Latina Senate candidate seeks to flip the script on Republicans in Florida

Perhaps no state in the country has dealt Democrats bigger electoral blows over the past decade than Florida. In 2016, the Sunshine State proved the harbinger of disaster for Hillary Clinton's presidential bid, then proceeded to cause Democrats heartburn in every successive cycle since.

In 2018, then-rising Democratic star Andrew Gillum lost to GOP Rep. Ron DeSantis while Democratic Sen. Bill Nelson suffered a narrow defeat to former Florida Gov. Rick Scott in a race rife with ballot irregularities.

That year also supercharged the idea that Florida Democrats had a "Hispanic problem," which ultimately fueled an over-simplified national narrative about a complex constituency that is anything but monolithic. But in Florida specifically, Democratic under-performance among Latino voters resulted from flagging turnout among Latino Democrats of non-Cuban origin while Cuban exiles helped propel DeSantis and Scott to victory.

"We see turnout dipping outside the Cuban bloc. And we need to fix it,” Ricky Junquera, then-vice chair of the Miami-Dade Democrats, told Politico Magazine a month after Democrats' twin statewide losses in 2018. But the situation only continued to deteriorate for Democrats, with Joe Biden losing Florida in 2020 by a greater margin than Clinton four years earlier, and DeSantis virtually wiping the floor in 2022 with perennial candidate and Democratic gubernatorial nominee Charlie Crist.