I grew up in an Orlando suburb called Hunter’s Creek, and it is probably what you imagine when you close your eyes and picture a Florida suburb: single-family homes with sago palms in the yard, retention ponds with alligators nestled among golf course holes, and marshy cypress woods, all within a short driving distance of a Publix supermarket. Hunter’s Creek is just along the southern edge of Orange County, Florida, long a part of the famous “I-4 corridor,” a critical area for swing votes in the Sunshine State “where presidents get picked.”
In 2000, Orange County gave Al Gore almost exactly 50% of its votes. In 2004, Orange County was so evenly split that only two-tenths of a percent separated George W. Bush from John Kerry. Orange County’s reputation in the 2000s as swing-voter central was well-earned.
If you get on a bike at my childhood home, cross one big intersection and ride south for five minutes, you leave Orange County and arrive in Osceola County. I spent a great deal of time in Osceola County while I was young, whether at preschool or ballet lessons or birthday parties at the roller rink. Growing up, I did not think there was much difference at all between the two counties, and politically there was not.
Osceola County, too, had split fairly evenly in 2000 and 2004. And in 2008, when Orange County broke 19 points for Obama, so did Osceola. In the two presidential elections that followed, 2012 and 2016, the two counties tracked closely together, with Democrats winning around six in 10 voters in each county in each contest.
Over the last decade, Democrats have made big gains across the two counties with their growing coalition of Hispanic voters and suburbanites, and Orlando is exactly the kind of place where those gains have largely stuck. Even today, all three members of the U.S House of Representatives who represent Orlando are Democratic members.
But despite looking nearly identical in their votes over the last two decades, Orange and Osceola Counties are not demographically the same — not even close. And in 2020, they began to go their separate ways politically, too.
Orange County is home to downtown Orlando, with a burgeoning community of young professionals. It is home to tony areas like Windermere and Lake Nona, where your favorite famous golfers and tennis players have homes. One-third of those over age 25 in Orange County have a bachelor’s degrees or higher, a higher proportion than the state average. To borrow Cook Political Report analyst Dave Wasserman’s favorite metric, Orange County has a Whole Foods.
Osceola County is different. Osceola County is more rural and has a demographic profile that is more working-class, with an average per-capita income of $21,331 a year compared to $28,859 in Orange. Only 20% of Osceola’s adults over age 25 have a bachelor’s degree, compared to 34% in Orange County. And Osceola County is the county in America with the largest percentage point increase in Hispanic residents, going from less than a third of the county’s population in 2000 to a majority (55%) today.
Osceola County is where the lingering economic devastation of the 2008 financial crisis is still ever-present, with its strip of affordable tourist motels still housing many of those who would otherwise be homeless (as depicted in the film The Florida Project). For many Puerto Rican families fleeing the devastation of Hurricane Maria, Osceola County became home.
In last week’s election, Orange County continued its pattern of giving the Democratic candidate around 60% of the vote, with presumptive President-elect Joe Biden winning the county by a whopping 23-point margin. It is precisely the kind of place Democrats have hoped to build a durable majority and where Biden, to his credit, made gains across the country last week.
But Osceola County, meanwhile, went its own way. It still broke for Biden, but by a narrower margin of only 14 points, voting notably less Democratic than its northern neighbor for the first time in decades. While much attention was focused on President Trump’s margins in Florida among Cuban voters in Miami, the other big red arrow pointing to a Trump swing in Florida is right there in Osceola, undercutting the notion that Trump’s only appeal to Hispanic voters was rooted in talk of Castro.
Orange and Osceola Counties used to vote basically the same way and had for two decades. But as Democrats made and solidified gains in the greater Orlando area, the new split between Orange and Osceola highlights an interesting path forward for Republicans: connecting with working-class Hispanic voters.
To be sure, Trump did not win Osceola County. There is much work to be done for Republicans and conservatives to build and grow their coalition, and it wouldn’t hurt to be able to make gains in a place like Orange County too. But when Republicans look around the electoral map for bright spots of hope, they are in places like the Rio Grande Valley and Osceola County. It is in these communities where Republicans can learn valuable lessons and set their sights on making future inroads.
