Tampa Bay is no longer a swing region, DeSantis says. Is he right?

On a Thursday afternoon earlier this month, Gov. Ron DeSantis made a bold pronouncement.

The Tampa Bay region, which for decades has been a swing region within a swing state, is a toss-up no longer. Now, DeSantis says, it can be penciled into the Republican column.

“Hillsborough (Tampa) is about to flip from D to R, which will mean every county in the Tampa Bay market has a R advantage in this previously ‘swing’ region of the state,” DeSantis wrote on the social platform X, formerly Twitter, on April 4, citing local voter registration numbers.

The region went solidly for DeSantis during his 2022 blowout reelection win against Democrat Charlie Crist, and Republicans have since made significant gains in voter registration in Pinellas and Hillsborough counties — the swingiest counties in the region.

Democrats still have about 9,000 more active registered voters than Republicans in Hillsborough, but the Democratic voter registration advantage is smaller than it has been in at least two decades.

As recently as the fall of 2020, Democrats had an advantage of nearly 74,000 active registered voters.

In Pinellas, the GOP has an advantage of more than 32,000 active registered voters — the largest advantage either party has had in the county in the 21st century.

The Democratic Party has seen a combined 58,000 voters in Hillsborough, Pinellas and Pasco counties switch registration to another party — or to no party — since the last presidential election, a Tampa Bay Times analysis found. Republicans have seen about 35,000 voters in those counties switch allegiances in that time.

So is DeSantis right that Tampa Bay is no longer a swing region?

“We don’t have quite enough evidence to say that,” said Aubrey Jewett, an associate professor of political science at the University of Central Florida. “But he certainly might be right.”

Swing regions are characterized by their voting patterns, not their registration numbers. Jewett said we haven’t seen enough recent Republican electoral dominance in Hillsborough County to proclaim it solidly Republican. Joe Biden won the county by 7 points over Donald Trump in 2020.

The registration totals cited by DeSantis are also more complex than they might appear. Registered voter reports posted by county supervisors of elections don’t reflect all the people in that county who are registered to vote. Officials report active registered voters — people who have recently cast a ballot or communicated with a local elections official. They don’t report inactive registered voters, who haven’t interacted with elections offices in a while but who are still eligible to cast a ballot.

As recently as 2020, the distinction wasn’t all that important. At the time of the last presidential election, just 6.6% of the more than 1.7 million registered voters in Hillsborough and Pinellas counties were inactive, according to an analysis of the voter file performed by Daniel A. Smith, a political science professor at the University of Florida.

But by March of this year, the percentage of inactive voters in those two counties had spiked to nearly 19%, Smith found.

That increase came after a series of election laws signed by DeSantis went into effect. A 2022 measure, SB 524, essentially required county supervisors of elections to more frequently and proactively reach out to voters who haven’t voted recently or been in touch with elections officials. If the supervisor’s office doesn’t hear from these voters, or mail notices come back to them marked undeliverable, the voter could be moved to the inactive list.

Although the change affected all parties, it has hit Democrats and no-party-affiliated voters much harder than Republicans. Hillsborough and other counties saw a particularly dramatic spike in voters being classified as inactive in late 2023, one year after a disappointing Democratic turnout in the 2022 election.

The technical discrepancy over voter totals is at the heart of the messaging war between the two major political parties in Florida.

For months, Republicans have been crowing about their widening voter registration advantage in the state. The Florida Democratic Party, meanwhile, has said that advantage has been inflated by the laws written and passed by Republicans.

Democrats circulated a memo last month that parsed the active versus inactive voter registration in large counties. The true voter registration gap between Democrats and Republicans in Florida is about 40% lower than what was reported by supervisors of elections as of December, the memo contended. (Republicans’ reported voter registration margin has only continued to grow since then.)

Both parties agree that Republicans are making real inroads both locally and around the state. April Schiff, a Republican strategist and consultant, said her political committee, the Hillsborough Leadership Council, has been strategic about targeting and contacting newcomers to the region to get them registered with the GOP.

“A lot of the new residents that are coming in all over the state of Florida are embracing conservative policies and registering as Republicans,” Schiff said. “That’s why they came here.”

Eden Giagnorio, a spokesperson for the Florida Democratic Party, said the party is doubling down on its efforts to mobilize inactive voters.

It’s relatively easy to be placed back on the active voter list, Giagnorio noted. A resident need only vote or contact their supervisor of elections and ask to be marked as active.

But even that outreach effort will take time and resources because inactive voters are less likely to be engaged than active ones, political scientists note.

“It is difficult to lift inactives back into active status,” Smith said. “But it’s a hell of a lot easier to do that than to register new voters.”

Times staff writer Ivy Nyayieka and data editor Langston Taylor contributed to this report.