Omari Hardy was terrified. He knew the optics weren’t good. Then a Lake Worth Beach city commissioner, he went home that night figuring his nascent political career was about to come to an unceremonious end.
“I’m a black man and they got me on tape yelling at this white woman,” he remembers. “And if you could have seen the faces of the people in that room… I was so afraid of what the Palm Beach Post was going to print in the newspaper the next day.”
The day after it happened, Hardy was still so nervous that he could barely steady his hand long enough to type out an email. But the nerves were not accompanied by any sense of regret. The incident, he tells Progressives Everywhere, was “the culmination of three years of political education.”
Hardy had been elected to the Palm Beach County town’s city commission in 2017 as an idealistic 27-year-old hoping to help the working class residents in a poverty-filled city. Instead, he quickly learned how entrenched power and special interests routinely subsume good intentions and stop politicians from following through on their promises. By March of 2020, with the Covid pandemic beginning to ravage the country, Hardy had reached his limit.
On March 23rd, the rest of the Lake Worth Beach city commission voted to give control of the government to the city manager without an emergency declaration. The week before, the town’s city manager had declined Hardy’s request to hold a meeting to address the Covid crisis. After, the manager allowed poor residents behind on payments to have their electricity and gas shut off while they were in quarantine in the middle of a global pandemic.
Hardy voiced his disgust throughout the commission meeting, sharp but earnest objections that the mayor openly mocked, accusing him of making a show for the cameras. Hardy countered that the city manager had lied about shutting off peoples’ utilities, a damning accusation for which there was no factual rebuttal. The debate got uglier and uglier, with the mayor and city manager continuing to belittle Hardy as he protested.
The next day, the Palm Beach Post published video of the incident on its YouTube page. Soon Hardy, a third-generation teacher steeped in the community, began seeing it shared on Facebook. But instead of mass condemnation, the early comments seemed largely positive. Then the encouraging texts began to pour in. And the next morning, he says, he woke up to thousands of emails from people all around the world who thanked him for his standing up for working people in the face of dismissal and casual indifference.
The video was viewed nearly five million times within the first week it was posted, sending Hardy’s social media follower count into six figures. The New York Times covered the incident and even NBA legend Shaquille O’Neal sent Hardy a direct message.
“That was an educative moment for me,” Hardy reflects. “As long as I'm sticking up for my constituents and I'm being honest about it and I'm being reasonable, I can be 100% comfortable being myself and I don't have to worry about the political consequences. That was freeing.”
It wasn’t that Hardy hadn’t stood up for his beliefs before. Years earlier, Hardy defied the NIMBY faction in his district to support the construction of affordable housing units, a decision that earned him a primary challenger. Months later, with that primary challenger breathing down his neck, he defied the city’s popular mayor and forced a vote on giving local IDs to migrants who could not obtain driver’s licenses, which then passed.
Hardy had already decided to primary an incumbent conservative Democrat in the state House of Representatives when the March 2020 city commission showdown went viral. From that point forward, he ran an unequivocally progressive campaign that highlighted issues facing working families in the district and the state of Florida. He wound up beating the incumbent by over 20 points.
Hardy spent the first few months of 2021 acting as a thorn in the side of Gov. Ron DeSantis, leading to a public war of words that made it all the way to a primetime 60 Minutes report on DeSantis’ corrupt Covid vaccination program.
Coincidentally, US Rep. Alcee Hastings, the dean of Florida’s Congressional delegation, died of pancreatic cancer just a day after that 60 Minutes report aired.
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As a resident of the late Congressman’s district, Hardy looked at the damage being wrought by conservative Democrats in Washington and decided that, despite having only spent a few months in the legislature, he could best serve his constituents by assuming Hasting’s position in Washington, representing Florida’s 20th Congressional district.
“I was looking at the choices [of declared candidates] and I wasn't pleased,” Hardy says. “I saw everyone in this race is taking a step back from Alcee Hastings' legacy as a fighter and as a progressive, and I think that we should really be building on that.”
That would be a welcomed contrast to what so many members of Congress are doing right now, especially as it applies to the Build Back Better bill’s drug prices provisions and the filibustered voting rights bills. Hardy’s arrival in Congress would give Democrats a five-seat advantage and progressives a new voice that is not afraid to speak up against the party’s lobbyist-bought members.
“The folks in Congress are trying to scale down the Democratic Party's ambitions on stuff that really matters to working class people, and stuff that allows Democrats to go to the people and say, ‘look at what we did,” Hardy says. “It just shows how they've spent their political lives, they have never had that moment where they learned the lesson I learned. It's sad, honestly, for them as human beings, because they have the potential to do lots of good for other human beings.
“And from a pure political standpoint,” he adds, “it's ass-backwards. They could not be more confused about what it takes for our coalition to win elections. And yet, they are empowered and seen as mainstream.”
Hardy’s constituency is economically downtrodden, which puts his progressive politics in direct contrast to those of Joe Manchin, whose fiscally conservative antics work entirely against the interests of his poverty-stricken state.
“I get why Joe Manchin does performative stuff on on cultural things, but I have no idea why Joe Manchin does performative stuff on economic things,” Hardy says. ‘The evidence of how foolish his performances have been was that when they were considering the American Rescue Plan, the now-Republican Governor West Virginia was like, ‘What sense does the fact like if we spend a little bit too much money now? The consequences of that are minor as opposed to not spending enough.’ When even the Republican governor of your state is telling you that your position here is weird, you don't understand the people you're pandering to.
“If he votes to give seniors dental, vision, and hearing care through Medicare, how can one think that you're going to lose because of that?” Hardy adds, getting passionate. “These performances around the infrastructure bill or the reconciliation package, they’re not going to win any points there. But they can win points by delivering for working class people.”
The state’s Democratic Party has been largely inept in tagging DeSantis with the fallout of the Covid epidemic he’s caused in part because so many of its members have also sold out their constituents in exchange for special interest cash. Hardy has been a rare exception, aiming his opprobrium even at the sugar industry, a financial titan in the state whose campaign donations to both Democrats and Republicans alike won it immunity from being sued over the long-term damage it causes to residents’ health.
His willingness to speak out and vote against travesties like that one has won Hardy the support of most of the young progressive lawmakers who also voted against the sugar amnesty. The list includes state Reps. Anna Eskamani and Carlos Smith, regular interviewees here at Progressives Everywhere who have taken strong stands on behalf of Florida's increasingly marginalized working people.
The primary is crowded with Democrats, many of whom are more central to the long-failing Florida Democratic Party. Hardy, along with the activist organizations we’ve featured and the younger representatives who have endorsed him, represent a new hope for the state’s progressives, working day and night to overcome the rot that has taken them from a vast advantage in voter registration to on the verge of being overtaken by Republicans in that key metric.
“Many of the Democrats in our Congressional delegation are getting up in age, so there's going to be a changing of the guard and when that guard changes, the new folks stations at the helm of the Democratic Party in Florida need to be really in line with what's best for working class people,” Hardy says. “There will be opportunities to usher in a new guard that can provide new hope for Democrats who wants to see all of Florida go blue sometime in the near-future.”
Thanks to Ron DeSantis’ partisan gamesmanship, the special primary election will take place on November 2nd.
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