Democratic Stronghold Flips Republican as Florida Voters Paint Biden Territory Red
Back in the day, Florida was a swing state. Remember “hanging chads”? The only reason those ballots were so important was that the decisive state in the 2000 election, the Sunshine State, was decided by well under a thousand votes.
As much as the Democrats might have been sore about that at the time, it turns out those were halcyon days for the party in the third-most populous state in the nation. Donald Trump has carried the last two presidential elections there, the last Democratic senator to represent Florida lost re-election there in 2018, and the state’s House seats lean heavily red. The same is true for the governorship and state legislatures.
State Democratic Party chairwoman Nikki Fried — who was the only statewide-elected Democrat when she won the commissioner of agriculture seat back in 2018 — aimed to change that with a “Take Back Local” campaign.
The first test of the grassroots effort would be on Tuesday, when, according to Florida’s Voice, seven party-endorsed candidates, “all in areas where Democrats would be expected to win,” were on the ballot.
“These races are nonpartisan so it’s important for voters to know which candidates will fight for our values and it’s our job as a party to provide the infrastructure democratic candidates need to win — that’s how we will take back Florida. We are fielding candidates and contesting races everywhere and it starts at the local level,” Fried said in a statement last month.
Only four of those seven candidates managed to win, however — and not only that, but the Democrats lost a race they were so easily expected to win that one imagines Fried and Co. didn’t even bother making the party-affiliated candidates part of the “Take Back Local” campaign.