Rarely do I disagree with Matt’s takes, but this is one where I’m just kind of dumbfounded. The difference between Harris and Trump’s vote percentages are nearly identical.
20 years ago, we all thought Texas was a decade away from turning blue. And the cities are mostly blue, but the surrounding suburbs and rural areas are mostly not. Hispanic Texan voters aren’t uniformly voting for Democrats anymore. Florida is more like Texas than Matt thinks, IMO.
>I do think that obviously the nominee would need to be a “different kind of Democrat” in some sense, including by being vocally hostile to Communist regimes in Latin America and clear-eyed about why a lot of people are allergic to the idea of socialism.
A candidate who did that would never win the nomination.
Now, Before the Midterms: There should be a massive effort to place a billboard on every major highway on the outskirts of every major town in every Red District in the Country identifying by name the U.S. Representative who voted for the Big Ugly Bill listing the eventual damages it will do to its citizens. The same should be done in every State with a Republican Senator up for reelection. Much of the bad stuff will not be apparent to voters until after the midterms; consequently, Democratic Party messaging between now and then is critical! We need to be in Republican Faces Every Day like they are in ours. I Think Mobile Billboards Would Also Work Well.
JUST AN EXAMPLE: "Your Representative in Congress, (first name, last name) Just Voted to slash Your Medicaid, Medicare, and SNAP Benefits to Pay for Tax Cuts for the Rich! VOTE HIM (HER) OUT."
Is that a slight overstatement of facts? Certainly, but that's what Republicans do all the time and we need to counterattack using the same tactics and be UBIQUITOUS about it, e.g., Billboards.
Each Billboard's message presupposes that Democrats in each District are smart enough to identity the hot button issues that will resonate with the intended Republican audience, be it Taxes, FEMA Support, Economy, ICE Overreach, Medical Coverage, infrastructure, Tariffs, etc. If Dems can't pinpoint the right issues, then billboards will have little effect.
I hate the idea of giving up on anywhere just because you haven't won it lately. The map is hard because democrats have been bad at winning elections, and now they're using that as an excuse for future poor performance. A culture of self defeatism all around. All this talk about how democracy is ending but they can't even find a candidate for a senate seat? Obnoxious.
The problem is that “they” don’t find a candidate. Candidates have to decide to run. It was a rare Howard Dean era effort to get the national party involved in ensuring that there were candidates in every single congressional race.
Waiting around hoping a great candidate will fall into their lap sounds like an epic abdication of responsibility. Actively building a pipeline of people to run for office in a relatively competitive place like Florida should be a fundamental task the party seems to have neglected.
Pretty tired of off-handed pejorative references to the Biden presidency from liberal pundits. Give it a rest. You've already overcommitted to a narrative that greatly exaggerates the extent of his issues, and you aren't helping anything by continuing to flog it.
Don’t know much about his politics, but I feel like ARod could be good, especially because his scandals have removed the good two shoes issues that can be a problem for dems.
i wonder if the democratic party should pull a "dan osborn." Miami State Senator Jason Pizzo is a wealthy legislative leader and former prosecutor who left the party earlier this year, allegedly over complaints with state party leadership (all FL dems complain about the state party), and with rigid party ideology on social issues.
Compared with Dave Jolly, a former republican congressman running for governor on an anti-trump platform, I imagine that Pizzo, a former Democratic party leader running on a moderate-left platform would do much better. But not if the two split the ballot
A Florida based Democratic elected official here. Florida shouldn’t be written off, but from inside the state it’s hard to feel optimistic.
• Statewide races are brutally expensive, with multiple very expensive media markets
• Republicans control state government and have played hardball to choke off donors and institutional support
• The state party has been perennially underfunded, disorganized, and poorly run
• Democratic morale is in the tank after watching Florida go from a swing state to deep red and now leaning into the worst impulses of the GOP. The lack of a clear explanation for how or why we got here just makes the outcome feel even more bleak. There was a lot of optimism for our blue state in 2008 for all the underlying reasons you cited, but it’s hard to keep leaning on those when so few of them have panned out.
