Commentators on Southern political life agree that Florida was always different. The state’s size and geographic barriers, its relative separation from other parts of the South, its urbanism, its high level of new residents, the disparity between its various regions, have all set it apart throughout its history as a state, and especially during the 20th century. They made Florida poliitics into a study in localism that was recognized well before the infusion of Cubans immediately preceding and since the Cuban Revolution of 1959.

V.O. Keys, writing in Southern Politics in State and Nation, a 1949 classic that examined the political structure of every Southern state, referred to Florida’s politics as an incredibly complex m?lange of amorphous factions: