Stop calling Trump a ‘felon,’ Florida voting rights leader says

Democrats and news outlets are casting this year’s presidential race as pitting a “prosecutor” — Vice President Kamala Harris — against a “felon” — former President Donald Trump.

And one of Florida’s voting rights leaders wants them to stop.

Desmond Meade, who led the 2018 effort to restore voting rights to Floridians convicted of felonies, says the term felon is stigmatizing the estimated 20 million Americans with those convictions.

“To resort to playground antics of name calling or reducing the election of the President of the United States to being a contest between a Prosecutor and a ‘F-word’ is robbing this country of the serious dialogue it deserves,” Meade said in a news release on Tuesday.

In a follow-up op-ed on Time’s website, Meade wrote that referring to Trump “as a ‘convicted felon’ does more harm than good.”

“The truth is the label doesn’t harm Trump, as much as it harms the millions of other people living with felony convictions,” he wrote.

The Harris campaign did not respond to emails requesting comment.

The sentiment is a rare rebuke of one of Democrats’ key talking points this presidential election by someone who has been championed by members of the party in Florida in recent years.

Democrats were quick to label Trump a “felon” after he was convicted of 34 felony counts involving hush money payments to adult film actor Stormy Daniels. President Joe Biden called him a “convicted felon” to his face during last month’s debate.

Since Harris became the presumptive nominee, the campaign and prominent Democrats have pushed the “prosecutor vs. a felon” narrative. Harris was an assistant district attorney in Alameda County and, later, San Francisco between 1990 and 2000 and was elected as San Francisco’s district attorney in 2003. She was California’s attorney general between 2011 and 2017.

“This brilliant prosecutor will make the case against convicted felon Donald Trump,” former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton wrote in her endorsement of Harris, posted on X.

Meade and his organization, the Florida Rights Restoration Coalition, convinced more than 60% of voters in 2018 to overturn the state’s longtime ban on voting by people convicted of felonies.

Although his organization is nonpartisan and has tried to stay above the political fray, Democrats have cheered his efforts to restore voting rights to hundreds of thousands of Floridians.

Meade was convicted of felonies stemming from drug addiction in the 1990s, leading to a prison sentence. In the 2000s, he went to college and graduated from law school, but his record prevented him from becoming a lawyer. In 2021, his rights to hold office and serve on a jury were restored.

He noted that more than 600,000 people return to society from prisons each year and may struggle to find housing, insure a home or get a bank loan.

“People caught in this system are easy targets to villainize because words like ‘felon,’ ‘convict,’ and ‘criminal’ carry stigma,” Meade wrote in Time. “Those words provide an excuse to throw people away.”