It’s genuinely helpful to hear this reminder from outside the state. But it would be hard to find a Florida Democrat who feels good about where we are, which is why strong candidates are reluctant to raise the money and do the work for what is likely a loss to a far better funded Republican.
One out-of-the-box celebrity candidate could be John Morgan, the injury lawyer whose ads are everywhere, and has said he's thinking about running for governor on a third-party ticket. Longtime Dem donor, recent Dem party skeptic, funded two successful ballot campaigns, including one to raise the minimum wage.
I read the whole article, and war with Venezuala doesn't even get a mention. I don't personally know if it helps or hurts a Dem Senate challenge, that why I subscribe to MY. FL has a lot of Venezualan-Americans, I imagine they have feelings on this.
Yeah, but war? War seems like another level. Yes, plenty of hostility to socialism especially among Cuban & Venezuelan Americans, but how much feeling against US military adventures in the hemisphere? What if Maduro hangs on and there is a lot more suffering among poor Venezuelans? How do Puerto Ricans and Mexicans feel about all of this?
Cuban plus Venezuelan are outnumbered by Mexican plus Puerto Rican, by the way.
The problem with both parties is that what big money donors want and what voters want are two different things. Voters want support for small business, they want higher wages, more jobs and lower price increases. Big donor want corporate welfare, lower wages, lower hiring (AI will do this for them, and higher margins. Voters want good healthcare options they can afford. Big donors don't want government involved in healthcare at all, let corporate healthcare make all the decisions. RNC and DNC both follow whatever big donors want. So forget Florida and Texas. The DNC will be holding focus groups until 2027 hoping to figure out where they stand on issues.
I never said that big donors give more than small donors. That fact doesn't really matter. The DNC listens to big donors and tailors their agenda to appeal to as many big donors as possible. That point is mute though because the DNC is virtually broke. Instead of ramping up fundraising from small donors they spent the last three months on a report that they then threw in the trash because they didn't like the outcome. Like the recent election victories, it is going to take candidates raising their own money and running their campaigns with minimal support from the DNC which is hopelessly rudderless.
I don't get what's so hard about candidate recruitment. Wasn't Andrew Gillum just kind of Some Guy, and, with the benefit of hindsight, a pretty messed up one? And he almost won!
Like, you just gotta get somebody who can go out and talk a good game and put some money behind them. But no, the Florida Democratic Party is a political machine that rewards its own. The problem is that the machine breaks about as often as a McFlurry machine, and is even harder to get serviced, and there's nobody among "its own" that deserves to be rewarded with anything.
A hidden issue is for a variety of reasons, the Florida Democratic Party is uniquely bad and has been uniquely bad since basically the 60s when it was the first Dixiecrat party to lose hold of voters to the GOP in the actual South.
For the next sixty years, whether ran by Dixiecrats, conservative, moderate, or progressive Democrats, it's been kind of a shitshow, with the only outliers being insanely talented politicians (Lawton Chiles/Bob Graham) or running an astronaut in the state where astronauts started (Bill Nelson). The difference was, until DeSantis, the Florida GOP was a lightly corrupt Big Business-centered party that didn't go far out over their skies on cultural or social issues.
A combination of the overall shift in the GOP and migration by conservative people during COVID _and_ the shift of your typical migrations going from early Boomers to late Boomers/early Gen X meant a quick shift to the right. Like, I'd actually bet Kamala only lost by 4 or 5 among people who live in Florida prior to say, 2018.
You do not get better at winning in a state by declining to contest the election. At minimum Democrats should run a maverick candidate and see if a different message sticks at all.
Rarely do I disagree with Matt’s takes, but this is one where I’m just kind of dumbfounded. The difference between Harris and Trump’s vote percentages are nearly identical.
20 years ago, we all thought Texas was a decade away from turning blue. And the cities are mostly blue, but the surrounding suburbs and rural areas are mostly not. Hispanic Texan voters aren’t uniformly voting for Democrats anymore. Florida is more like Texas than Matt thinks, IMO.
>I do think that obviously the nominee would need to be a “different kind of Democrat” in some sense, including by being vocally hostile to Communist regimes in Latin America and clear-eyed about why a lot of people are allergic to the idea of socialism.
A candidate who did that would never win the nomination.
