Florida's Gubernatorial Primary Colors

FLORIDA FLORIDA FLORIDA: it’s the ultimate swing state, crazy from the heat of the weather or its own legislative invention, a lawless free-fire zone with guns more abundant than in the wild wild West. And with roughly nine weeks left before the November elections, the Sunshine State’s gubernatorial race is shaping up as the one to watch, thanks to an upset no one thought possible, a racist dog-whistle everyone knew was probably inevitable, and the reliable intrinsic potential for surprise common to a region in the center of the American Venn diagram of race and ethnicity, politics, and the evolving national future.

The Sunshine State has set the stage, and the stakes, for a compelling finale to the 2018 midterms, and quite possibly sets the terms of Democratic engagement with Republican power in 2020.

There was idle talk that President* Trump had effectively nationalized the midterms, making them a referendum on his time in office. Inquiring minds would beg to differ: the midterms are necessarily a referendum on the people in state offices right now seeking re-election, and a gauge of the qualifications of those hoping to get elected for the first time. Trump can only hope the outcome of the midterms aren’t a national expression of his time in the Oval Office; the results of the latest Washington Post-ABC News poll would seem to say he shouldn’t do that.

But if there’s a way of truly, organically nationalizing this midterm vote — of taking the micro and viewing it in a macro context — it’s there in the Florida gubernatorial.

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When Andrew Gillum narrowly defeated Rep. Gwen Graham to win the Democratic primary for governor, it was a huge wake-up call for Florida politics. The son of a bus driver, Gillum rose to become the mayor of Tallahassee, and this year mounted an effective insurgent campaign to win the primary. With marginal money (compared to Graham) and only some name recognition, Gillum faced an uphill battle with Graham, an experienced pol with the instant name recognition befitting member of a well-connected family (Her father, Bob Graham, was the 38th governor of Florida, and a U.S. senator as well).

What made the difference for Gillum, and what Democrats would be wise to templatize between now and 2020, was his willingness to engage the state’s electorate as a Democrat, full-throated and unapologetic, in both style and substance.

First there was his campaign style. Gillum’s a true believer in tried-and-true retail politics, minimizing the physical and emotional distance between himself and the voters, shaking hands, meeting where they live. Graham did much the same.

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But Gillum also staked out policy prescriptions that are singularly progressive: Medicare for all, a ban on assault weapons, increasing teacher salaries, embracing sanctuary cities, pursuit of alternative energy. He smartly marked territory that was separate and distinct from Graham, whose policy ideas were more cautiously arrived at, and filtered through the lens of what got her elected before.

Jerry Iannellli of Miami New Times understood what was happening: Gillum was, “a Bernie Sanders-endorsed progressive gifted with the ability, and bravery, to clearly and concisely lay out his platform to voters and to defend his ideas from bad-faith attacks from the right. He ran on abolishing Immigration and Customs Enforcement. He ran on instituting Medicare-for-all and giving all Americans health care. He ran on equal pay for women. He ran on legalizing marijuana. He ran on making college debt-free and overhauling the state criminal justice system. Then he effectively explained how those ideas would create jobs in the Sunshine State.”

Graham’s campaign, by contrast, “did not have good answers for the numerous ethical questions that sprouted from her past, including why she cast many right-leaning votes as a congresswoman and why her family has a financial stake in a huge Miami-Dade mega-mall project that, if built, might encroach on the Everglades. In post-Trump America, nobody bought that the candidate Democrats needed to fight the ultra-reactionary right was a milquetoast centrist who pals around with Ivanka and Jared.”

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Florida voters took Gillum to their collective heart and put him over the top on Aug. 28, lifting him over Graham by almost 3 percentage points. Going strictly by numbers, that doesn’t sound like much, but you have to look at where Gillum stopped Graham. Gillum did very well in the deeply metropolitan Miami-Dade and Broward counties, as pretty much expected.

