Look out, Florida, here we come!
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BREAKING
Thanks to one of the most Herculean grassroots advocacy efforts Iâve ever seen, along w incredible support from so many to ensure filing fees were paid, there IS a QUALIFIED/VERIFIED Democratic candidate for EVERY state house and senate district in Florida
â David Pepper (@DavidPepper) June 14, 2024
As the saying goes, hell hath no fury like Democrats who have been subjected to corruption and abuse of power for close to 10 years!
More of this, please.
Open thread.
Sxjames
Good đ
Other MJS
Pepper’s books are must-reads IMO.
RaflW
Saw this great news yesterday. Looks like Charles Gaba has some work ahead to fill out the rest of his Blue24 fundraising page for the Florida legislature, but it’d be nice to eventually flow some money that general direction. I know there’s a lot of fish to fry this year, and limited money. But FL is not as red as it looks, and it really takes building a bench to be able to eventually regain some semblance of balance (or even win a majority from time to time!).
geg6
I keep getting polls via text, some state (PA) and some national. Â I generally ignore these texts but have decided to start answering. Â Iâll be one of the weird, unlikely strong Dems from the white, 65+, female cohort. Â The more of us, the better.
piratedan
kudos to Nikkie Fried and the Florida DNC, that’s a lot of hard work to put something like this together after years of ineptitude.
Mousebumples
Yay!
On a similar note, all 16 (17?) Wisconsin State Senate seats up for election this year (half of 33) and 97 of 99 State Assembly seats will have a Democrat on the ballot. With the new maps only finalized a few months ago, that’s impressive work by WisDems. Seeing this in Florida too makes me wonder if it’s an emphasis of the DNC/Biden/Jamie Harrison?
Anyone else have similar stories to report across the nation?
Baud
@geg6:
I hope I donât need to start answering my phone.
Adam L Silverman
Itâs almost 25 years since the GOP conned the state legislative Black caucus into supporting their redistricting plan. An additional majority minority district was created for the latter and in exchange the former was able to crack, bleach, and pack the rest of the state and federal districts. At this point there have been two even more extreme gerrymanders that further consolidated the GOP majorities. It has also allowed first Scott and now DeStupid to pass more draconian voter suppression laws. And DeStupid has also packed the state Supreme Court and the state appellate courts. He also removes Democratic officials under BS pretexts because he can, which further disadvantages Democrats and Su-presses turnout. This is an impressive effort, but it is ultimately futile. Florida is a managed, illiberal democracy where the elected officials pick their voters instead of the voters picking their elected officials. It doesnât help that the state Democratic Party couldnât organize an orgy in a whore house if you spotted them the madam, the courtesans, the customers, the booze, and the actual building and furnishings. And before anyone replies with âbut Nikki Fried,â Nikki knows all this because she learned it as a student in my state and local politics class when I was a post doc at UF.
WaterGirl
@RaflW: I’d say the better strategy is to do the bench building after November, because we need to put everything we’ve got into winning the Presidency, the House and the Senate.
That’s the road to progress and shoring our democracy back up again.
Adam L Silverman
@Other MJS: Why? Nothing heâs done in Ohio has actually worked.
geg6
@Baud:
Oh, I would never do that. Â But a text seems okay.
Another Scott
Nikki Fried and FlaDems are doing the work.
Godspeed!
Cheers,
Scott.
WaterGirl
Nothing changes, until it does.
rikyrah
Great news. Compete everywhere
Baud
Kudos to all the candidates running as well. Especially in tough districts.
Almost Retired
@Adam L Silverman: Â I hope Nikki Fried didnât absorb the hopeless futile why bother message from your Poli Sci class. Â She is soldiering on and can make a difference. Â Iâm not giving up on Florida.
Shalimar
@Adam L Silverman: She doesn’t seem to have been a very good student.  You haven’t talked her into giving up yet. She’s still fighting.
Jackie
@WaterGirl: Agree!
BettyCracker was happy about FL having a Dem running in every district, while tempering expectations. I, for one, hope some GQP districts are caught flat footed!
Adam L Silverman
@Almost Retired: I didnât teach hopeless and futile. I taught the political history of what was going on in Florida at the time and the political sociology of why it was going on.  Short of a violent  rebellion being waged and succeeding, this state was lost to authoritarianism a long time ago.
Scout211
Itâs interesting to me just how many things my professors assumed I learned in their classes.
ETA: Â And that my husband assumed his students learned in his classes.
Adam L Silverman
@Shalimar: She was, as I recall, an excellent student. When I was a professor I didnât polemicize. Sheâs a very smart, very talented person. Unfortunately, her efforts will be in vain. Short of an all out open revolt, there is no way to break the GOPâs authoritarian control of Florida.
