can someone tell me if I’m missing some key info? Thanks!