Just a few months after the first issue of the Orange County Reporter rolled off the presses in June 1876, Florida found itself in a position that would become very familiar — as the key to a presidential election.
Copies of those early editions of the Reporter — which would become the Orlando Sentinel — don’t exist today, but a newspaper in the South in the first decades after the Civil War would have expected to be as solidly Democratic as its reader base. And while the Reporter indeed was, the Florida vote had a surprise in store.
Today in 2026, Orlando and Orange County are again heavily Democratic, and for several decades the Sentinel’s editorial board (which is separate from the newsroom) has endorsed Democratic candidates for the White House — including, most famously, anyone but the incumbent Republican president in 2019. But in the half century prior, it almost almost always gave its support to GOP nominees.
Over the last 150 years, what it means to be a Democrat or Republican has changed and evolved dramatically. The politics of Central Florida have morphed along with it.
Like many places in the South, the Orlando region was a Democratic stronghold in the days of Jim Crow. But then it was one of the first areas in the state to swing Republican after World War II, spearheaded in part by the pull of the powerful Orlando Sentinel publisher Martin Andersen.
For decades, Central Florida was a battleground region for the White House, with presidents and candidates routinely swinging through and drawing crowds every four years. The newspaper’s reporters and photographers covered the speeches, rallies and campaign stops, from Democrat Bill Clinton shaking hands at Loch Haven Park in 1992 to Republican John McCain being served his own “McCain ’08” pizza in College Park in 2008.
But in the 21st Century, as Florida turned decidedly Republican and Orlando and Orange remained firmly blue, its role as a kingmaker ebbed.
By 2024, for the first time in decades, neither major presidential candidate saw the need to campaign here.
![A historic Democratic illustration claims the party can "prove beyond a shadow of doubt that Louisiana and Florida voted for [Democrat Samuel] Tilden by decisive majorities" and not Republican Rutherford B. Hayes. But historians believe that Republicans were correct that intimidation and violence kept Black voters from the polls in states still under post-Civil War Reconstruction. (Library of Congress)](https://i0.wp.com/www.orlandosentinel.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/TOS-L-1876-poster-01.jpg?fit=620%2C9999px&ssl=1)
1876
The first presidential race covered by the Orange County Reporter was the infamous presidential election of 1876.
Nationally, Democrat Samuel Tilden won the popular vote, but Republican Rutherford B. Hayes won the electoral college after a dispute over Florida, South Carolina and Louisiana led to the creation of a commission that handed Hayes all three states.
Democrats threatened another civil war, and historians still debate if there was a backroom deal in which Hayes agreed to pull out the troops still stationed in the South in return for his victory.
Republicans charged that the Democrats used violence and threats of violence against Blacks, who still backed the party of Lincoln, to suppress the vote — and they were almost certainly right.
“For all the complaints about ballot issues and vote counting, a lot of that came down to the fact that you had thousands of African American voters not allowed to cast ballots,” said Matt Isbell, a Democratic elections analyst based in Tallahassee.
Though Hayes’ victory meant a Republican was still in the White House, Reconstruction soon ended, Black voters in the South were abandoned and Democrats took power again in Florida and other southeastern states.
In 1884, the Reporter took issue with an Ohio paper claiming the South was Democratic “at the muzzle of a shotgun,” through mass intimidation of Black voters.
Such language, the editors wrote, only served to “embitter the prejudices and inflame the passions of one section of our country against another.”
But after that year’s presidential election — won by Grover Cleveland, the first Democratic president since the Civil War — the paper alluded to an ugly truth.
“Between 40 and 50 negroes who had been induced to register for this precinct stayed away from the polls on election day and did not vote,” the Reporter wrote. “Most of them had no legal right to vote and they did well to stay away.”
Women’s suffrage
Though Black residents’ voting rights were denied, Orlando gained a measure of fame as one of the first governments in the country to grant such rights to women.
“We can really brag about our history in terms of the women’s suffrage movement,” said Linda Chapin, the first mayor of Orange County.
In 1913, the Rev. Mary Stafford, a Unitarian minister from Orlando, co-founded the Florida Equal Suffrage League to lobby male politicians for the right to vote.
Just one year earlier, “Orlando’s usually unflappable city clerk, Cassius Boone, nearly fell out of his chair when a group of women marched into his office and demanded to vote in a bond election,” wrote Orlando historian Joy Wallace Dickinson in a 2004 Sentinel column.
Many opponents of suffrage argued that women would damage their status and power in their proscribed place — the home — by muddying themselves with electoral politics.
“It’s very hard to put yourself in that era and really try to understand what roles were and were not available for women,” Chapin said.
