About 5.3 million voters are Democrats, up from about 5.2 million eligible to cast ballots during the November 2018 election. About 5 million voters are Republicans, up from about 4.9 million.

RIVIERA BEACH — After decades of high-profile losses statewide, Florida’s Democratic Party says that this time around, they will win, and a Martin Luther King Jr. Day voter registration drive shows why.

Democratic volunteers joined a mental health awareness event Monday in Cunningham Park on Avenue S and West 29th Street to register voters. They held drives in four other places in Palm Beach County and more than 30 places statewide.

The push is part of what the party called an unprecedented effort to register more Democrats to vote. It started after the 2018 midterm elections when longtime Democratic Sen. Bill Nelson and gubernatorial candidate Andrew Gillum, who would have been the state’s first black governor, each lost their races by less than 1 percent.

The state party boasted in a Monday memo that it has raised $5.2 million while organizers and volunteers registered 17,720 voters in 2019 compared to about 9,200 in 2015. The Republican Party of Florida raised about the same amount in the final three months of 2019.

About 5.3 million voters statewide are Democrats, up from about 5.2 million eligible to cast ballots during the November 2018 election. About 5 million voters are Republicans, up from about 4.9 million.

Riviera Beach officials teamed up with a local not-for-profit that provides mental health services to minorities, Mind Over You, to call attention to mental health in an event dubbed “Restoring the Village.”

A party official contacted Mind Over You President Ezsa Allen to ask if they could set up a voter registration booth, she said.

Rather than wait until the months before Election Day to engage voters of color, as some say is the Democrats’ pattern, the party has been connecting with those communities throughout 2019, state party Chairwoman Terrie Rizzo said.

Three in five party organizers are not white and the majority of them speak at least two languages, the party’s memo states.

The party has spent $500,000 on ads in newspapers and other media aimed at blacks, Hispanic and young people.

About 78 percent of black voters and 39 percent of Hispanic voters in Florida are Democrats. About 3 percent of blacks and 24 percent of Hispanics are Republicans.

Organizers also plan to persuade registered voters who sat out the last two statewide elections, dubbed “warm voters,” to cast ballots for Democrats this year, Rizzo said.

Voting by mail, typically dominated by Republicans, also is crucial, Rizzo said.

When more voters in Duval County, home to Jacksonville, cast ballots for Democrats in statewide races in 2018 for the first time in recent years, Rizzo credited the party’s vote-by-mail push.

The party is sending mail to black and Hispanic Democrats to persuade them to sign up to vote by mail, Rizzo said.

“We are learning from the past and building for the future to win,” she said.

Another traditionally Democratic bloc, young voters, are also a priority, Rizzo said.

To bolster turnout among these voters, Florida Democrats will take part in Organizing Corps 2020, a national program that in Florida aims to recruit 200 young people — mostly nonwhite and non-straight — to help train organizers to register voters in their neighborhoods and make sure they vote.

Most of those recruits will come from black colleges, state party Executive Director Juan Penalosa said in April.

At Cunningham Park, volunteers’ efforts netted some registrations by teenagers.

Kajee Davis, 17, a Palm Beach Lakes High School senior, said he feels excited to cast a ballot in November. He wants President Donald Trump out of office.

“I wanted to join the Army out of school,” Davis said, but is hesitant because of fears that the United States would go to war with Iran after its assassination of Iranian general Qasem Soleimani. “But with the way things are right now, I don’t know.”

Davis plans to become a firefighter instead.

cpersaud@pbpost.com

@chrismpersaud