Shortly after the Reconstruction era, white Democrats regained control of the Florida legislature. In 1885, they created a new constitution, followed by statutes through 1889 that disfranchised most blacks and many poor whites.[10][11] From the end of the Reconstruction era until the 1952 presidential election, the Republican Party only won Florida once, in the 1928 presidential election. According to historian Herbert J. Doherty, Republican victory in that election was mainly due to the fact that its Democratic opponent Al Smith was a Catholic and opposed to Prohibition, which caused many members of the Southern Baptist Convention to switch to the Republican Party.[12]
From 1948 to 1952, the emergence of the Pinellas Republican Party attracted a lot of voters.[13] Since the presidential election in 1952, the Democrats have won Florida in only five presidential elections: 1964, 1976, 1996, 2008, and 2012. In the 2000 presidential election, George W. Bush led Al Gore by less than 2,000 votes on election day, but as the recount proceeded, the gap between the two sides continued to narrow.[14] In Bush v. Gore, the Bush campaign filed a lawsuit against Gore in the U.S. Supreme Court, arguing that the recounting of votes in certain counties violated the Equal Protection Clause of the U.S. Constitution. The Supreme Court announced the halt of vote recounting.[15] After a lengthy judicial process, Bush eventually won Florida's electoral votes by a margin of only 537 votes out of almost six million cast (0.009%) and, as a result, became the president-elect.[16] However, the result sparked controversy.[17]
Florida was long a swing state, and furthermore, it had been seen as a bellwether in presidential elections since 1928 (only missed in 1960, 1992 and 2020).[18] However, with the Republican Party's performance in Florida far exceeding its national average in the 2022 midterm elections, many analysts believe that the state has transitioned from being a Republican-leaning swing state into a reliable red state, with Democratic-leaning trends in Hillsborough County, Orange County and Osceola County not being able to offset Republican gains in Miami-Dade County, Broward County, and Palm Beach County [19][20]
The election of 1860 was a complex realigning election in which the breakdown of the previous two-party alignment culminated in four parties each competing for influence in different parts of the country.[31] The result of the election, with the victory of an ardent opponent of slavery, spurred the secession of eleven states and brought about the American Civil War.[32]
^For purposes of these lists, other national candidates are defined as those who won at least one electoral vote, or won at least ten percent of the vote in multiple states.
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