Whenever she’s faced with a vote on an important piece of legislation, Florida State Rep. Michele Rayner thinks back to a conversation she had back in 2018.
A civil rights attorney, Rayner was representing the family of Markeis McGlockton, a 28-year old Black man who was shot to death in front of his family over a parking space in Clearwater by a white man. McGlockton was murdered in cold blood, but his assailant had been allowed to leave the scene of the crime by police.
“I will never forget when Mr. McGlockton, Markeis’s dad, who I still talk to to this day, he looks at me and he says, ‘You know, Miss Rayner, I knew about Trayvon Martin, I’d heard about Stand Your Ground. I just never thought it would visit my house,’” Rayner reflects. “And when you’re voting, you’re not voting yes or no arbitrarily. Your vote has a real consequence on people’s lives.”
Rayner’s co-counsel on the case reminded her of the conversation when a St. Petersburg-area seat in the Florida legislature opened up the next year, encouraging her to pursue the opportunity to represent District 70.
At first, it didn’t seem like a viable option to Rayner. “I always thought that someone like me — I'm a black, queer woman, like, ain't always gonna vote for me,” she recalls.
As a public defender and then civil rights attorney, Rayner has had to have a crusader’s sense of justice and the mettle to survive reckoning every day with a society that all too often fails to provide it. Running for office would allow her to fight on behalf of more people, and so after conversations with friends, family, and State Sen. Shevrin Jones, the first Black LGBTQ legislator in Florida history, Rayner decided to go for it. She’d beaten the odds before — Markeis McGlockton’s killer was sentenced to 20 years in prison a year after the shooting.
Now in her second year as a Democratic state representative, Rayner has become a leading voice of resistance to one of the most aggressive and cruel Republican regimes in the country. And now, with a deeper understanding of how power works and how she can best help her community, Rayner is running for Congress in Florida’s 13th district.
Under the auspices of the uniquely cruel and ambitious Gov. Ron DeSantis, Florida has become a war zone, as the GOP trifecta in state government has launched a multi-front attack on anyone that is not a wealthy, cis straight white man.
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In 2021, the legislature passed a massive voter suppression law, gifted massive tax giveaways to corporations, authorized the mowing down of Black protestors, stopped trans kids from participating in school sports, and put a ban on schools teaching “critical race theory” (aka an honest accounting of history). This year is shaping up to be an even more vicious session, with the legislature in the process of enacting a draconian abortion ban and doubling down on its attack on teachers.
Not only do Republicans want to all but silence any conversation about race in the classroom, they’re also on the verge of passing what’s become known as the “Don’t Say Gay” bill, which would prohibit most discussions of gender identity and sexual orientation in classrooms. It would allow parents to sue teachers over any conversation in classrooms, which would essentially force many educators back into the closet and render children all alone during some of the most vulnerable moments of their lives.
As a Black lesbian, Rayner herself is essentially in the crosshairs. Not one to back down from a righteous fight, Rayner has led rallies and protests against the various proposals, made TV appearances to thrash DeSantis and his bigoted cronies, and used the amendment process to expose their most craven intentions.
“Because he's running for president, this has been deliberate. It’s clear that if you do not think like him, look like him, love like him, or are affiliated with the same party, that he really does not care how you feel,” Rayner says. “All of this is this the Republican playbook, and it really is a playbook to really disenfranchise the most marginalized of in our community.”
With so many problems plaguing Florida, why is Rayner running for Congress right now? Why head up to DC when Tallahassee is such a swamp of corruption and Florida has become one of the worst states for income inequality in the country?
For Rayner and the community members that convinced her to run for Congress, it’s clear that so many of the problems plaguing the St. Petersburg area and the state at large stem from federal inaction.
In November, when she ran a food drive in partnership with a local Publix, it was inundated with folks that she did not expect to see showing up at a food drive, a phenomenon that a friend who works at a food pantry told her was a regular occurrence. At the same time, Democrats in DC were bickering over how little help they should offer working Americans in a bill that has now been stalled inevitably.
“What's so frustrating is that… we keep electing folks who do not take into consideration the people living in their communities,” Rayner says. “We have the opportunity to pass these types of landmark legislation that will actually give people real relief immediately, and what are we doing? It’s not the lack of resources, it’s a lack of political will.”
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Rayner wants to push Congress to have the political will to codify Roe v. Wade, insist that states use relief funds to help families and not fuel tax giveaways, and protect students everywhere. And given her career representing low-income residents, history as a community organizer, and tireless grassroots work, Rayner has a deep understanding of how government can best assist and empower her constituents.
While obviously engaged with the high-profile issues that make cable news headlines, Rayner is almost more comfortable ticking off the local problems that only someone steeped in the community would identify. The gypsum stacks at Pitney Point that fuel deadly red tide swells, or the fossil fuel plant next to the elementary school, or the housing price surge that has led to a spike in eviction notices in St. Petersburg — these are what keeps Rayner up at night.
As we’ve been documenting for the past two years, Florida’s decline has run parallel with the collapse of the state Democratic Party. Rayner, like Reps. Anna Eskamani and Carlos Smith, has been fighting hard to remake the party, and this election offers an opportunity to make significant progress in that effort. In a district that is very likely to stay blue, Rayner is running against several other Democrats that hew closer to the party establishment. Two candidates have raised more money, in large part thanks to their embrace of corporate donations, but Rayner is confident that she’ll have more than enough to supplement what has been a very bottoms-up movement campaign.
That approach, Rayner says, is the difference between her local, people-powered approach to politics and what the state party, and indeed much of the national leadership, has pursued over the past decade.
“I think Virginia really was the tipping point, we as Democrats keep nominating the same kind of people and thinking we're going to do the same thing and get different results, but people don't turn out because they're not excited, because we're not giving people something to vote for,” Rayner says.
“There’s not a voice like mine in Congress,” she adds. “I would be the first out black lesbian woman to ever be elected to Congress and standing up the intersections of those identities. You legislate on your lived experience. I’m thinking about how policy is going to affect LGBTQ folks, women, how it's going to affect black folks and brown folks and minorities and other marginalized groups. I come from a working family. So I'm going to think about those things. It is the right time for someone like myself to step into this.”
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