Republican control of Florida isn’t just due to the success of GOP strategies — Democrats in Florida have also ceded major ground to Republicans in recent years. It’s a truth Democrats in the state will readily admit. Nikki Fried, the new chair of the Florida Democratic Party, said that November 2022 marked the “complete collapse of the Democratic Party in the state”: “If we don’t realize that the problem is us, then we can’t move forward.”

Rep. Maxwell Frost, a Democrat from Orlando and the first member of Generation Z elected to Congress, discovered just how tall a task turning Florida blue might be during early voting in 2022. In a panicked Zoom call, he and other Central Florida leaders realized that their voters just weren’t showing up in the numbers they expected and the party’s complacency was to blame.

“When you build year-round, you don’t have to convince people at the last minute — you just have to remind them,” he told Vox.

Fried said the party dropped the ball on voter registration for the past couple of election cycles; Republicans registered 26 new voters, on net, for every Democrat between 2018 and 2022. Local and national Democrats lacked coordination, invested too little too late in ground game, and took certain communities for granted, including Hispanic and Black voters.

The party didn’t have a coherent message that spoke to voters’ basic concerns about inflation (which remains high in Florida despite abating nationally), housing costs, and the state’s property insurance crisis — issues that cut across party lines and demographics. Instead, they allowed Republicans to define the debate and focus on culture war issues.

“Florida has a very toxic political environment, which mainly consists of our opposition trying to frame us as people who we aren’t,” Frost said. “Someone says, ‘You’re a socialist,’ or, ‘You’re defunding the police.’ And we spend our whole media budget on a commercial that says, ‘No, I’m not.’ I’m not convinced that is a winning message in the state of Florida.”

It wasn’t just the message that was the problem in 2022: Many Democratic voters also just weren’t inspired by Democratic candidates and stayed home.