Palm Beach legislator and ‘unapologetic progressive’ joins race for Hastings’ seat

West Palm Beach state Rep. Omari Hardy announced Wednesday he plans to run for Alcee Hastings’ former congressional seat after his death on April 6, and the 31-year-old first-year lawmaker said he will run a left-leaning campaign.

Hardy, the fifth politician currently in office to announce a run for Florida’s 20th Congressional District, represents most of West Palm Beach. His political career began in 2017 after he defeated an incumbent on the Lake Worth Beach City Commission, and he won his state House seat in 2020 after defeating former state Rep. Al Jacquet by 17 percentage points in a heated Democratic primary.

He’ll now run for a seat that Hastings occupied since it was created in 1992.

“I know from experience we need fighters in Congress, people who are not afraid to speak truth to power in defense of working class people and people of color,” Hardy said in an interview with the Miami Herald. “We had that in Representative Hastings. I’m running to make sure we don’t lose that in this election.”

Hardy has one advantage over the rest of the field: a large social media presence and a knack for attention-grabbing moments to attack political opponents. In March 2020, he earned national attention after yelling at Lake Worth city officials from the dais after the city shut off power during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic. Since assuming office in Tallahassee he has been a vocal critic of Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis and amassed more than 167,000 Twitter followers.

Hardy said if he’s elected, he’ll push for the Green New Deal, affordable housing, Medicare for All and a basic income for working class Americans. He repeatedly compared himself to New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a high-profile left-leaning lawmaker who defeated a member of House Democratic leadership in 2018, and Missouri Rep. Cori Bush, a Black Lives Matter activist who defeated an incumbent Democrat in 2020.

“Those issues, housing, healthcare, a basic income are the issues I’m going to run on,” Hardy said. “I know that of elected officials in Florida, not many at least have spoke a lot about those issues but I look forward to bringing the conversation to folks in this district. Even if you don’t know what the Green New Deal is you should know there’s a climate crisis, and we shouldn’t let this crisis go to waste. We should use this climate crisis to create jobs and to repair the damage that has been done to inner city communities after decades of disinvestment.”

Hardy joins state Rep. Bobby DuBose, state Sen. Perry Thurston, Broward County Commissioner Dale V.C. Holness and Broward County Commissioner Barbara Sharief as sitting politicians to enter the race. They all have to resign their current positions to seek the congressional seat.

The Democratic primary also includes five other candidates: former state representative and 2019 West Palm Beach mayoral candidate Priscilla Taylor; Sheila Cherfilus-McCormick, a healthcare executive from Hollywood who ran against Hastings in 2020 and received 30.7% of the vote in the Democratic primary; Marlon Onias, a Fort Lauderdale attorney; Elvin Dowling, a public speaker and author from Broward County; and Matt Boswell, a Fort Lauderdale resident also running on a left-leaning platform.

The Democratic primary will almost certainly decide who ends up filling Hastings’ seat in a special election that has yet to be scheduled by DeSantis. About two-thirds of the district is in Broward County and one-third is in Palm Beach County.

Unlike DuBose, who said he “wouldn’t go up and put myself in one box,” and Thurston, who said the slogans of Medicare for All and Defund the Police are too simple to address complex problems, Hardy says he is running as an unapologetic progressive. He pledged in his announcement video not to take donations from corporations.

And he said Hastings was one of the most progressive members of Congress, noting that he signed onto Ocasio-Cortez’s Green New Deal the day it was introduced in 2019.

“If you look at House Resolution 109, the name right after AOC was the name of Mr. Hastings,” Hardy said. “Although he was advanced in years, he maintained an open mind, he was a fighter and a progressive. I don’t want to see our communities take a step back from that.”