Democratic Politics

Demings has been guided by that same earnest self-checking she’s exerted at campaign stops since entering Congress five years ago. She went from upholding the law as a police officer at every rank for 27 years to crafting it, first taking the oath on January 3, 2017—17 days before Trump was sworn in. “I went to his inauguration,” Demings told me. “Even though I didn’t vote for him, he was still our president.” As he governed, she found one of Trump’s shortcomings was that he never understood the oath he took, “our democracy, the Constitution, the rule of law, and therefore, he didn’t protect it, and it showed.”

Eight years before that swearing-in, Demings was chief of the Orlando Police Department when a man entered a downtown office tower and began firing a handgun, injuring five people and killing one. The November 6, 2009, shooting made national headlines. Her handling of the case is what her husband, Jerry, a former Orlando police chief, believes caught the attention of the national Democratic Party, because afterward, the couple was invited to D.C. to meet with its leaders, including then Vice President Joe Biden and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi. Jerry told me the meeting felt like recruitment for future party leaders. He sensed they were “somewhat strategic in identifying the talent to replace them. They want authentic individuals who have intellectual abilities, the charisma to be able to do the job. And because I mean, they are all 80-plus years old, so they got to fold it soon.”…

She emerged in the party as someone who can speak about systemic racism and police brutality while insulating Democrats from GOP charges that they are soft on crime or hold extreme progressive ideologies. Heading into the midterms, Demings provides Democrats a big-name candidate in their hopes to hold on to the Senate. The 65-year-old three-term moderate has appeared uninterested in upending the system, so there’s no worry of her being caricatured as a leftist or a “socialist” bearing “woke” ideals as she runs in a bastion of Republican conservatism. With her consistent track record in policy and tone, “you never have to wonder where she stands on an issue,” Representative David Cicilline, who serves on the House Judiciary Committee alongside Demings, told me. “She has a set of life experiences that give her incredible credibility.”…

Biden called Demings to tell her he was running for office before his April 2019 announcement. Once his campaign launched and Demings became a cemented star in her party following the trial, the vetting team phoned to say she was on the vice presidential short list…

The vetting team dug deep into Demings, her husband, their three sons, the couple’s 20-year tax records, and anyone within a stone’s throw throughout Demings’s life. Three of her brothers were asked to explain their career choices. The team raised an eyebrow at another brother who had been arrested. Her sons handed over social media passwords and were asked about the intentions behind posts from years earlier. They asked about particular sermons her pastor preached. When the Demingses couldn’t locate two years of their tax returns, the vetting team pushed the couple, “ ‘Well, we need the other two, and perhaps you need to hire a CPA to help you get access to them.’ ” So they did. “You know what I really wanted to say was, Okay, when Donald Trump gives you one year”—of his never-tendered tax returns—“then come back to me,” she said, laughing a serious laugh.

In August 2020, Biden called to let Demings know she had not been selected. He chose Senator Kamala Harris instead. Demings told me her competitive side responded with, “Oh, darn.” But as a consummate optimist, she moved right back into, “I know that God has something else for me.” She also made it clear to Biden and his team that she didn’t want a position in the Cabinet because “there’s work to be done in the House, and that’s where I am until I go to the Senate.”…

“In Val there’s hope,” Representative Robin Kelly said of her longtime friend and colleague’s campaign, “that we can move closer to that promise of America.” Demings’s life is also “a story of success,” her Delta sorority sister, Representative Joyce Beatty, told me. “She understands multiple systems and how to work through them without ever forgoing on her principles…it’s the power within her.” If successful, Demings will become the only active Black female senator and third ever in its 233 years, behind Carol Moseley Braun and Harris. (It took 24 years from Braun’s election to Harris’s win.) She will also be the second woman elected to the Senate from Florida since Paula Hawkins in 1980.

Records aside, this run is a most consequential assignment Demings has been ready to complete. “Oprah talks a lot about that aha moment,” she said, “when we think about that, we think it’s like really big and powerful, but it’s usually not. It’s just that quiet moment that tugs at the heart. And John Lewis, his legislation, now he’s gone, but now we are the guardians of what he died for, risked his life for. So, we got to continue to do that. If not us, then who?

“When I make it to the U.S. Senate, it will not be the same.”