Voting in the 2023 Jacksonville Mayoral Election
On Tuesday, May 16 Democrat Donna Deegan defeated Republican Daniel Davis by 4 points to be Jacksonville’s new mayor. Deegan’s win came as a surprise upset to many — although not to the folks who run the University of North Florida’s poll who gave Deegan a slim lead in a pre-election poll. Davis had a decisive fundraising edge in a state that many national pundits have written off due to Governor Ron DeSantis’ 19 point victory over Charlie Christ in 2022.
Jacksonville is unlike many large cities in the United States. The city and county are one consolidated government, so the mayor is elected countywide. Duval County is not a blue bastion. In many ways it is a microcosm of Florida with a diverse inner-city core, rural outlying areas, and suburbs with a large retirement community of naval veterans.
DeSantis won Duval by 12 points in 2022. The map above illustrates the blue core of Duval with a large African-American community that has been the target of racial gerrymandering by the city council. Surrounding this core are swingier competitive suburban areas and outlying red communities — some rural, some wealthy, some retirement.
Davis ran a DeSantis style campaign. As related by the New York Times
But as a mayoral candidate, he campaigned from the political right, promising to promote causes espoused by the conservative group Moms for Liberty, which is closely aligned with Mr. DeSantis. He also pledged to be tough on crime in a city that has struggled with stubbornly high crime rates for years, including under Republican leadership.
DeSantis did not campaign for Davis. He gave a tepid endorsement announced by Davis via Twitter. DeSantis may have distanced himself from Davis because his attention was consumed by his presidential ambitions and closing out Florida’s legislative session to get his policy agenda enacted. But he might have also done so because he sensed Davis was in trouble, as the sparse public polling indicated. Deegan is a former local television personality, and thus had high name recognition despite Davis’ campaign money advantage.
Even if DeSantis chose not to expend political capital on the race, a 16 point shift between November, 2022 and May, 2023 is striking. One might chalk this up to Davis being a bad candidate, but Charlie Crist — Ron DeSantis’ 2022 opponent — did not excite voters, either. What the Duval election results remind us of is that one election should not be taken as evidence of a hard shift left or right — as many have done in projecting DeSantis’ 2022 win as evidence that he’d dominate President Joe Biden in a national matchup.
What happened in Duval? My Voting and Election Science Team colleagues compiled precinct data for the 2022 governor’s election results and recast them into the 2023 precincts used for the mayoral election — boundaries which changed due to the city council redistricting. Through this we can compare the 2022 governor’s election to the 2023 mayoral election.
In the above figure, I’ve plotted the change in the Republican vote share between the 2022 governor election and the 2023 mayoral election within Duval County. Darker blue represents more of a shift towards the Democrats. There are two precincts where Davis outperformed DeSantis, everywhere else he lost ground. Note that the swing towards Deegan didn’t occur in the inner core where Democrats already win lots of votes and it didn’t happen in the more Republican areas in the western part of the county. The swing happened primarily in the more swing areas of the county.
Turnout was down in the local mayoral election, as one might expect. The total number of voters in the 2023 mayoral election was 217,398, compared to 329,319 in the 2022 governor’s election, a 40% decline. The darker green coloring in the above figure represents less of a turnout decline in the 2023 mayoral election compared with the 2022 governor election. A key to Davis’ victory is that she retained voters in Duval’s blue central core, while turnout declined more precipitously elsewhere.
The 2023 Duval mayoral election is thus a reminder that campaigns and the election context matters.
What lesson is there for the 2024 election if DeSantis is the Republican nominee? Between 2018 and 2022, there were 449,162 fewer people that voted in the governor’s election. This in one of the fastest growing states in the country. Florida’s turnout rates among those eligible to vote decreased 6.2 percentage points from 54.3% to 48.1%. At least some of DeSantis’ impressive 19 point 2022 win statewide — especially compared with his 2018 0.4 point win — is due to Democrats abstaining because Crist’s campaign did not excite them.
Florida’s 2022 governor’s election should be viewed more as an aberration than evidence of a hard right turn in Florida. The 2022 governor’s election should not be taken as evidence of what will happen nationally if DeSantis is the Republican nominee. It is highly unlikely that whomever the Republican nominee is that Democratic turnout will evaporate nationwide. Joe Biden will have plenty of campaign cash and the megaphone of the presidency.
The 2023 Jacksonville mayoral election appears to be a return to the baseline normal where Duval is a slight right Florida swing county that a Democrat can win. It may even foretell how moving too far right can cost Republicans’ votes.