He knew my ancestor's doodoo.

Florida is The Evil Mouse Kingdom The Gunshine State,[2] and hangs chad-like, proudly over the Caribbean from the United States' abdomen. It is also the least explicable of the weird states, being the only state so honored with its own tag by Fark.com. For example, part of the coast is referred to as the "Redneck Riviera" but also features gay pride gatherings every Memorial Day weekend.

Florida is the only American State where the further north you go, the farther "south" you get.[3] Thanks to an influx of immigrants, tourists, and Jews retirees from New York City, Florida is a politically competitive state and is commonly considered a "bellwether" in national elections. It is also the easiest place in the US to get OxyContin.[4] Coincidentally, Rush Limbaugh lives there Florida is ranked 49th in mental health funding in the United States.

Explanation for the alleged high incidence of weird behavior by Floridians can be blamed on Flakka… or Bath salts… or the air… or the fact their state is constantly on fire... or something.[5]

Due to its geographic location, it is home to both large numbers of retired Americans from northerly climes, and (the descendants of) disenfranchised Cuban businessmen who were pwned by Fidel Castro in 1959. Also flying cockroaches big enough to need their own runways.

Cubans voted for Trump even though he lied to them about his illegal deal with Fidel Castro in 1998, when he sent employees to the island against the embargo and against federal law.[6] South Florida Cubans wanted the "wet foot, dry foot" policy removed; they dont like that a bunch of young blood comes to Miami and take advantage of all the things their taxes pay for. (They very quickly learned what it means to be an American.)

Retirees in Florida are required to submit to the following provisions prior to being allowed past the Florida state line checkpoints:

Foreign residents[edit]

As of FY2010, all resident aliens will be required to pay a state entry and exit tariff in the amount of 20% of their gross income. Conversely, all illegal aliens will receive a scholarship to the University of Florida, a (non-transferable) all-access pass to Café Risque (with multiple convenient locations along I-75), and a yearly stipend of no less than 20% of the average gross income of all legal citizens residing in the state.

Key West thinks they are a foreign country, the "Conch Republic." But they aren't.

Florida currently leads all other states in the Union in exporting Cuban sandwiches, sunburns, hurricanes, Publixes, "Chek" sodas, fundamentalist textbooks, and mild invectives hurled by old timers about how gas used to cost a nickel back in their day.

Regional breakdown[edit]

Florida's genetic and cultural makeup is fascinating to many people. Sans the geography, you could say the Sunshine State is a microcosm for all of the various social and political divisions within America.[8] The Panhandle is home to Tallahassee, the largely forgettable capital, populated by a bunch of angry ideological plutocrats who won their seats mostly by gerrymandering. The Panhandle is very much like the rest of the Deep South, hence why Republicans control the state legislature and largely ignore the peninsula. Many Floridians see the Panhandle as an alien construct that should be ceded to Alabama (the western third even has the same time zone as Alabama). About its only saving grace is that Tallahassee is home to Florida State University and the historically-black Florida A&M University, both of whom pride in their heavy research activity and their high standards of education. FSU even leads Florida in external STEM funding. What is it doing perched up in the North and why isn't the rest of the Panhandle taking after it? We have no fucking idea. It is also home to some shockingly nice beaches around Pensacola, which is home to the Blue Angels, a fun beach and downtown area, and way too many creationists.

Now head to the peninsula and you get North Florida, which is part of the Bible Belt, but less wingnut than the Panhandle. North Florida includes Gainesville (home to the University of Florida), Daytona Beach (home to the Daytona 500), and Jacksonville (the largest city), which controls Duval County. Jacksonville is also the largest city in the US by surface area. Despite being located in North Florida, Jacksonville is a cultural melting pot, with a significant Muslim minority, a bunch of Asian, African, European, and Hispanic immigrants, and an African American Democratic mayor all next to a large naval presence. Head down the rest of the peninsula and you get Central Florida, represented most of all by the Interstate 4 corridor connecting Orlando with Tampa Bay. Central Florida is more reminiscent of the Midwest (say, Michigan, Illinois, and Ohio), has booming tourism and tech industries and growing non-white populations, and perfectly represents the Purple to the North's Red and the South's Blue; with the exception of 2016, where it went firmly for Hillary Clinton, it has voted for the presidential candidate who won the state as a whole in every election since 1992. South Florida is the other big reason why the Sunshine State is slowly but steadily turning blue, with Miami-Dade, Broward, and Palm Beach having the highest concentration of the population in addition to a diverse variety of immigrants, tourists, retirees, and college students who largely dislike and oppose the Panhandle's grip on the state.

West of South Florida and south of the I-4 corridor of urban Central Florida, you get Southwest Florida. This part of the state is a conservative stronghold comparable to the Panhandle, in both the urban and rural areas. As a matter of fact, Lee County is one of two counties in Florida with a major state university (Florida Gulf Coast University) and a track record of consistently voting Republican (the other is Escambia, home of the University of West Florida and Pensacola Christian College). Interestingly, FGCU's eagle mascot and use of palm trees in their logo eerily resembles PCC, and the student populations of UWF and FGCU closely resemble each other. The beach communities make up a vast retirement mecca, with the average age of the residents in many towns along the coastal strip reaching into the sixties. Inland from there is the "Florida Heartland", a mostly agricultural region (sugar and citrus especially) and the last remaining island of the deep South outside North Florida, hidden away near Lake Okeechobee. The wealth gap between the coastal and inland communities can be staggering; the city of Naples has the second-highest concentration of millionaires in the US, while in the same county, the town of Immokalee has long been infamous for ghoulish poverty, such that it was featured in the 1960 CBS documentary Harvest of Shame about the struggles of migrant workers (most of whom are of Mexican or South American heritage).