In 1913, the Orlando Sentinel ran a condescending editorial titled “The Women’s Brigade.”
Conjuring up a world where women won the right to vote only to be told “if you are voters, you must be soldiers,” the piece described an imagined battle in which two women generals have a “shrill” argument about their wardrobe. Meanwhile, enemy soldiers distract female soldiers by firing fashion magazines at them. It was bylined by a woman.
But in 1919, as a suffrage amendment was working its way through Congress, Orlando Mayor James L. Giles asked the Legislature to allow women to vote in city elections — a move praised in Sentinel newspaper editorials.
That May, women in Orlando — those who were property owners, at least — were able to vote on a bond issue, and Winter Park women joined them at the polls in July.
After the 19th Amendment was ratified a year later, granting all women — all white women, anyway — the right to vote, the Florida Equal Suffrage League voted to disband after a victory dinner at the San Juan Hotel on Orange Avenue, Dickinson wrote, celebrating “the culmination of a lifetime of work.”
The first woman elected to the Florida Legislature, Edna Giles Fuller, was an Orlando teacher who won her seat in 1928 under the name “Mrs. J. T. Fuller.” The Sentinel defended her against the Miami Herald’s claim she would be “sidetracked to innocuous committees” because of her sex.
“She was pitted in the last campaign against an aggressive opponent and won in a straight, above-board contest,” the Sentinel wrote.
Since then, Central Florida women have served in the U.S. Senate, the House of Representatives, and as mayors of Orlando and Orange County.
But Chapin, herself a trailblazer, is concerned about recent rumblings on the right — including from some women — that women’s suffrage should be reversed or restricted.
“I hope to God we’re not going to experience a backlash,” she said.
Turning red
Except for 1928, when Southern Democrats rejected Catholic candidate Al Smith, Central Florida favored Democrats for president from the 1880s through World War II.
But in 1948, Orange and Lake counties switched to supporting the GOP, and Seminole and Osceola joined them four years later. Democratic candidates for president would not win any of the four counties again that century until Osceola voted for Bill Clinton in 1996, and no Democrat has won Lake since.
Steven Noll, a professor of history at the University of Florida, said the the biggest reason for Central Florida’s shift to the GOP was increasing suburbanization.
“A lot of Northerners were coming to Florida looking for cheap land after World War II, looking for low taxes, looking for better weather, and Republicans kind of built on that,” Noll said. “These are conservative people who at some level could tie into the conservative ethos of the Democratic Party, but not the overt, small-town, good-ole-boy, pork-chop-gang Democrats that were running the state of Florida.”
Still, he added, “we can say that the Republican transition in Florida had less to do with race” than elsewhere in the South. “But it certainly does have something to do with race.”
Andersen, as publisher of the Sentinel, had backed Democratic President Harry Truman in 1948 despite his qualms about the party adding a civil rights plank to its platform. “We do not believe that Pres. Truman will force the anti-segregation laws on the South,” an editorial stated that year.
Black people, who were able to vote for the first time in city primaries in Orlando in 1950, “would get there quicker through the help of their sincere Southern friends than through political manipulators,” Andersen said, according to his biographer Ormund Powers.
It took another two decades, however, before an African American was elected to Orlando City Council with Arthur “Pappy” Kennedy in 1973. Mable Butler became the first Black woman on the council in 1984.
Andersen’s uneasiness with civil rights, as well as Democrats’ pro-union policies, pushed him to break with the party and back Republican Dwight Eisenhower in the 1952 presidential election.
“We were for Ike,” Andersen said later. “Everyone was.”
Still, it was hard for some longtime Dems to make the switch, so the Sentinel provided advice.
“Remember, all you have to do is push the lever” for Eisenhower, an editorial stated. “You can then return to the Democratic column and vote for all the rest of the Democrats as you wish.”
President Lyndon B. Johnson (left) and Orlando Sentinel Publisher Martin Andersen ride together during the Democratic president’s visit to Orlando on Oct. 26, 1964. Andersen, who by then had become Republican-leaning, endorsed his old friend that year. (Orlando Sentinel file)
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President Lyndon B. Johnson (left) and Orlando Sentinel Publisher Martin Andersen ride together during the Democratic president’s visit to Orlando on Oct. 26, 1964. Andersen, who by then had become Republican-leaning, endorsed his old friend that year. (Orlando Sentinel file)
For the rest of the century, the Sentinel’s presidential endorsements would go to Republicans but for 1964. That year, Andersen backed his longtime friend, Democrat Lyndon Johnson — thanks to a little pressure.