Now, Before the Midterms: There should be a massive effort to place a billboard on every major highway on the outskirts of every major town in every Red District in the Country identifying by name the U.S. Representative who voted for the Big Ugly Bill listing the eventual damages it will do to its citizens. The same should be done in every State with a Republican Senator up for reelection. Much of the bad stuff will not be apparent to voters until after the midterms; consequently, Democratic Party messaging between now and then is critical! We need to be in Republican Faces Every Day like they are in ours. I Think Mobile Billboards Would Also Work Well.
JUST AN EXAMPLE: "Your Representative in Congress, (first name, last name) Just Voted to slash Your Medicaid, Medicare, and SNAP Benefits to Pay for Tax Cuts for the Rich! VOTE HIM (HER) OUT."
Is that a slight overstatement of facts? Certainly, but that's what Republicans do all the time and we need to counterattack using the same tactics and be UBIQUITOUS about it, e.g., Billboards.
Each Billboard's message presupposes that Democrats in each District are smart enough to identity the hot button issues that will resonate with the intended Republican audience, be it Taxes, FEMA Support, Economy, ICE Overreach, Medical Coverage, infrastructure, Tariffs, etc. If Dems can't pinpoint the right issues, then billboards will have little effect.
I hate the idea of giving up on anywhere just because you haven't won it lately. The map is hard because democrats have been bad at winning elections, and now they're using that as an excuse for future poor performance. A culture of self defeatism all around. All this talk about how democracy is ending but they can't even find a candidate for a senate seat? Obnoxious.
The problem is that “they” don’t find a candidate. Candidates have to decide to run. It was a rare Howard Dean era effort to get the national party involved in ensuring that there were candidates in every single congressional race.
Waiting around hoping a great candidate will fall into their lap sounds like an epic abdication of responsibility. Actively building a pipeline of people to run for office in a relatively competitive place like Florida should be a fundamental task the party seems to have neglected.
Pretty tired of off-handed pejorative references to the Biden presidency from liberal pundits. Give it a rest. You've already overcommitted to a narrative that greatly exaggerates the extent of his issues, and you aren't helping anything by continuing to flog it.
Matt I think it's time you move to Tampa and play up your Cuban heritage!
Don’t know much about his politics, but I feel like ARod could be good, especially because his scandals have removed the good two shoes issues that can be a problem for dems.
i wonder if the democratic party should pull a "dan osborn." Miami State Senator Jason Pizzo is a wealthy legislative leader and former prosecutor who left the party earlier this year, allegedly over complaints with state party leadership (all FL dems complain about the state party), and with rigid party ideology on social issues.
Compared with Dave Jolly, a former republican congressman running for governor on an anti-trump platform, I imagine that Pizzo, a former Democratic party leader running on a moderate-left platform would do much better. But not if the two split the ballot
https://floridaphoenix.com/2025/04/24/pizzo-says-democratic-party-in-florida-is-dead-will-become-an-independent/
https://www.politico.com/news/2025/05/09/pizzo-governor-democratic-party-exit-00340240
A Florida based Democratic elected official here. Florida shouldn’t be written off, but from inside the state it’s hard to feel optimistic.
• Statewide races are brutally expensive, with multiple very expensive media markets
• Republicans control state government and have played hardball to choke off donors and institutional support
• The state party has been perennially underfunded, disorganized, and poorly run
• Democratic morale is in the tank after watching Florida go from a swing state to deep red and now leaning into the worst impulses of the GOP. The lack of a clear explanation for how or why we got here just makes the outcome feel even more bleak. There was a lot of optimism for our blue state in 2008 for all the underlying reasons you cited, but it’s hard to keep leaning on those when so few of them have panned out.
It’s genuinely helpful to hear this reminder from outside the state. But it would be hard to find a Florida Democrat who feels good about where we are, which is why strong candidates are reluctant to raise the money and do the work for what is likely a loss to a far better funded Republican.
One out-of-the-box celebrity candidate could be John Morgan, the injury lawyer whose ads are everywhere, and has said he's thinking about running for governor on a third-party ticket. Longtime Dem donor, recent Dem party skeptic, funded two successful ballot campaigns, including one to raise the minimum wage.
