Florida might be MAGA country but some Republicans sent a strong message to Trump | Opinion

Florida might be MAGA country, but a contingent of Republicans made a point this week of showing that Donald Trump is not their candidate.

In Tuesday’s presidential primary, one in five Republicans voted for someone other than Trump, who is a Palm Beach resident, the Herald reported.

Trump still won Florida by vast margins — 81.2% of the votes, according to preliminary results — but that’s still less than the 93% he received in 2020 and what he got in other states this year. Given he’s the only major candidate left in the race, it appears some Republicans wanted to send a message. As of Tuesday evening, former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley had a small lead in three Miami-Dade County precincts despite dropping out of the primary weeks ago.

Haley came in second with almost 14% followed by Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis in distant third place at less than 4%. DeSantis dropped out in January after the Iowa caucuses but that’s still not a good showing for him in his own state — and probably a blow to the ambitious governor who has refused to step back from the spotlight.

We have to be careful not to read too much into Tuesday’s numbers. This was a primary where the outcome wasn’t in question. Some Republicans voted for candidates other than Trump, yes, but there’s zero doubt he commands the GOP, which he has reshaped from the party of small government and free trade into one that coddles a leader who gushes over authoritarians, accuses immigrants of poisoning the blood of the country and who warns that if he loses in November, the U.S. is never “going to have another election.”

Trump-backed candidates performed well in other states in crucial races on Tuesday, such as Ohio’s U.S. Senate primary. And it’s possible that almost 20% of GOP voters in Florida were motivated to go to the polls to oppose the former president while, at the same time, some of his supporters stayed home because he already amassed enough delegates to be the presumptive Republican nominee.

But these protest votes matter, especially because Florida, unlike other states that voted on Tuesday, has closed primaries. Only registered Republicans voted, so no Democrats or independents could have influenced the results.

Whether that translates into any kind of advantage for Democrats in the fall is a different question. Republicans who object to Trump might put party affiliation first and still cast a reluctant vote for him, instead of for President Biden. At the same time, Democrats have cut back on their investment in the state as Florida becomes increasingly out of reach for them. The GOP’s voter-registration lead over Democrats has reached a whopping 851,000, the largest gap between parties since 1988, the USA Today Network reported.

Tuesday’s results still show that a sizeable — or, at the very least, vocal — minority of GOP voters remain unconvinced that Trump deserves another chance at the White House. Their votes are a rebuke of Trump’s lies about the 2020 election, his inflammatory rhetoric, his inciting of hatred and the violence that took place on Jan. 6. It might be that some conservatives actually aren’t comfortable dismissing the disturbing things Trump says as nothing more than hyperbole. They may not be buying into his claims that his indictments are witch hunts, as many Republicans have had to do to justify their unwavering loyalty to the former president.

There’s hope that the Republicans who refuse to go along with the toxicity of the MAGA GOP are holding out. Democracy needs them.

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This story was originally published March 20, 2024 at 1:34 PM.