The big surprise was Gillum’s strong showing in Hillsborough County, the sprawling, almost willfully contrarian region, and thought to have been a stronghold for Graham. Not on Election Night. Gillum beat Graham by about 5 points in Hillsborough, a county that’s had an uncanny knack for backing the right horse in every presidential election (but one) since 1960. A county of 1.4 million people (median age of 36) that's been making a clean break with the past.

Adam C. Smith of The Tampa Bay Times observed in November 2012: “Any discussion of Hillsborough County is really a discussion of Florida as a whole because it is a near-perfect microcosm of the state, which in turn is a microcosm of America. Be it age, ethnicity, race, suburban, urban, rural, Southern, Northern, gay, straight, blue-collar, white-collar, military — you name it, Hillsborough has it.” The county’s more diverse now than it was then.

So statewide, it's Gillum’s broad, ecumenical reach, proven in the hurly-burly heat of a real campaign in one of the country’s most pivotal regions, that‘s giving him real traction going into the general. It’s also likely giving his Republican challenger, Ron DeSantis — a white former Navy attorney and the congressman for the state’s 6th congressional district who kissed the ring of Trump throughout the current campaign — some sleepless nights now and before Election Day.

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That probably explains why DeSantis, good Trump flunky that he is, immediately resorted to the oldest, dumbest trick in the campaign playbook: dancing on the third rail of racial innuendo. Within hours of knowing who his challenger would be for the rest of the campaign, DeSantis retreated to the safe harbor of the Fox News bloviation ecosystem to issue a warning to Florida voters: “The last thing we need to do is monkey this up by trying to embrace a socialist agenda with huge tax increases and bankrupting the state,” DeSantis said.

Wait, what? “Monkey this up”? WTF is that crap? Sounds like an outtake from the Rolling Stones’ Exile on Main Street period. Hey, Ron DeSantis! Mick and Keith called, they want their song title back.

That tortured locution isn’t idiomatic, it’s not even recognizable slang. It was a deliberate attempt to muddy the waters of a campaign that’s bound to get murkier all by itself. Watch the video. See how DeSantis ever so thoughtfully pauses before uttering the offending phrase.

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The DeSantis team was of course quick with the denial of injecting subliminal racial insult in the campaign in a cheap, sub rosa way. The campaign released a statement: “Ron DeSantis was obviously talking about Florida not making the wrong decision to embrace the socialist policies that Andrew Gillum espouses. To characterize it as anything else is absurd.”

It’s sorry, strategically implanted statements like DeSantis’, followed by equally sorry defensive apologies, that make American politics the cesspool it’s devolved into. For his part, Gillum took the high road. “We're better than this in Florida,” he said on MSNBC. “I believe the congressman can be better than this. I regret that his mentor in politics is Donald Trump, but I do believe that voters of the state of Florida are going to reject the politics of division.”

“It's very clear that Mr. DeSantis is taking a page directly from the campaign manual of Donald Trump, but I think he's got another think coming to him if he thinks that in today's day and age Florida voters are going to respond to that level of derision and division.”

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That high-road approach may be why, in early, post-primary polling, Gillum jumped out to a 5-point lead over DeSantis. Among independents, Gillum leads DeSantis by a 34-point bulge. The Republican is playing an old game but he’s doing it in a state that’s slowly, demographically outgrowing such dirty tricks. If Hillsborough County is a bellwether, and it is, Florida now isn’t the Florida it used to be when racist winks like his were an everyday thing.

Florida’s primary colors are changing: they’re black and white in color these days, regardless of who’s running, and the 2018 governor’s race may bear this out. However this thing turns out in November, Florida’s Democrats have learned a lesson they can transmit to the party writ large, at the national level:

Play the cards you’ve been dealt. Propose solutions to the everyday problems that everyday people are going through. And don’t be afraid to stand on progressive values — despite the fact that the Republicans will do everything they can to make those values something to run from, rather than what they really are: something to embrace.