Republican Party of Florida history

The assassination of President McKinley in 1901 elevated to the presidency Theodore Roosevelt, leader of the party’s progressive wing.

With the Republican vote divided, Wilson won the presidency, and he was reelected in 1916.

In the election of 1932, considered the country’s third critical election, Republican incumbent Pres.

In 1967, Claude R. Kirk, Jr. was the first Republican governor elected in the state since the 19th century Reconstruction era.

By 1968 the party’s moderate faction regained control and again nominated Nixon, who narrowly won the popular vote over Hubert H. Humphrey, Johnson’s vice president.

Although Nixon was reelected by a landslide in 1972, Republicans made few gains in congressional, state, and local elections and failed to win control of Congress.

In the wake of the Watergate scandal, Nixon resigned the presidency in August 1974 and was succeeded in office by Gerald R. Ford, the first appointed vice president to become president.

His vice president, George H.W. Bush, continued the Republicans’ presidential success by handily defeating Democrat Michael S. Dukakis in 1988.

Clinton was reelected in 1996, though the Republicans retained control of Congress.

In 2004 Bush was narrowly reelected, winning both the popular and electoral vote, and the Republicans kept control of both houses of Congress.

In the 2012 general election, the Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney was unable to unseat Obama.

But Schale said the party could benefit from sustained organizing, particularly in Hispanic communities in South Florida that helped Trump win Florida last year by an even larger margin than in 2016.

DeSantis won office in 2018 by a margin of about 32,000 votes after a key endorsement from Trump, in a year when Democrats outnumbered Republicans by more than 250,000 registered voters.