In warning sign for GOP, Republicans in key Florida county soured on Trump in 2020, analysis shows

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By every barometer, they fit the description of voters who have typically backed Republican candidates.

Upper-income white college graduates. Check.

Living in upscale suburbs. Check.

Running their own businesses. Check.

Belief in less government, less regulation and lower taxes. Check.

They voted Republican for much of their lives. Then came Donald Trump. And they voted for the Democrat.

And not just any Democrat, but Joe Biden, who promised to raise taxes on people like them, increase government spending, enact more business regulations and advocate for labor unions.

“I am not in love with Biden, but he’s not a psycho,” said David Lichtman, 63, a Jupiter resident who is a technical director for a multinational airplane parts testing company.

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But Lichtman, who describes Ronald Reagan as his hero, is no “Never Trumper.” He voted for Trump in 2016. 

At first, Lichtman said, he liked what Trump was doing. Then he said he became disgusted with the president, especially his handling of the coronavirus pandemic. Last year, for the first time in 20 years, he voted Democratic, he said.

But his disillusionment wasn't complete, he said. Trump refused to accept defeat after losing reelection in November, repeating the lie that he had been cheated. He riled up supporters, bringing their fury to a boil Jan. 6, when he preached to a mob of hardcore loyalists who then invaded the U.S. Capitol to try to overthrow the government.

After that, Lichtman said he was done, not just with Trump but with the Republican Party. He changed his voter registration to independent.

“I blame the whole Republican Party,” he said. “They were perpetuating this lie that led to January 6.”

Lichtman is far from alone.

A Palm Beach Post review of election records and interviews with more than a dozen voters suggests discontent with the 45th president has brewed in country clubs, yoga studios and higher-end neighborhoods where Republican presidential candidates once dominated.

That is the case even here, in Palm Beach County, where Trump cast his ballot a year ago in his new home state, which he comfortably won, and where he remains zealously popular among the GOP base. But even as he trounced Biden in the Sunshine State, Trump's margins in precincts comfortably won by predecessor Republican nominees either shrank or went underwater.

Yet, in Florida, Republican voters have abandoned their party in the first eight months of 2021 at a faster clip than Democrats have bolted from their party: 67,462 voters who were registered Republicans in January are no longer with the GOP, compared with 55,998 who are former Democrats.

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State GOP officials don't seem to care, or even appear concerned. And Trump himself regularly taunts Republican leaders who criticize him, calling them "RINOs" — Republicans in name only.

“He is still the leader of the party,” Florida Republican Party Chairman Joe Gruters said of Trump.

As for those voters who say are unhappy with Trump, Gruters said they will come back to the fold.

“We just have to continue what we’re doing and I think people will come around,” he said.

Exodus clear in Palm Beach County's longtime GOP strongholds

Trump's repellent effect on voters in traditionally Republican neighborhoods is evident in Palm Beach County, where voting results show upscale suburbs that once reliably supported the party's presidential nominees drifted Democratic in last November's election.

How each Palm Beach County precinct voted in presidential elections from 2012 to 2020

Tap or move your mouse over each precinct for more information.

Source: Palm Beach County Supervisor of Elections. 

Map by Palm Beach Post reporter Chris Persaud.

The trend is highlighted in voting Precinct 1054, covering Lichtman’s Jupiter neighborhood, where houses have pools and are valued at more than $500,000.

Just 55% of voters there selected Trump in 2020, down from the commanding 61% Mitt Romney won in 2012, Palm Beach County Supervisor of Elections data shows. Biden won 45% of the precinct’s vote, up from former President Barack Obama’s 38% eight years earlier.

Not far away, the exclusive Jupiter community where Donald Trump Jr., and girlfriend Kimberly Guilfoyle bought a home in March for $9.7 million also swung against Don Jr.’s dad. Just 57% of Admiral Cove’s voters in Precinct 1140 backed Trump in 2020, far less than the 72% Romney got.

Biden also won 52% of votes from the gated Palm Beach Gardens neighborhood of Mirasol, Precinct 1238, where houses sell for upward of $2 million and residents have access to a private golf course and country club. Four years ago, Trump won 50.3%. In 2012, Romney got 67%.

Just to the southwest is Precinct 1252 — containing BallenIsles, the former home to tennis star Venus Williams and one-time 2016 Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort. There, 58% of voters backed Biden. That’s a big reversal from 2012, when 56% backed Romney. In 2016, 53% voted for Clinton.

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Another golf course community with seven-figure houses, Ibis in West Palm Beach, also flipped to Biden, who won 51% of voters. Trump got a 49% plurality in 2016, a far cry from Romney’s 61%. He got 48% in 2020. 

