FL-09: Former Osceola County Commissioner John Quiñones, who had reportedly been gearing up for a bid against Democratic Rep. Darren Soto, officially kicked off a bid on Tuesday in the hopes of putting a traditionally left-leaning seat in play for Republicans.
Joe Biden carried the Orlando-area 9th District 58-41, but Soto defeated an unheralded Republican foe by a smaller 54-46 last year. Florida data analyst Matthew Isbell also says that GOP Gov. Ron DeSantis actually carried the 9th 50-49 over Democrat Charlie Crist in 2022, while Democrat Val Demings edged out Republican Sen. Marco Rubio just 51-48. Republicans naturally hope that the midterm results, combined with their increased success with Florida Latinos in recent years, will give them an opening.
Quiñones ran for this seat once before in 2012, a campaign that did not end well. Concerned about his possible appeal to the many Puerto Rican voters in the district—Quiñones was the first Republican of Puerto Rican descent elected to the state House—Democrats successfully kneecapped him ahead of the GOP primary. They did so by deploying tactics similar to those famously used by Claire McCaskill to propel Todd Akin to the Republican nomination for Senate in Missouri that same summer (and would become especially popular among Democrats nationwide in 2022).
Painting Quiñones as a tax hiker and pretending to attack his tea-partying rival Todd Long as someone who "will never compromise with President Obama," Democrats helped Long win a 47-28 victory. He then predictably got crushed by Democrat Alan Grayson (who was waging a comeback campaign after getting turfed out in the 2010 GOP wave) by a 63-37 margin. Quiñones, meanwhile, lost his bid for reelection to the County Commission two years later and hasn't been on the ballot since.
Since then, however, voting patterns among Latinos have shifted dramatically in Florida. According to the progressive data firm Catalist, just 44% of Latino voters in the state backed Crist last year, a drop from the 50% who voted for Joe Biden in 2020 and an even steeper decline from the 66% who supported Hillary Clinton in 2016.
However, that includes Florida's considerable contingent of Cuban Americans, who make up a plurality of Latinos statewide and are typically more conservative than other Hispanics. By contrast, in the 9th, where about half of all voting-age residents are Latino, Puerto Ricans make up at least half the district's Latino population, if not more. (Detailed census data on ethnicity for the nation's new congressional districts has yet to be released.)
Florida was also an outlier nationally, as Catalist's analysis shows: Latino support for Democratic candidates for Senate and governor in every other state matched or even exceeded 2020 levels. The central question for Democrats and Republicans alike, then, is whether Florida represents the start of a new trend, whether it will continue to stand on its own, or whether it might even return to its previous form.