Gather ‘round, children, and I shall tell you a tale. Once upon a time, the Democratic Party believed in the 50-State Strategy. They ran candidates across the land, and captured many federal and state legislative seats, governorships, and judicial seats. It was a good time for the health of our republic. But then the party adopted a myopic focus on the highest offices, and abandoned this strategy. Republicans did not, however, and they won a massive landslide victory in 2010 that gerrymandered this country to the breaking point.
It has taken 10 years. Ten long, agonizing years for Democrats to retake the House firmly and be on the cusp of undoing all that damage. The lesson to learn from 2010 is a simple one: contest EVERY office. Give no seats away, leave no post unchallenged. As the DailyKos elections team have said themselves, you never leave a seat uncontested because you never know when something unpredictable could lead to a surprise underdog victory.
Florida is doing that this year. For the first time in years, EVERY state seat in Florida has a Democrat on the ticket. Every seat is being contested. Even better, this is shaping up to be the Mother of All Wave Elections. Iowa is in play, Alaska is in play, TEXAS is in play. This is one of those unpredictable moments. In such a climate, only a fool would try to stand in the way of candidates hoping to help push that victory even further.
The Florida Democratic Party is one such ship of fools.
The good folks at 90for90 have a simple dream: turning Florida blue this election. If Florida goes to Biden, Trump is finished. That is game over. Realizing that the state always teeters on a knife edge, they had the ambitious plan to put a candidate on every seat. The rationale was simple: if there’s a candidate to vote for, more Democrats will come out to vote for them than usual. Sure, most if not all of those seats are long-shot blood-red districts, but in a race as close as Florida this is a game of inches. A few hundred here and a thousand there across two dozen “hopeless” districts can be the difference between victory and defeat statewide (just ask Rick Scott). That’s not even including the fact that, in a wave election, anything is possible. A few of those seats just might flip. I know in 2018 we here in Texas didn’t expect to see Tarrant County, the rock-ribbed red bastion of North Texas, turn blue but it did. Nothing is off the table in a wave year.
So after recruiting all these candidates, they have had just one request: access to the VAN database the state Democratic parties maintain, which contain contact information for Democratic voters across the state. It’s a simple request, but a vital one: being able to call and mail those voters can turn out hundreds of people who might otherwise sit it out. This is doubly important in these blood-red seats, where those voters haven’t heard from a local candidate running for office in years. This would be the only way to let them know there’s someone they can vote for, and ensure they do it.
The Florida Democratic party refused to allow them access. The VAN database costs money to maintain, so the story goes, so candidates have to pay for access to it. Even strapped-for-cash long-shot ones. Never mind the potential for victory, pay up or go home. But hey, fair is fair. And besides, these long-shot candidates soon found themselves a benefactor: Nikki Fried, Florida’s ONLY statewide elected Democrat at this time, stepped up and paid for each and every one of these candidate’s access to VAN. Happy ending, right? Let’s all celebrate and do some phone banking for these people!
Not so fast, says the party. Now that the first hurdle has been cleared, another one was hastily erected. The party is STILL refusing to provide access to the VAN database and give these candidates the voter lists. Why? Well, Florida’s minority leader Gary Farmer doesn’t seem to have any good reasons. He says it’s because they don’t have the money to support “hopeless” races; putting aside the slap in the face this is to both the candidates AND Democratic voters in districts without a voice in the state, it ignores two things:
1. Every additional vote in every election can help put a Democratic senator or congresspersons in Washington, a governor in Tallahassee, and (this time) flip the state blue for Joe Biden. There’s never a good reason to not run candidates in these seats, nor deny them this minimal support. All of these candidates are worth the support, even if we don’t flip a single state house or senate seat.
2. No one is ASKING for money, so the entire argument is a red herring. They’re asking for VAN access, which (once again), has already been paid for.
There’s plenty of reasons to distrust the sincerity of what Gary Farmer is saying. There’s the aforementioned fact that he’s dodging the question of why the candidates aren’t being given access to voter lists they paid for (here in the real world, we call taking money from people and then not giving them what they paid for “theft”, but maybe it’s different in Florida); there’s the fact he seemingly isn’t even trying to raise money for the party during a critical wave election; or there’s the fact he’s cheated on his wife with a conservative lobbyist that has worked on behalf of charter schools, fossil fuel companies, and Farmer’s old trial lawyer group (Farmer insists an elected official like himself having an affair with a lobbyist doesn’t count as a conflict of interest).
The rest of us, who want to see a Blue Florida (and a Blue America for that matter) aren’t interested in more excuses from a man who seems to have an endless supply of them. We want the Florida Democratic Party to support Florida Democrats (a novel idea, to be sure). We want candidates to be given access to voter lists that have been paid for. We want the party to get out of the way of the people working hard in the abandoned and forgotten parts of the state to push Florida across the finish line for Joe Biden.
So how can you help? Contact the Florida Democratic Party leadership and demand they give access to the VAN database to ALL candidates that have paid for it, no excuses, no conditions. The big three names are:
- Sen. Gary Farmer: contact him on twitter at @FarmerForFLSen, email him via this page, or give him a call at his offices (954) 467-4227 and (850) 487-5034
- Rep. Bobby DuBose (FL District 94): contact him on twitter at @RepBobbyDuBose, email him via his state rep page, or give him a call at his offices (954) 467-4206 and (850) 717-5094
- Rep. Evan Jenne (FL District 99): contact him on twitter at @evanjenne, email him via his state rep page, or give him a call at his offices (954) 893-5000, (954) 893-5001, and (850) 717-5099
You can also check out the list of candidates backed by 90for90 and adopt one for yourself by sending a donation. The state party may not feel like they deserve funding, but you can support them instead! Together we can turn Florida blue and bring it home for Biden.
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