Florida Democrats call for new party leadership and strategy after yet another GOP rout

Total systemic failure. Time to rebuild the party. Desperate need of new leadership.

Those were just some of the reactions from Florida Democrats after their party’s 3-point defeat to President Donald Trump, as well as losses in key down-ballot races Tuesday night.

Those concerns are likely to be just the beginning of a tumultuous fight among Florida Democrats over the party’s platform, structure and strategy for winning elections.

“We need to clean house,” said state Rep. Anna Eskamani, D-Orlando, one of the party’s younger progressive voices. “Leadership within the [state] Democratic Party and the caucuses needs to resign. Step back and let others step in.”

Beyond the Trump win, Democrats lost U.S. House, state House seats and its two most promising state Senate races in Seminole and Miami-Dade. And how it happened has a familiar ring.

The party infrastructure either isn’t there or is pieced together at the last moment. Outreach to key constituencies, such as African-Americans and Hispanics, comes too late in the election. Candidates don’t aggressively use the tools they do have to target voters and get out the base.

“We have to get back to the party of engaging voters year-round,” said Sen. Shevrin Jones, D-West Park, who won his Senate race in South Florida on Tuesday. “You can’t continue to come to the Black community in the late hours asking for them to take them to our churches ... and then you drop them like a bad habit after the election.”

But some of the excuses Democrats usually cite, including not enough money to compete with well-heeled GOP candidates and voter suppression tactics by Republicans, don’t apply this time. Turnout in Florida was 77% of the electorate, the highest since 1992. And most Democrats in major races had enough outside resources to compete with Republicans.

One thing most Democrats seem to agree on is their party needs new leadership. Jones didn’t explicitly call for FDP chair Terrie Rizzo to resign but said she should be “held accountable.”

Sen. Lauren Book, D-Plantation, one of the more moderate members of the Democratic caucus, agreed with the progressive Eskamani that change was needed at the top.

“We’re in desperate need of new leadership if we hope to gain future ground,” Book posted on Twitter. “Tonight’s losses shouldn’t have happened.”

A party spokeswoman didn’t return an email seeking comment for this story.

Florida Democrats' problems, though, run deeper than just one election. Since 2000, Democrats have won six statewide contests out of 28 in an ostensibly swing state where there are more registered members of their party than Republicans.

“It’s not a swing state right now,” said Matt Isbell, a liberal analyst who runs the MCIMaps website. “It’s a right-of-center state. The Republican coalition is stronger, and it gets the Republicans to an easier victory. Democrats have to have everything go right to even be in play.”

Aubrey Jewett, a professor of political science at the University of Central Florida, disagreed.

“I don’t think that Florida is red,” Jewett said. “We’re still a purple state. … I don’t think it’s hopeless for Democrats, although I’m sure for many of them, it’s beginning to feel like that.”

The problem for Democrats, Jewett said, is that they have tried “all sorts of combinations of candidates” for statewide office over the past few years, from a former Republican in Charlie Crist to a Black progressive in Andrew Gillum in 2018, and yet have come up short every time.

“The candidate [himself] just doesn’t seem to have mattered,” Jewett said. “I’m reminded of the old Peanuts cartoon, where Lucy holds the football and keeps enticing Charlie Brown to try to kick it and then yanks it away at the last minute.”

Isbell joked that there was one surefire way for Democrats to win Florida: “Try to get Alabama to take over” the Panhandle.

But realistically, Isbell said, “for the Democrats, it’s going to be a multi-year process. It’s not something that is going to be fixed even within two years. I have not a lot of faith in the governor’s race in 2022."

That race, in which Trump ally Gov. Ron DeSantis will seek reelection, as well as 2022 campaigns for the state Cabinet and U.S. Senate, are all just about ready to get started. And the GOP is in control of all but one of those offices.

“[Trump] won a really significant victory in the state of Florida,” DeSantis said Wednesday at a news conference where he took some of the credit for the president’s win. “Eric Holder, the former [Democratic] Attorney General, poured between $10 and $15 million to try to flip the state House ... the result was that House Republicans gained five seats. So they didn’t draw any blood, [and] they lit a lot of money on fire.”

Isbell said they need to focus on two groups the party is struggling with: Hispanics and working-class voters.

“First of all, they need to understand that their Hispanic outreach sucks and that they cannot show up in Osceola and Orange County and Miami-Dade and south Broward at the last minute and try to shore that vote up,” Isbell said. “And the Hispanic community needs to stop being thought of as a single entity.”

In Miami-Dade, a massive GOP Hispanic turnout by the Cuban community sealed President Trump’s win in the state, while Democratic Hispanics underperformed.

“Democrats let the Republicans run roughshod over them for months there, letting them frame the narrative around the presidential race and knock on doors and register voters,” Isbell said. “And Democrats weren’t doing that.”

Democrats and the liberal-leaning groups they rely on for canvassing have claimed every two years that they’re heavily investing in Hispanic registration and get-out-the-vote efforts, yet every time they have fallen short of their goals.

Jimmy Torres Valdez, head of the liberal Puerto Rican group Boricua Vota in Orlando, said registration and mobilization were hampered by the coronavirus pandemic this year.

But Torres Valdez said, “the Democratic Party needs to understand that campaigns have to be organized more sharply to the issues of Boricuas. And that includes having managers of campaigns that are Puerto Ricans.”

Isbell said Democrats did make some significant gains in the suburbs, winning Seminole and Duval for the first time in years, “But they’re still struggling in some of these working-class areas.”

“Biden did worse than Hillary Clinton in Volusia County,” he said. “Pinellas, he barely clawed back. St. Lucie stayed with Trump. So they’ve got a lot of persuasion work to do with working-class voters in the state.”

Eskamani was vocal about how she believed the state party’s message on economic issues doesn’t work.

“The Democratic Party continues to have no values,” Eskamani said. “And the fact that the $15 minimum wage amendment passed while so many of our candidates, including the self-anointed ‘top Democrats,’ don’t even stand in strong solidarity [of the initiative] … because they’re influenced by corporate donors, is another example of just why we keep losing.”

Eskamani cited her own winning campaign’s ground game, which included 40,000 phone calls and knocking on 33,000 doors.

“When was the last time these consultants, who give all this advice to Democrats, knocked on doors or actually talked to working people, let alone even showed up in a working people neighborhood?” Eskamani asked. “I think there is a deep disconnection between what consultants are telling Democrats to do, and what we see on the ground every single day, whether it’s navigating the unemployment system, a family living in hotels and motels, or even just people barely making ends meet. Their issues are deeply personal.”

slemongello@orlandosentinel.com; grohrer@orlandosentinel.com

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