Even Trump’s wealthy Palm Beach neighbors backed away from him. He won 62% of voters in Precinct 7154 covering Mar-a-Lago, the Trump family-owned private club he officially declared as his home in 2019. Romney got 77%.

And in other Palm Beach County upper-middle class suburbs that leaned Democratic in previous elections, where Republican candidates still garnered significant support, Biden improved on Clinton’s 2016 performance. That's despite Trump netting 3,410 votes countywide in 2020.

Biden netted hundreds of votes from gated communities along State Road 7, such as Valencia Shores in Precinct 3122 south of Hypoluxo Road, where he got 66% of the vote, compared to Clinton’s 60.5%.

And in eastern Wellington, 50.6% of voters in Village Walk (Precinct 2146) ended up supporting Biden. A similarly slim majority backed Trump four years ago. And 48% backed him in 2020. In the neighboring Olympia community, Precinct 6210, 57% backed Biden compared to 53% for Clinton. 

Voters' revulsion with Trump flipped Republican strongholds to Biden

Many of these voters interviewed by The Post over the course of the past six months say they find themselves increasingly at odds with the GOP on the most basic of American political principles, such as upholding democracy and the peaceful transfer of presidential power.

Robert Himelfarb, a 67-year-old semi-retired hedge fund manager, cast one of those ballots that flipped Mirasol in Palm Beach Gardens for Biden. He is registered with no political party, but voted for Trump in 2016 and Romney in 2012.

“I voted for Trump originally because I bought into the story of ‘It’s time we got rid of politicians and have a businessman running things,’” he said.

Himelfarb previously worked 37 years for Ford Motor Co., including in Asia, in managerial roles helping decide engineering budgets and business strategies for planned vehicles, he said. 

“I know what a CEO is supposed to do, pull everybody together and get stuff done. … He never tried to get everyone in a room the way (CEO) Al Mulally did at Ford,” he added.

And as Cabinet member after Cabinet member came and went, berating Trump along the way, Himelfarb saw what he said was poor leadership. Fourteen of Trump’s Cabinet secretaries left over his term, the most in 40 years.

“Everyone who was close to him said he was a ‘f------- moron,’” Himelfarb said, repeating what Trump’s first secretary of state, Rex Tillerson, reportedly called him during a 2017 Pentagon meeting.

Another Trump-to-Biden vote, in Valencia Shores, came from Valerie Hastings, who also is registered with no political party. The 69-year-old yoga-practicing retired underwriter flipped to Biden after voting for Trump in 2016. She had hoped the businessman would shake up Washington, she said.

“I was willing to overlook his lack of a filter and other unacceptable behaviors,” she said. “What was really a big turnoff was the way he handled the pandemic. Not that I think we should shut the economy down. I just did not appreciate the fact that he was so cavalier about the whole thing.”

Still, when she voted for Biden, she said, “I had to hold my nose to do it.”

Thomas Gritter, a 39-year-old registered Republican in Jupiter, said he voted GOP until 2016, when he selected Libertarian Party candidate Gary Johnson out of disgust with Trump. He voted for Biden last year.

Gritter describes himself as a "born-and-raised Christian conservative." When he looks at the members of his faith who still support Trump and the GOP, he said he thinks, “Wow, you guys are insane. You’re ... openly racist, openly cynical about everything. And that allows the Democratic Party to be the voice of reason.”

Trump has so tarnished the GOP, Gritter said, that it will be a long time before he votes Republican again, even down ballot and even for a candidate he might like.

“Do I want to give the Republicans in Washington, who are Trump-loving crazies, one more vote?” he said.

About 64% of registered voters in Ibis, Precinct 6066, are 66 or older, and Trump’s mismanagement of the pandemic cost him, one Republican officeholder said.

“They were thinking more about COVID, and COVID led them more to Biden than Trump,” said state Rep. Rick Roth, a Republican whose district covers the gated neighborhood. “They weren’t concerned about going back to work. They were concerned about being safe.”

The virus had killed more than 241,000 people nationwide by Nov. 3, including nearly 17,000 in Florida, 82% of whom were 65 and older.

The trend in Palm Beach County was visible in other pockets across Florida

Last November, Trump racked up a commanding win, by Florida standards, with a 3.2% margin of victory, the biggest since George W. Bush won the state in 2004. Still, there were signs of fissures in other erstwhile reliable GOP bastions in the Sunshine State. 

When the majority of voters in Duval County backed Biden, it was the first time voters there supported a Democrat for president since Jimmy Carter in 1976. That's a feat that was not accomplished by either Bill Clinton in 1992 and 1996 or Obama in 2008 and 2012.

Duval County Democratic Party Chairman Daniel Henry said some of the GOP defectors were "traditional, Mitt Romney, socially moderate fiscally conservative type of Republicans."