But what about Venezuala?
I read the whole article, and war with Venezuala doesn't even get a mention. I don't personally know if it helps or hurts a Dem Senate challenge, that why I subscribe to MY. FL has a lot of Venezualan-Americans, I imagine they have feelings on this.
``..being vocally hostile to Communist regimes in Latin America and clear-eyed about why a lot of people are allergic to the idea of socialism.''
Yeah, but war? War seems like another level. Yes, plenty of hostility to socialism especially among Cuban & Venezuelan Americans, but how much feeling against US military adventures in the hemisphere? What if Maduro hangs on and there is a lot more suffering among poor Venezuelans? How do Puerto Ricans and Mexicans feel about all of this?
Cuban plus Venezuelan are outnumbered by Mexican plus Puerto Rican, by the way.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hispanics_and_Latinos_in_Florida. How much has intense Castro hatred been passed down to Cuban immigrant;s children and grand children? (Venezualans are less than 10% of FL hispanic population)
It's complex. It isn't obvious to me whether on net war makes things easier or harder for a Dem challenge in Florida.
Seems worthy of more than an oblique reference in MY's column.
The problem with both parties is that what big money donors want and what voters want are two different things. Voters want support for small business, they want higher wages, more jobs and lower price increases. Big donor want corporate welfare, lower wages, lower hiring (AI will do this for them, and higher margins. Voters want good healthcare options they can afford. Big donors don't want government involved in healthcare at all, let corporate healthcare make all the decisions. RNC and DNC both follow whatever big donors want. So forget Florida and Texas. The DNC will be holding focus groups until 2027 hoping to figure out where they stand on issues.
Most money comes from small donors, not big donors.
I never said that big donors give more than small donors. That fact doesn't really matter. The DNC listens to big donors and tailors their agenda to appeal to as many big donors as possible. That point is mute though because the DNC is virtually broke. Instead of ramping up fundraising from small donors they spent the last three months on a report that they then threw in the trash because they didn't like the outcome. Like the recent election victories, it is going to take candidates raising their own money and running their campaigns with minimal support from the DNC which is hopelessly rudderless.
I don't get what's so hard about candidate recruitment. Wasn't Andrew Gillum just kind of Some Guy, and, with the benefit of hindsight, a pretty messed up one? And he almost won!
Like, you just gotta get somebody who can go out and talk a good game and put some money behind them. But no, the Florida Democratic Party is a political machine that rewards its own. The problem is that the machine breaks about as often as a McFlurry machine, and is even harder to get serviced, and there's nobody among "its own" that deserves to be rewarded with anything.
Charlie Crist is extremely tanned, tested, and ready
Seriously though, thought on Nikki Fried? I thought she seemed like a decent candidate and I think she’s the last Dem to win statewide office.
Nikki?? nah
“…Nikki Fried…”
You mean the chair of the Florida Democratic Party who needs medical marijuana?
Yes, how was she as a candidate?
She lost the Democratic Party primary for governor to a former Republican. So not a great candidate, I’d say.
A hidden issue is for a variety of reasons, the Florida Democratic Party is uniquely bad and has been uniquely bad since basically the 60s when it was the first Dixiecrat party to lose hold of voters to the GOP in the actual South.
For the next sixty years, whether ran by Dixiecrats, conservative, moderate, or progressive Democrats, it's been kind of a shitshow, with the only outliers being insanely talented politicians (Lawton Chiles/Bob Graham) or running an astronaut in the state where astronauts started (Bill Nelson). The difference was, until DeSantis, the Florida GOP was a lightly corrupt Big Business-centered party that didn't go far out over their skies on cultural or social issues.
A combination of the overall shift in the GOP and migration by conservative people during COVID _and_ the shift of your typical migrations going from early Boomers to late Boomers/early Gen X meant a quick shift to the right. Like, I'd actually bet Kamala only lost by 4 or 5 among people who live in Florida prior to say, 2018.
What’s Carlos Curbelo up to these days? Any chance he’s up for running as a Dem?
You do not get better at winning in a state by declining to contest the election. At minimum Democrats should run a maverick candidate and see if a different message sticks at all.