Florida, the ultimate swing state, has played a decisive role in too many presidential elections. Every single vote counts in any statewide election there. In 2018, Republican Ron DeSantis beat Democrat Andrew Gillum 49.6% to 49.2% in the gubernatorial race and Rick Scott beat Bill Nelson (basically a walking corpse) 50.1% to 49.9% in the Senate election. Two years earlier, Trump had beaten Hillary 49.0% to 47.8%.
On Friday, the Tampa Bay Times published another stinging indictment of the venal and incompetent Florida Democratic Party in the form of a question from top state Senate candidate Kathy Lewis: I can lift Biden and flip state Senate.
My guess is yes-- this November we're going to see a lot of the seats that were lost while Debbie Wasserman Schultz incompetently ran the DNC picked back up by Democrats again. And, as Joan Walsh explained this week for The Nation that process is already underway. During the Wasserman Schultz years Democrats lost 942 legislative seats.
I hope you're aware that Blue America is helping with an effort to remake the disastrous Florida Democratic Party as a real vehicle for real change. we're supporting an effort to flip the state legislature, for example, by having candidates for every seat, something the state party has opposed-- although is happy to claim some of the credit for now that it's a fait accompli.
I had dinner with civil rights icon Fergie Reid last night and we were discussing how both Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders had backed the 90for90 voter registration initiative but how Mayo Pete's team had refused. I noted that Mayo's racism was hardly something new or unknown.
This week, Erik Loomis' essay at Lawyers, Guns & Money, The Big Electoral Story of 2019 reminds us that "we don’t pay nearly enough attention to how power is actually built–through local and state races and organizing.
