Florida emerged from this week’s historic blue wave still a red state, but one where dramatic gains by Democrats stand to make it more competitive in 2028—if the party can rebuild and fund its long-neglected political operation.

Democrats fared far better after drubbings in 2024, when President Trump won Florida by 13 percentage points, and 2022, when Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis rode pandemic anger to win re-election by 19 points. This year, Republican Ashley Moody beat Democrat Angie Nixon in the Senate race by three points, while Republican Byron Donalds edged Democrat David Jolly by little more than a point in the governor’s race.

The results marked a striking shift in a state that had transformed from the nation’s pre-eminent presidential swing state into the epicenter of the MAGA movement. Trump won the state three times, after Barack Obama won it twice by narrow margins. “Florida is not a lost cause, and I think we proved that tonight,” Nixon said.

After her election loss on Tuesday, she pledged to spend the next two years registering voters and building support for Democrats: “2028 is around the corner.”A more competitive state could carry major implications for future presidential elections. Yet Florida Democrats face a challenge in persuading national party leaders to make the state a priority after Democrats expanded the battleground with victories in red states like Texas and Ohio. Those states are likely to command significant resources, given the high cost to campaign in each. In Florida, the GOP captured 17 U.S. House seats, Democrats won seven, and the races for four seats remained uncalled on Thursday.

A redistricting push spearheaded by DeSantis, as part of a broader White House strategy, backfired. If the current result holds for an uncalled seat south of Orlando, Republicans will have lost all four races in districts redrawn to favor them. Florida Democrats also picked up a net of at least 15 seats in the state House, breaking the GOP’s supermajority, and flipped a seat in the state Senate.

Democrats hope the razor-thin margins in races up and down the ballot this election will serve as a wake-up call as the party looks to the future.

Florida is projected to gain two or three congressional seats and an equal number of Electoral College votes after the 2030 census, reflecting its population growth. But to compete seriously in Florida again, national Democrats—who largely abandoned the state after DeSantis won his first term as governor in 2018—will need to dedicate significant resources to infrastructure, voter mobilization and ads.

Nikki Fried, chair of the Florida Democratic Party, said she spent much of Thursday speaking with donors to press for more support to fund year-round organizing efforts and extend the party’s reach into minority and rural communities. “Strike while the iron’s hot and reinvest,” said Matthew Isbell, a Democratic elections analyst.

“If they don’t want to do that, we might not get another chance.”One longtime Democratic strategist from Florida said the GOP victories in the state this election, while slim, would likely keep 2028 presidential party hopefuls from paying too much attention to the state. A Democratic governor would have coaxed national investment and pressured candidates to show up. Lacking that, Florida remains a very expensive state to campaign in, the strategist said, and that money will go a long way in a number of other states. Some of the most striking erosion of Republican support came in Miami-Dade, the state’s most populous county that had dramatically swung toward the GOP in recent years.

While Cuban-Americans have long leaned conservative, that support deepened significantly during Trump’s rise—a rightward surge that extended to other Hispanic groups and transformed Miami-Dade from a Democratic stronghold into a pillar of Trump’s coalition. This year, Nixon and Jolly both won the majority-Hispanic county.

Meanwhile, two prominent Cuban-American incumbents—GOP Reps. María Elvira Salazar and Mario Díaz-Balart—are still awaiting the outcome of their races after they found themselves clinging to narrow leads.

Salazar’s contest had drawn national attention after she warned Trump that his immigration crackdown had gone too far—including in a provocative television ad a month before the election—and that his Hispanic voters felt betrayed. But the tight race for Díaz-Balart, a 12-term incumbent, caught both parties off guard, sending a shock wave through Florida’s political circles.

“It’s a moment of celebration, but it’s also a moment of reckoning,” Salazar told supporters on Tuesday night.

Florida voters across numerous demographic groups shifted heavily toward Democrats, according to data on this year’s Senate race from a national voter survey.

Hispanics shifted a net 22 points toward Democrats, partly in response to the Trump administration’s immigration raids that especially affected communities in South Florida. “They couldn’t escape the effect that it was going to have on Latinos,” said Julio Ligorría, a Miami political strategist who has advised candidates from both parties, noting that Salazar’s district was severely affected by immigration raids.

And while Cuban-American voters still supported the GOP candidate, they moved 17 points toward Democrats. Despite evidence that an antisocialism stance wasn’t resonating with many voters, Republicans “doubled down on socialism, saying it’s going to be our winning message,” Ligorría said.

Nixon, a Democratic socialist, captured nearly as many votes as Jolly, a moderate, suggesting the label didn’t matter as much as it used to. Democrats pointed to Nixon’s energetic, on-the-ground campaign as key to her competitive performance. And despite becoming a member of the Democratic Socialists of America this year, she largely rejected the label during her race.

Democrats also benefited from voter concerns about the economy, as inflation, soaring real-estate prices and rising home-insurance premiums have created an affordability crunch in Florida. According to the survey, 58% of Florida voters said Trump’s policies had worsened economic conditions, and 60% believed his tariff policies hurt the national economy. Another 41% said their family’s financial situation was worse than two years ago, and 79% reported financial hardship as a result of inflation. Despite such advantages, Democrats still came up short.

“Florida’s Republican victories should be measured against the national political environment, not past elections,” said Slater Bayliss, a prominent Republican lobbyist close to Donalds’s campaign. “Given the tailwinds Democrats enjoyed nationally, their inability to win statewide should concern them.”The result wasn’t surprising given the lopsided fundraising advantage Republicans enjoyed and the lack of support from national Democrats, said Christian Ulvert, a Democratic consultant in Miami.

Donalds raised roughly 6.5 times as much as Jolly, and spent more than $165 million by the final stretch, compared with about $25 million by the Democrat. The Democratic Governors Association invested at least $10 million apiece in seven states including Georgia and Michigan, but only $1 million in Florida.

“It is painful to see that we came so close in Florida but clearly lacked the resources to put us over the top,” said Chris Korge, the Democratic National Committee’s finance chair who lives in the state. Korge said Democrats had made “giant steps” this election, “but the job is not done.”