Floridians who want to show support for former President Donald Trump — or cast a protest vote against him — need to act soon, with various deadlines approaching for the state’s Republican presidential preference primary.

All the old familiar names, and some that may have been forgotten, will appear on Florida’s primary ballot. Besides Trump, the seven include dropouts Gov. Ron DeSantis, former Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey and former Gov. Asa Hutchinson of Arkansas, along with still-running former Gov. Nikki Haley of South Carolina.

Even if Trump has unequivocally locked up the nomination and no competitors remain when the state’s Republicans vote on March 19, the primary will proceed and the votes will be tallied.

“We are still expecting strong Republican turnout at the polls,” said Kevin Neal, chair of the Palm Beach County Republican Party.

Maybe not. “Unfortunately, the Florida presidential primary is irrelevant this year,” said Sean Foreman, a political scientist at Barry University.

Even in the past, Foreman said, “we haven’t had much impact on the process because of the timing and voting in March, when oftentimes a candidate has clinched the nomination. This time it looks like it will have no effect at all.”

There are other reasons for all voters, not just Republicans, to pay attention to March 19.

Although they don’t attract lots of publicity, four Broward communities and 22 cities, towns and villages in Palm Beach County have elections for local offices that are nonpartisan and open to all voters regardless of party affiliation.

There are also referendums in three small pockets of unincorporated Palm Beach County in which voters are being asked if they want to be annexed into nearby cities.

To vote, someone needs to be registered by the end of the day Tuesday, Feb. 20.

To participate in the presidential preference primary, someone must be registered as a Republican. Florida has closed primaries, so Democrats and no party affiliation/independent voters are not allowed to participate.

Related Articles

Shenanigans

If non-Republicans want to cast votes in the Republican primary — whether for Trump, for someone else to show dissatisfaction with the former president, or to show some home-state support for DeSantis — people can switch their registration, then switch back to Democratic or NPA after the primary.

Dan Nagler, a Miami Beach lawyer, said he “switched in under five minutes on the phone while drinking a beer.”

He wouldn’t say if he’s doing so to express dissatisfaction with Trump, but added, “I’m a registered Republican for the next month and a half, but I’m a Democrat.”

“For me, it’s all about just exercising the democratic privilege to vote,” he said. “It’s the exact opposite of protesting. It’s the exact opposite of mischief. The essence of democracy is voting. That is what American democracy is all about.”

In states like New Hampshire, it’s easy and common for unaffiliated voters (equivalent to no party affiliation voters in Florida) to vote in a party’s presidential primary.

In Florida it takes more effort and has to be started a month before the primary and Foreman said “only a small, insignificant number of people do that.”

“I hear that’s happening,” Broward Supervisor Joe Scott said about people changing their registrations to vote in the primary, calling it “really isolated. There’s not a ton of people doing that.” And there’s no way to know why people are changing their affiliations.

The numbers are infinitesimally small, said Scott and Alison Novoa, director of strategic initiatives at the Palm Beach County Supervisor of Elections Office.

In Palm Beach County, 905 Democrats have become Republicans since Jan. 1 and 103 Republicans have become Democrats. All switches involving Democrats, Republicans and NPA voters so far this year total 4,547, which works out to 0.53% of the county’s 860,784 registered voters.

In Broward, 855 Democrats have become Republicans and 97 Republicans have become Democrats. A total of 3,810 voters have switched since Jan. 1, which works out to 0.35% of the county’s 1.1 million registered voters.

Mail voting changes

Droves of people started voting by mail during the COVID-19 pandemic. But people who have voted by mail in the last two general elections, in 2020 and 2022, can’t automatically continue to do so.

All mail ballot requests before the 2022 gubernatorial election were canceled.

Anyone who wants to vote by mail in any Florida election this year has to apply.

Civic groups and elections supervisors have been telling people they need to sign up again. “We sent mailers, we’ve done news, we’ve done billboards. We’ve done literally everything we can possibly think of to tell voters (about it), but a lot of them still don’t know,” Novoa said.

As a result, the number of people signed up for mail ballots has declined precipitously.

In Broward, 136,000 people so far are signed up to get mail ballots this year, Scott said. In the last two election cycles he said it was 515,000. (Scott said he didn’t expect it would ever get back to pandemic levels.)

In Palm Beach County, 147,000 people so far are set to get mail ballots this year. At the end of 2020 the county had almost 500,000 requests on file and around 360,000 at the end of 2022, Novoa said.

The Palm Beach County elections office has sent out about 70,000 mail ballots to all county Republicans who’ve made requests plus all other voters in the municipalities with elections on March 19. Broward, which has fewer Republicans and far fewer local elections, has sent out about 37,600.

Municipal politics

All the local elections are nonpartisan, meaning they’re open to Democratic, Republican and no party affiliation/independent voters.

Even though candidates don’t run with party labels, Republican leaders in Palm Beach and Broward counties hope for a strong performance this year.

Especially before Republican presidential candidates started dropping out as Trump’s strength toward the nomination intensified, Republicans thought the March voting could give them an advantage in the local elections.

The thinking: Republicans would turn out in droves to vote in the presidential primary, and since they were voting anyway, they’d also vote in the nonpartisan municipal elections. If the county parties could effectively communicate information about the Republican candidates to Republican voters that could provide an edge.

Fueling their optimism was the state Democratic Party’s decision not to have a presidential primary in the state, so there’s nothing to draw its voters to the polls.

With virtually all political analysts and party leaders believing Trump will have the nomination sewed up by March 19, Republican voters might not have as much incentive to go to the polls — especially since there won’t be a Trump-DeSantis contest to resolve.

Neal said Republicans having a presidential preference primary, and the Democrats not having one, will “work in our favor for our candidates. … We are still expecting very strong election results for our Republican candidates.”

“We are supporting those candidates in every way that we can,” he said. “We’ve got texting campaigns, email campaigns, door knocking. All of our get-out-the-vote efforts to push our municipal candidates over the top. Municipal elections are a very high priority for us.”

Republicans in Broward are helping their candidates as well. For example, voters in a small beachside city have received the “Lauderdale-By-The-Sea Republican Voter Guide” from Republican party precinct committeemen and committeewomen.

Anthony Man can be reached at aman@sunsentinel.com and can be found @browardpolitics on Bluesky, Threads, Facebook and Post.news.