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,
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