2024 Local Election Results for Okaloosa County

In Brief:

🗳️ Who: Okaloosa County voters, including prominent candidates like Matt Gaetz, Rick Scott, and Dr. Joel Rudman

•📜 What: General election results, including decisions on candidates, referenda, and state constitutional amendments

•📅 When: November 2024

•📍 Where: Okaloosa County, Florida

•📈 Why: Voter decisions on local, state, and national issues, with a focus on party representation, tax policy, and community standards

Roughly three-quarters of people eligible to vote in Okaloosa County showed up to the polls or turned in mail-in ballots for this general election.

Those results mean that ‘did not vote’ came in second place in every election for office and two of the six constitutional questions on the ballot.

But even if Democrats in the area had garnered every ‘did not vote’ to their column, the Republicans would have still won all of their races.

Local Referenda – EDATE Tax in Okaloosa County

According to the Election Returns from Okaloosa County’s Supervisor of Elections Office, Okaloosa’s EDATE Tax Exemption for businesses will have another 10 years on the rolls.

The measure passed with about 70% of the vote.

The tax exemption, which aims to draw more businesses into Okaloosa County to provide more jobs at higher wages, has been on the books since at least the 1990s – the earliest passage of the measure we could find on the supervisor of elections website.

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National Elections

Florida voted emphatically for the Republican ticket on election night, as did Okaloosa County. Matt Gaetz tallied up 68% of the vote – a four percentage point increase on his performance four years ago and a one-point increase on his midterm showing in 2022.

Senator Rick Scott improved on his statewide showing in 2018 when he defeated former astronaut Bill Nelson by less than half a percentage point. Scott defeated challenger Debbie Mucarsel-Powell by ten points in his race. Okaloosa County turned out for Scott, giving him the highest vote total for any candidate in any race – with 80,277 votes.

Former President Donald Trump put a bookend on the era of Florida as a swing state – taking Miami-Dade County and the Sunshine State by almost 15 percentage points. In Okaloosa County, the 45th president took 70.42% of the vote.

Ballot Referenda

Amendments that Passed Statewide

Of the six ballot amendments on Floridians’ ballots this year, Only ballot measures two and five passed the 60% threshold needed to etch the propositions into the state constitution.

Amendment two, according to the letter of the ballot language, protects the right to hunt and fish “including by the use of traditional methods, as a public right and preferred means of responsibly managing and controlling fish and wildlife.” The amendment was the most popular of the six on the ballot, getting 67.3% of votes statewide and receiving more than three-quarters of the voters in Okaloosa County.

Amendment five, which adjusts the homestead exemption according to the rate of inflation, was also passed. Two-thirds of Florida voters approved of the amendment. Okaloosa County polled slightly more favorably for this amendment – about seven in ten voted in favor of the exemption.

Amendments Three and Four

Florida’s two most controversial amendment propositions, Amendment Three (recreational marijuana) and Amendment Four (abortion) failed to reach the 60% threshold for inclusion in the state constitution – but not by a wide margin. The two ‘voter-initiated’ (meaning not placed on the ballot by the state legislature) propositions earned more than half of the votes, with amendment three receiving 55.7% of the statewide election returns and amendment four receiving 57.1% of the vote.

In Okaloosa County, Amendment Three tracked relatively close to the state average—52.62% of voters approved the amendment. However, Amendment Four’s results in Okaloosa County told a different story. Okaloosa County and the rest of the state were separated by almost 14 percentage points on the measure that would have moved the latest time one could receive an abortion from six to twenty-four weeks. 43.48% of Okaloosans voted in favor of the amendment that would have pushed the latest date a woman could legally receive an abortion back to the sixth month of pregnancy.

State Elections

Southern Okaloosa County State Representative T. Patterson Maney handily won re-election over his opponent from the Democratic Party, Samuel Chang. Maney, a former judge and army officer, outperformed his opponent by nearly fifty points in the contest. His district includes Eglin Air Force Base, Niceville, Valparaiso, Destin, and Fort Walton Beach.

Representative Joel Rudman and Florida State Senate candidate (and former superintendent of schools) Don Gaetz also had dominating wins over their opponents from the Democratic Party.