After a Sentinel editorial praised Republican Barry Goldwater, an opponent of the Civil Rights Act, Johnson supposedly sent word to Andersen that if he didn’t support him, Orlando would lose its airbase at what is now Orlando International Airport, according to Powers’ book.
“‘They’re not going to get that air base,’” Andersen supposedly responded.
Andersen’s pro-LBJ editorials provoked reader backlash, but the publisher stuck by his Texas friend and sat next to Johnson in a campaign parade on Orange Avenue that drew thousands.
After that, the Sentinel went back to endorsing GOP presidential candidates until 2004, when it endorsed Democrat John Kerry.
From Tallahassee to D.C.
But while the Orlando area remained a Republican stronghold, most of Florida was dominated by Democrats. John Mica of Winter Park was just one of 28 Republicans elected to the 120-member Florida House in 1976. In the Senate that year, there were just 9 Republicans out of 40.
“The Democrats kind of controlled everything,” Mica said. “I got paired off with some of the more conservative Democrats, and we became and still are very good friends. … I got a few bills passed.”
But if Democrats controlled Tallahassee, Republicans began to win more statewide races — and it was Central Florida that provided the talent.
In 1968, former Winter Park Mayor Edward Gurney became the first Republican to win a Florida U.S. Senate seat in the 20th Century. He later resigned, however, after being indicted on bribery charges.
Twelve years later, the self-styled “Battling Housewife from Maitland,” Paula Hawkins, became the first and, to date, only Florida woman to be elected to the U.S. Senate.
Mica ran Hawkins’ senatorial offices and recalled the freak accident in 1982 that injured her and overshadowed much of her single term.
During an interview at the WESH-Channel 2 studios in Winter Park, a large wooden screen fell on Hawkins, striking her in the head and neck and exacerbating a previous spinal injury.
“In the Capitol, we put a hospital bed in there and put weights on her feet to stretch her out, relieve the pain, and give her some painkillers,” Mica recalled.
In a 1986 year-end roundup under the subhead, “The Fickle Trends of Fashion,” the Sentinel dismissively wrote about Hawkins’ “on-again, off-again neck brace.”
Democratic Gov. Bob Graham, who was ending his second term in Tallahassee, ran for Hawkins’ seat. He was able to travel the state campaigning that year while Hawkins could not. Despite her comparing her debate against Graham to “Joan of Arc against a robot,” Hawkins lost.
Mica, though, was elected to Congress in 1992, ultimately rising to chair the House Transportation Committee and serving 24 years, the longest-tenured Central Floridian in the chamber.
For a time in the mid-2000s, a single neighborhood in Orlando, Baldwin Park, was home to both of Florida’s U.S. senators: Democrat Bill Nelson, a former congressman who flew in space on the shuttle Columbia, and Republican Mel Martinez, a former Orange County mayor and cabinet member.
“If the developers need some help with the federal government, maybe they should talk to two of their homeowners,” the Sentinel column “This Just In” suggested after Baldwin Park applied for disaster aid following a hurricane.
Former President Calvin Coolidge and his wife, Grace, visited Mount Dora in 1930 and stayed at the Lakeside Inn. (Orlando Sentinel file)
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Former President Calvin Coolidge and his wife, Grace, visited Mount Dora in 1930 and stayed at the Lakeside Inn. (Orlando Sentinel file)
‘The center of the universe’
Presidents had been swinging through Central Florida for decades, but mostly they were here for pleasure and not work. Chester Arthur fished on Reedy Creek, Grover Cleveland visited Winter Park, and Calvin Coolidge vacationed at the Lakeside Inn at Mount Dora, where you can now stay in the Coolidge Suite.
But as Florida’s importance increased, more presidents visited as part of the job — turning Orlando into the scene of some of the most famous, and infamous, presidential speeches.
It was at a newspaper editors’ conference at Disney’s Contemporary Resort that Richard Nixon insisted “I am not a crook” in 1973. Ten years later, Ronald Reagan coined the phrase “Evil Empire” at the Sheraton Twin Towers, now the Doubletree by Hilton Orlando at SeaWorld. Covering Reagan that day in 1983 was a young photojournalist for the Sentinel, Joe Burbank.
“I don’t even remember if it was a big deal that news cycle or not,” Burbank said. “But later I got invited to do a roundtable about that speech, so you know what a big deal it was. That photo has been used in textbooks.”
Burbank got in on the ground floor of one of the biggest political phenomena in the late 20th century: the I-4 Corridor, the swingiest region in America’s swingiest state.
“Orange County was like basically the barometer for how the state would go,” Isbell said. “Orange County’s margins often matched the statewide margins.”
