Three Black Women ran for office in 2018 without any support from their Democratic state party’s and they almost won. One lost by only 220 votes. (Joan Walsh wrote about this recently in The Nation) So this year, 2020 you’d think the party would be backing women in these same races right? Well, you would be wrong.
Kathy Lewis is one of those candidates who ran in Florida and got 46.5% of the vote. That was running against the incumbent too, this year there is no incumbent. You would think the Florida state party would be all over her race. Nah, you know better than that by now.
Kathy Lewis is a fantastic candidate who would be an incredible representative of her community in the Florida Senate,” said Anders Croy, a spokesman for the Democrats’ Senate Victory effort. “We are continuing to monitor her race as we move toward election day.www.tampabay.com/..
This whole article is good but I found the above quote baffling; the Florida Senate Victory (the Senate Democratic caucus group responsible for flipping and holding seats) are “monitoring her race”? What does that mean? They’re watching for news of it in papers? On TV? They certainly aren’t supporting her in any way.
Barry Edwards, campaign advisor to Darryl Rouson, the only Black state senator in the region, feels that Darryl Rouson will not be endorsing Kathy Lewis; that her Republican opponent is polling too strong.
(If you like numbers there are 2 great pieces about this race here: The Sheer Incompetence of The Florida Democratic Party Could Sentence All Of Us To 4 More Years of Trump and here: Districts like this could win us the Presidential election)
I called Rouson’s campaign to check that info and he denied it, saying he hasn’t decided yet, that it was a long time until the election. I told him politely that I was confused, there are 2 candidates running in the race and only one was a Democrat, what was there to decide?
He called me back later to try to clear the matter up, saying that Kathy Lewis was a very nice person. I repeated my confusion about why a Democrat would have a hard time trying to decide to endorse the only Democrat in the race. He interrupted me to ask if I didn’t think it was confusing that Kathy Lewis hadn’t called him to ask for his endorsement.
My answer was that that I thought the big guys should be reaching out to the little guys. There are 17 Democratic Senators currently serving and none of them have reached out to Kathy Lewis. If they want to be in the majority they need her to win and they need to start helping her out. In the meantime we here at Daily Kos can help her!
Everything I write, including, but not limited to, my name, Tracy B Ann, belongs solely to me.