Adam L Silverman
@Scout211: She learned the factually accurate history of how the GOP was able to take over the state of Florida. Because that is part of what I taught. Unless youâre suggesting she cheated and had someone else do her homework and take her tests for her.
WaterGirl
@Another Scott: That’s a great social media account, thanks for posting that.
Ken
@geg6: You’ll be glad to know that the difficulties with getting representative polling samples are now being solved (“solved”) with AI. If your phone calls don’t get you enough white 65+ females, you just push a button and viola! the AI simulates answers from that cohort.
(I wish I were joking.)
Melancholy Jaques
@Adam L Silverman:
With respect to his political performance, Pepper hasn’t done much to talk about.
Maybe @Other MJS: is referring to his novels.
Another Scott
@Adam L Silverman: Dr. Doom is here. Hi, doc.
Fortunately, none of us are very good at predicting the future.
We do know, though, that doing the work is often the first necessary step in creating the future we want to see.
With a Democratic trifecta in DC, lots of things are possible – things like the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act – that can help break apparently unbreakable current realities.
We’ve got to keep doing the work, and not assume that violence is the only way to effect those changes.
My $0.02.
Cheers,
Scott.
WaterGirl
RaflW
@WaterGirl: I get that. And, I don’t think Biden-Harris or any of the Senate races will be hurting for money.
Canvassers, election judges and other boots on the ground? Yes more are needed. And I think there are House races that may not be fully funded. Raising for the outside groups BJ identifies makes excellent sense.
And, FL having a full Dem slate is an accomplishment. If a bunch of those races end up as poorly funded slogs, it may not repeat.
FL has at least 5,000,000 Democratic voters. They need to give a lot of the money. But individual Juicers outside FL may want to help, too. I will, at least selectively.
Glidwrith
@Adam L Silverman: I am curious: between the homeowner insurance crisis, flooding from climate change, book banning and women losing their freedom that there arenât enough crossover votes to let Democrats win?
wjca
Realistically, you have to have both. The Federal power to break up state gerrymandering and the state party organizing and competent enough to move when the power lock is broken. If you’ve only got one of those, the absolute and unshakable control Adam speaks of is locked in. But with both, change becomes possible.
geg6
@WaterGirl:
Florida guy. Â Perfect.
Eolirin
@Adam L Silverman: We don’t need to win the Florida statehouse back this cycle. We need to get enough turnout to get the 2-3% extra margin over 2020 to make Trump and Rick Scott lose, and possibly pick up a house seat or two.
We will need to fix the gerrymandering at the federal level. But having contested seats will hopefully drive up turnout so that when we lose most of those seats we keep the margins in those districts down enough that we can win the statewide races.
Florida is one of our only pickup opportunities for the Senate, and if Biden takes it Trump has no viable electoral map. Anything that even remotely increases our margins in the state needs to be pursued as hard as possible right now.
WaterGirl
@Eolirin: Or, as Illinois used to say in their lottery ads:
Adam L Silverman
@Another Scott: You arenât. You insisted that I was wrong in October 2020 when I stated that Youngkin would win and the GOP would flip the  House.
Your extreme normalcy bias, as well as far too many others here, has helped to set the conditions for the danger weâre in. People have been hurt and killed because you canât get your head around the fact we donât live in happy gumdrop rainbow land. And, as a result, more people will be hurt and killed.
Adam L Silverman
@Glidwrith: No. A good chunk of the problem is the extreme gerrymander and the voter suppression laws and regulations. The rest is that the majority of those who actually vote in Florida have no problem with the way things are.
Adam L Silverman
@wjca: The Democrats had a trifecta in DC between January 2021 and January 2023. Youâll notice what did not pass when they had that trifecta?
Adam L Silverman
@Eolirin: Florida is not a pick up opportunity for the Senate. Anyone who thinks so is delusional.
Timill
@Adam L Silverman: Anything Joe Manchin didn’t like.
Adam L Silverman
@Timill: Thatâs part of it. The other is that around ten Democrats, like Senator Wallpaper Paste from Delaware, were hiding then and are still hiding now behind Manchin and Sinemaâs refusal to even tweak the rules for filibustering. Having the trifecta is not enough. Not having enough Democratic senators willing to either tweak the filibuster rules to put the onus on the minority to maintain one, rather than the burden on the majority to break one or to eliminate it all together, means the John Lewis Voting Rights Act will never pass even if the Democrats somehow manage to retake the House, hold the Senate, and hold the White House.
Even in the majority, Senate Democrats act like theyâre in the minority. This is why they have a slavish devotion to blue slips for judicial nominations even though the GOP ignores them when theyâre in the majority. And itâs why McConnell signed the invitation for Bibi to address a joint session of Congress not Schumer. That alone tells us who really has the power in the Senate.
WaterGirl
@Glidwrith: It seems to me that If there is ever a year when upsets in our favor are possible, it’s this one.