As a result, Burbank said, Orlando became “the center of the universe.”
“Everybody knew what you were talking about when you talked about the I-4 Corridor,” he recalled. “That whole thing, from about 1992 up until 2020, totally defined presidential politics in the state. … And I had the privilege of catching all these presidential visits.”
Florida was the true flashpoint in the 2000 election, in which George W. Bush officially won the state by 537 votes over Al Gore. A Sentinel investigation the next year found thousands of potential votes were lost due to confusing ballot designs, most of which hurt Gore, and if counted would have narrowed Bush’s margin even further.
Among Burbank’s favorite photos is Bush being greeted at the airport by his younger brother, Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, who “turns it into a total goof, where he pulls the president into him and messes up his hair. It made a great photo. It would never happen in this day and age.”
Barack Obama shook up his official campaign schedule in 2008 by making a delivery to his Central Florida campaign phone bank center. “The photo I took was of him with a stack of pizza boxes and a really funny expression on his face,” Burbank said. “Another time, Obama swung by a bar on Orange Ave.”
Later, however, Burbank would take another picture, one he considers among his most important, of Obama solemnly laying a wreath at the makeshift Pulse memorial at the Dr. Phillips Center in 2016.
In 2020, Joe Biden held a small, socially-distanced event in Kissimmee, while Donald Trump — who had kicked off his reelection campaign the year before at the Amway Center downtown — held a rally in Sanford delayed a week by his COVID-related hospital stay.
“The bloom on the I-4 Corridor had already kind of come and gone, but there was still some of it,” Burbank said. “But now, after 2024, we can hear the crickets chirp.”
Those 2020 events were the last presidential campaign events in Central Florida. Trump won the state by about 3 percentage points that year, a margin that grew to 13 percentage points in 2024.
Since Jeb Bush’s first term as governor in 1999, Florida’s state government has been Republican-controlled. Now it’s considered a safe Red state in presidential elections, too, making campaign stops unnecessary.
“Republicans felt that their money could be better spent at places that were in play, and Florida wasn’t in play,” Noll said. “Democrats felt that it wasn’t worth it, because there was no way they were going to win in Florida.”
The state’s political transition from a purple state to a solidly red one in the past two decades has been “extraordinarily quick and extraordinarily deep,” he added.
The future
In 2026, Central Florida stands at a crossroads politically.
Orange County, once a red island in a sea of blue, became one of just a few Democratic-leaning areas in a state dominated by Republicans.
Major registration drives during Obama’s presidential campaigns, Isbell said, created “a massive spike in Hispanic and Black registration and political engagement in Orange County.” That has since stuck, making the county a “firewall” even as Republicans won seven straight governor’s races.
But a controversial mid-decade redistricting pushed by Gov. Ron DeSantis this year has carved up the area’s congressional districts so that only one Democratic-leaning seat remains, while other Orange suburbs have been attached to Republican-leaning seats stretching out as far afield as Lake Okeechobee, Melbourne and The Villages.
Neighboring counties, though, are in a state of flux. Seminole County went from being “rock-ribbed” Republican to voting for progressive Democrat Andrew Gillum in 2018 and Joe Biden for president in 2020, before tipping back to the GOP fold in elections since.
In Osceola County, what had been an increasingly blue bastion as the state’s Puerto Rican heartland became a warning signal for Democrats nationally when it swung to Republicans in 2022 and 2024.
The area is also seeing a changing of the guard.
The only Democrat with a safe U.S. House seat is 29-year-old Maxwell Frost, the first Gen Z-er in Congress, whose district adjoins that of Republican Cory Mills, still young (for politics) at 45.
Longtime public figures such as U.S. Rep. Dan Webster, 77, Orange County Mayor Jerry Demings, 67, and Orlando Mayor Buddy Dyer, also 67, are all retiring, with 36-year-old state Rep. Anna Eskamani the favorite to succeed Dyer at City Hall.
In 1934, a Sentinel editorial noted the same phenomenon when a twenty-something challenger ousted the longtime head of the Orange Democrats, Josiah Ferris, who years before had owned the Sentinel.
“Our younger leaders, God bless them, impatient, impulsive, ambitious, are confronted with a tremendously important opportunity in the field of politics,” the Sentinel wrote.
“The fact that young men are coming along to replace the veterans,” the editorial concluded, “is as definitely clear as a full moon on a cloudless night.”
More stories and features from the Orlando Sentinel’s 150 years of covering Central Florida can be found at OrlandoSentinel.com/150. Sign up for our free history newsletter at OrlandoSentinel.com/newsletters
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