For first time, Volusia GOPs outnumber Dems

Little by little, for decades now, once-blue Volusia County has been edging toward a change.

This month marked the completion of the transformation. More Republicans are registered to vote in Volusia than Democrats for the first time since Reconstruction, maybe ever. (The records from the 1870s aren't so good.)

"We have always been a Democratic county," said Lisa Lewis, Volusia County's supervisor of elections.

No more.

Local Republicans say they intend to keep Volusia red, while Democrats pledge they're not giving up without a fight.

There are many reasons for the Republicanization of Volusia, starting with geography and demography. The areas that are growing — higher-end subdivisions in DeLand, New Smyrna Beach and Port Orange — tend to attract wealthier, older, whiter residents, resulting in a bigger influx of Republicans than Democrats.

And then there are those who've switched.

George Heise, an 85-year-old retired real-estate businessman from New Smyrna Beach, is as good an example as any. A lifelong Democrat, he was among those who changed parties on May 1 or 2, when the GOP officially surpassed the Dems.

"Since Obama got in ... he was awful. He got by with everything," Heise said. "The party that he represented let him go ahead and remove God."

Heise voted for President Trump, saying he agreed with much of what the Republican candidate promised to do.

"Here is a man who says something, he sticks by his guns," he said.

Heise said he intended to change his party affiliation throughout Obama's second term, but only switched parties this month because "I didn't get around to it."

Nonpartisans' gain

In 1980, the year of the Reagan Revolution, Volusia County was 62.4 percent Democrat, 31.5 percent Republican and just 6.1 percent carried no party affiliation or were minor-party members.

Despite that breakdown, Volusians chose Reagan over then-President Carter by a 56-39 margin. The rest of the partisan races were a split between Democrats and Republicans, and the county has largely been that way — purple — ever since. The county voted for Republicans in four straight presidential elections before selecting Democrats four times in a row. That streak ended in 2012, with Volusia narrowly going for Mitt Romney and Trump by 13 percentage points last year.

In terms of voter registration, Republicans have moved just a tick past 35 percent, with Democrats falling just shy of that figure, while the share of nonpartisans and minor-party voters has grown to nearly 30 percent.

"I think it's been 20 years in the making, really," said Mike Scudiero, an Ormond Beach political consultant who's a Republican. "The writing's been on the wall a good 20 years. ... The real story is whether we're 10 or 20 years away from independents being in the majority."

The past year has shown a surge in new registrations of no-party affiliation voters, a 15,070 swing up from this time last year. Meanwhile, Republicans gained more than 5,000 new voters while Democrats lost more than 1,000.

Trump energizes electorate

Love him or hate him, the president dominates political conversation in 2017.

Scudiero describes a "Trump effect," which involves many voters who "never have anything to do with the local party," who are largely driven by national and state tickets. While many new Republicans, like Heise, are drawn to the GOP by Trump, there are likely many others who seek to claim the party back for more traditional conservatives.

Tony Ledbetter, the Volusia County Republican chairman, said the party remained almost 3,000 voters behind Democrats on Jan. 1. He attributes the closed gap to a backlash to negative mainstream media coverage of Trump and an effort to reach out to voters impacted by the state's decision to disband the Independent Party of Florida because of an auditing violation. Volusia had about 1,500 voters whose registration was automatically switched to no-party affiliation unless they opted for another party.

"There had to be a lot of these people who didn't want to be NPA," Ledbetter said. "They went to Republican."

Ledbetter views Volusia as a harbinger of Florida, which still tilted Democratic by about 330,000 voters out of a total of 13 million, as of Dec. 31, 2016.

"We have a campaign push all over Florida, all 67 counties," he said. "We're working to make Florida red."

Jewel Dickson, chairwoman of the Volusia Democrats, said some of the Republicans' gains can be attributed to hard work during a normally dormant non-election year.

"We were very disappointed. Republicans have been working very hard, and we intend to meet that challenge," Dickson said. "I think the Republican Party has been working very hard because of all of the bad press, to counteract the bad press. My feeling is we just haven't been out there beating the bushes, but we will be."

A lot of the energy on the left side locally has gone into anti-Trump rallies, she said, acknowledging the need to convert that into Democratic registrants and votes in 2018 and 2020.

Long haul

Longtime Republicans perhaps understand more than most how much has changed over the decades.

Upon hearing of the county's shift from Democrat to Republican, Kit Martin, a longtime Daytona Beach resident who was involved in organizing local GOP clubs as early as the 1964 election, had a two-word reaction.

"Happy day," she said.

She recalled the day when she, newly arrived from West Virginia, went to register to vote. She told the elections supervisor's clerk her party choice.

"Are you sure you want to register Republican?" came the response.

"I said, 'What is your name? I think it is illegal to try to influence my registration,'" Martin responded.

That happened regularly, she said, and she would dutifully complain to the supervisor.

Evelyn Lynn, who served Volusia County as a state representative and state senator between 1994 and 2012, is among those Republicans whose elections would portend the county's shift to red.

"It was still very Democratic here (in 1994)," she said, adding that it was her long record as an educator and Ormond Beach city commissioner that helped some Democrats get past her party affiliation. But not everybody did. She had a few doors slammed in her face.

While Lynn said she's excited to hear that more Volusia voters are Republicans, she also can see what's coming behind it.

"I think the number of independents is growing. I think people would like to say, 'I don't want to be affiliated with a party. I'm going to look for the best person who's running, who hears what I need in my life."