"The reason you saw Trump underperform in 2016 and then lose outright in 2020 [in Duval County] is his brand of Republicanism didn't quite match the social ethos Republicans here have," Henry said. "A lot of Republicans I talked to had an adverse reaction to his type of politicking and his presidency."

Seminole County, north of Orlando, also flipped to Biden after having backed GOP presidential candidates since 1952.

“There is a class of formerly Republican voters who really do not like Donald Trump,” University of Central Florida political science Professor Aubrey Jewett said. “And they tend to be college-educated white voters. And that is — at least in Seminole County — a big part of the explanation for why we went Democratic for the first time in like 50 years.”

About half of Seminole County residents earn more than $67,000 annually, or $11,000 more than Florida’s household median income. And 40% of residents 25 and older have a college degree, compared with 30% statewide.

Although white people are more likely than racial minorities to register and vote Republican, voting records show, white college-educated suburbanites across Florida increasingly vote Democratic.

Trump won an estimated 62% of white college graduates statewide in 2016, surveys of voters exiting polls showed. In 2020, that share decreased to 57%, according to surveys taken of voters who cast ballots in person and by mail.

GOP clings to Trump and election fraud lie despite voter backlash

Yet even after these once-reliable voters abandoned the GOP, elected Republicans and party leaders have shown no sign they are concerned.

GOP officials who spoke with The Post dismissed the idea that the party should worry about the growing ranks of disaffected individuals in Florida who were reliable Republican voters until Trump took over the party.

Party leaders have even embraced the lie, boosted by the former president, that the 2020 election was fraudulent. They do so even as it is an issue that voters who consistently backed Republican candidates say is a turn-off — even in Trump's home county.

"I think there's lots of questions surrounding the 2020 race and I think … we need to get to the bottom of it," Gruters, the state party chairman, said. No evidence of widespread voter fraud for Biden has ever been found.

Gruters, a state senator from Sarasota, said other issues will appeal to disenchanted voters going forward. One of those, he said, is Gov. Ron DeSantis' choice to keep schools and businesses open for most of the coronavirus pandemic.

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"Suburban moms and the people in the suburbs — whatever percentage we did lose — will come running back because they value education," Gruters said. "The governor has kept the state open, kept the schools open. They value freedom, going out to shop and eating, and they value living your life."

If Gruters is right, it would be a partial reversal of a 2020 trend. The share of white female college graduates statewide who voted for Trump fell to about 52% in 2020. An estimated 60% supported him in 2016.

Dean Black, the Duval County GOP chairman, said Trumpism isn’t going anywhere. He dismissed voters such as those interviewed by The Post as a “small fraction” of the electorate.

“What we could call the Trumpian philosophy is going to be very important for the party going forward,” Black said, defining that doctrine as “the idea that we’re not just gonna lay down and let China take advantage of the national economy, steal our jobs, steal our national technology.”

When asked whether he agreed Biden’s win was fraud-free, he replied, “No.”

There's another reason Florida GOP officials don't seem concerned. Namely, they successfully keep registering new GOP voters at a pace that continues to dwindle the Democrats' historical voter registration lead in the state.

The Democratic Party's lead over the GOP among Florida registered voters has shrunk to 109,223 as of August, down from 148,477 in January. That's despite an exodus of 24,266 Republicans from the party following the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol.

Exodus of 'traditional' Republicans means more Trumpian GOP

“What we see in Florida is an exodus of traditional Republicans," said UCF's Jewett said. "But they’ve been replaced by these voters who are attracted to the new Trumpified Republican Party.”

GOP enthusiasm for Trump is another reason state Republican Party officials continue to embrace the former president.

In polls last year by Florida Atlantic University's Business and Economics Polling Initiative, Republican voters surveyed said by vast margins that they were "enthusiastic" about voting for then-President Trump. That does not seem to have abated, judging by voter registrations surges that have made up for the defections in the ranks of Republican and GOP-leaning voters.

But Jewett wonders whether they will be as energized in the 2022 midterm election next November.

"We don’t know how mobilized the new (Republican) voters are ... when Trump is not on the ballot," Jewett said.

Michael Binder, a pollster and University of North Florida political science professor, said a host of unknowns also lie ahead in 2022.

 "Does the economy start to tighten a bit?" he asks. "That could be detrimental to all of those folks who are never-Trumpers."

And if jobs and businesses bounce back, he said "they're looking at a rebound and saying, 'Well we don't have to worry about Trump anymore. … maybe I can look to Republicans in 2022.'"

Staff reporter Wendy Rhodes contributed to this story.

Chris Persaud is a data reporter for The Palm Beach Post. Email tips to cpersaud@pbpost.com.