State Politics[edit]

The current governor is Rick Scott, a hard-working former CEO of a large hospital network. Rick Scott is notable for spending over seventy-three million dollars of his own money on his campaign. He was elected and reelected despite having committed the largest Medicare/Medicaid fraud in the US and the largest financial fraud in Florida history.[9]

The previous governor of Florida was Charlie Christ Crist. Charlie was a moderate Republican, and as such his views seemed rather wishy-washy depending on who talked to him. Notably, during his campaign as a Republican for US Senator, he was staunchly pro-life, though after becoming an independent he was pro-choice. When he tried to challenge Scott and return to the governor's mansion in 2014, he did so as a Democrat. To his credit, however, Crist did a lot to help the Florida education system and the environment, particularly the Florida Everglades. Crist was at one point considered a possible running mate for John McCain during the 2008 presidential election, and one must wonder whether the election would have turned out differently if he was a vice-presidential candidate instead of that crazy moose-shooting hockey mom.

Despite having more registered Democrats than Republicans, the Florida Democratic Party is almost legendary for its incompetence at mounting an effective opposition to the state's hard-right Republican leadership. Committed to a centrist platform and terrified of even the slightest whiff of progressivism out of a mistaken belief that Florida is a lot redder than it actually is, the state Democrats share some of the blame for allowing the GOP to hold the governorship uninterrupted since 1998.[10] Debbie Wasserman-Schultz, whose tenure as chair of the Democratic National Committee saw her lead the national party to defeat against an '80s yuppie villain caricature, represents Florida's 23rd Congressional District. No wonder the ex-Republican Crist ran for governor in 2014 as a Democrat; his center-right politics were right at home in the state party. That said, in 2018 Florida Democrats nominated Andrew Gillum, the Bernie Sanders-endorsed progressive mayor of Tallahassee, for governor in a major upset against a field of moderate "establishment" candidates, including Gwen Graham (the daughter of former Governor and Senator Bob Graham), Philip Levine (the mayor of Miami Beach and a former marketing mogul), and Jeff Greene (a billionaire Palm Beach real estate mogul), even though Gillum was outspent by a wide margin.[11] Time will tell what sort of impact this has on the state party.

Federal Politics[edit]

Florida, geographically part of the American South, is usually regarded as a red state. However, it's more accurate to say that it's purple, having voted for the winner in every Presidential election since 1928, save for the 1960 and 1992 elections, both of which were decided by three points or less.[12] Furthermore, since 1992, all of its elections were decided by five points or less — with the lone exception of 1996, where Bill Clinton won by a decisive (albeit not overwhelming) 5.7 points. It turns out the large number of Medicare/Social Security-receiving senior citizens, young college and university students, Latino immigrants, and South Beach/Keys-dwelling gay folk in the more metropolitan areas of the state are sufficient to garner more votes than the traditional conservative remnants of the Confederacy that live in the Panhandle, Jacksonville area, and Southwest Florida. Or, maybe, Florida is just bipolar. Even the conservative areas aren't very selectively conservative. It is considered a key swing state due to its large and growing population, and thus receives a lot of attention during the summers and autumns of election years.

These inherent contradictions were most especially, and most infamously, found in 2000 when hanging chads and weird recount rules required the 2000 U.S. presidential election to be settled by the U.S. Supreme Court in the court case Bush v. Gore. Controversial at the time were that then-governor Jeb Bush is one candidate's brother, and that then-Secretary of State Katherine Harris went on to work for President Bush-the-Lesser after the court decided to prevent a recount.

Weirdness capital of America[edit]

In the last decade or so, Florida has developed a reputation for "news of the weird", dethroning wacky California for the title of "craziest state in America". It began when Fark created a "Florida" tag to pin on weird news stories from Florida, mainly because the volume of such stories got so great that it became a running joke[14], but it really took off when the "Florida Man" Twitter feed began in 2013, supplying a steady stream of crazy Florida stories to the other 49 states.[15] Many explanations have been cited for this, from the Bermuda Triangle to the large number of old people and alligators to the state literally sitting atop the mouth of Hell.[16]

The truth is more mundane. A number of famous American humorists, such as Dave Barry[17] and Carl Hiaasen, are from Florida, mining much of their comedy from the state's eccentricities. Furthermore, American Media, a company that publishes many of America's big tabloid newspapers (National Enquirer, National Examiner, Globe, Sun, and Star), is based in Boca Raton in South Florida, while the Weekly World News (a spinoff of the National Enquirer) was based just a few towns over in Lantana. It's also the third-largest state by population, which means a lot more weirdos per square mile. Most of all, though, Florida has very strong open-records laws requiring that all government records, with very few exceptions, must be available to the public and anybody who asks for them. These laws create a great deal of government transparency in Florida, but since they also apply to police records, mugshots, and arrest reports, lurid stories that might get squashed in, say, Ohio due to the police refusing to give out sensitive information can easily find their way into newspapers in Florida. In other words, Florida probably isn't any weirder than any other state, it's just far more honest about it.[18]
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