The #Resistance Playbook Fails Democrats in Florida

By Jim Geraghty

Tuesday, August 23, 2022

 

Today, Florida holds its primaries, along with New York and Oklahoma. Besides the surprisingly personal demolition derby in Manhattan discussed yesterday, perhaps the most intriguing primary will be in Florida’s Democratic gubernatorial primary, where former governor and current representative Charlie Crist and state agriculture commissioner Nikki Fried are competing for the right to lose to Ron DeSantis.

 

Florida Democrats will scream that that sentence is incorrect, and that the general election hasn’t been resolved yet. But in polling, DeSantis consistently leads Crist and Fried, and neither one is particularly close; in the RealClearPolitics average, Crist is trailing by 6.2 percentage points, and Fried is trailing by 9.6 percentage points.

 

There are good reasons to think that the governor’s race ended before it started. Four years ago, the Democrats had near-ideal political winds, with a broad national backlash to President Trump, and yet DeSantis still hung on to win by four-tenths of a percentage point over Andrew Gillum who, it turns out, was nowhere near ready for prime-time. DeSantis outperformed his final polling average by about four percentage points in 2018. The incumbent has more than $130 million to spend. The Democratic Governors Association is deprioritizing the state.

 

So why does today’s Florida primary matter? Because Fried entered the governor’s race attempting to run the “#Resistance” playbook against Ron DeSantis the way most Democrats ran it against Donald Trump in 2018 and 2020. (Trump fans may not want to acknowledge this, but the attacks largely worked, as Democrats gained control of the House, the Senate, the presidency, and a lot of governor’s mansions in those cycles.) Both as state agriculture commissioner and as a gubernatorial candidate, Fried channeled the progressive id, denouncing DeSantis as heartless, an authoritarian dictator, and a threat to the rights of women and minorities, accusing him of launching a “war on education” and “courting violent, white-supremacist insurrectionists.”

 

And . . . it appears that this approach is getting her nowhere. Never mind not giving Fried the lead against DeSantis. The angry #Resistance tone isn’t even getting her any traction against Crist, who’s not exactly a whirling dervish of raw political charisma.

 

The most recent poll has Crist ahead of Fried by nearly 30 percentage points; while one or two surveys point to a closer race, most have him leading handily. If Crist wins by the expected margin, it will be a case of a young progressive touted as the state party’s “new hope” crashing and burning when put before the electorate in the big stage — and falling flat when up against one of the most tired and well-worn retreads in the state. And perhaps the most interesting aspect of her defeat will be how Democratic interest groups turned their noses up at her.

 

Emily’s List endorsed Crist, even though he used to be pro-life. The state teachers’ unions are endorsing Crist, as are the state AFL-CIO, the state’s largest gay-rights group, and the state Sierra Club and Florida Conservation Voters. A few days ago, the Progressive Club of the Islands rescinded its endorsement of Fried and endorsed Crist, concluding that Fried had been too cozy with big industry during her term as agriculture commissioner.

 

She must be one of the very few Jewish political candidates to ever earn a rebuke from the Anti-Defamation League for comparing DeSantis to Hitler: “While public officials may have disagreements over policies, comparisons to the Holocaust and Nazism are inappropriate, offensive, and trivialize this unique tragedy in human history.”

 

Fried pitched herself as as a young rising star, the next great progressive hope. Yet she hasn’t actually won over progressive interest groups, which raises the question of where her actual base of support is.

 

At the beginning of the year, National Review’s Charlie Cooke contended that she was a wildly overrated candidate — in fact, he said she was:

 

The most inadequate, embarrassing, and downright befuddling political candidate the great state of Florida has seen in a long while. . . . In the last month alone, Fried has compared sitting governor Ron DeSantis to Adolf Hitler and a Communist dictator; she has implied that the northern part of the state is an extended trailer park, of the sort that will be easily swayed by suggestive selfies; and she has rewritten the story of the 2018 gubernatorial election to make herself its hero. Were he to have proffered Fried some professional advice, Walter Mitty himself might have urged her to calm down.

 

In the past eight months, Fried hasn’t done much to prove Charlie wrong.

 

If you think the media-hype-to-performance ratio of young progressive candidates is all out of whack, Nikki Fried is about to become your Exhibit A. And while it’s unlikely that many will heed the lesson of her loss, she’s vivid counterevidence to Democrats’ favorite explanation that they lose because they’re too nice and just aren’t tough or aggressive enough. Fried’s attacks on DeSantis have been more than nasty enough; judging from the reaction of Democratic interest groups, none of them have much faith that her I’m-running-against-Florida’s-Hitler approach is going to work. They took a long look at her and concluded, “Nah, we’ll go with the guy who lost his last two statewide campaigns.”

 

As for the likely Democratic nominee, Crist is an odd duck. A long time ago, Crist called Ronald Reagan his role model. He not-so-subtly auditioned to be John McCain’s running mate in 2008. Then Crist shifted to run as an independent once Marco Rubio was running a successful primary challenge in the 2010 Senate race, and then after Crist lost that race, he switched to the Democratic Party. (Along the way, he taped some truly cringe-inducing commercials for a personal-injury-law firm: “Its website includes auto accidents, cruise ship injuries and dog bites.”)

 

Eight years ago, I wrote about how Crist had nearly completed a political transformation, imagining a scenario in which the Charlie Crist of 2010 traveled forward in time to campaign against the gubernatorial bid of the Charlie Crist of 2014. I ended the piece, “Amid flashes of light and intense wind, a second time portal opened, and the Charlie Crist of 2018 appeared, denouncing Crist 2014 for being ‘too centrist’ and ‘insufficiently progressive.’” Looking at the once-unthinkably far-left agenda Crist has today, I was off by four years. Apparently, Crist’s lone unbreakable principle is his firm belief that he should be governor.

 

Today’s Florida is not the almost-evenly divided swing state of 2000 legends; the purple state has turned redder and redder, and Democratic statewide wins are growing increasingly few and far between. Democrats literally haven’t won a governor’s race in Florida since the last century, in 1994. They haven’t won a Senate race since 2012. (You would think Republicans from coast to coast would want to study why that’s the case and try to see what lessons they could apply to their own states.)

 

As recently as 2017, Florida had 4.8 million registered Democrats, outnumbering the 4.5 million registered Republicans. As of last month, Florida now has 4.9 million registered Democrats and almost 5.2 million registered Republicans. That big shift toward Republicans in the Latino vote? That’s happening in Florida.

 

What particularly stings Florida Democrats is that, not that long ago, they thought the state’s shifting demographics were about the lead them to permanent victory conditions. People forget that in 2012, Barack Obama almost evenly split the Cuban-American vote in the state, 47 percent to Mitt Romney’s 50 percent. Obama won the state of Florida in both 2008 and 2012, and not getting walloped among the state’s Cuban-American community was a key factor in those wins. Many Florida Democrats convinced themselves that Cuban Americans were starting to vote like more Democratic-leaning groups of Latino Americans.

 

As Charlie Cooke summarized:

 

Through its insistence upon perpetual masking, its preference for neologisms such as “Latinx,” its relentless attempts to push radicalism on children, and its indifference to the South American communists whom many Floridians have fled, the contemporary Democratic Party may finally have done the impossible: For now, at least, it may have made Florida a safely red state.