Florida Democrats, God love ’em, are nothing if not endlessly fascinating (which might, in this case, be a synonym for “ridiculous”). Also predictable, which works in Florida Republicans’ favor.
Eight months after an election-season massacre that made the Little Big Horn look evenly matched, Sunshine State representatives of the nation’s oldest political party gathered for their annual Leadership Blue confab/fundraiser over the weekend, vowing to rise like the fabled Phoenix.
About that. In the thoroughly unionized Fontainebleau Miami Beach, 700 elites of the party that not long ago unceremoniously banished Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson from its collective memory turned what ought to have been a clear-eyed wounds-licking, mea-culpable-pleading, forward-looking fix-what’s-broke session into a redoubling, perhaps even re-tripling, of the wrongheadedness that led to their historic drubbings last November.
Not that they saw it that way.
Florida Democrats are putting on a brave face and professing confidence that they’ve started to slow — and even reverse — the downward slide that has seen them come close to irrelevance as Republicans have surged.
“I am feeling optimistic — very optimistic,” Alfredo Olvera, Broward’s state Democratic committeeman said during a break Saturday at the Florida Democratic Party’s annual summer Leadership Blue conference and fundraiser.
“The excitement is genuine. We haven’t disguised the challenges with optimism,” Olvera added. “We are aware of the problems, and we are creating a path to win in 2024. We were absent in 2020. We were absent in 2022.”
Well. They can believe that if they want to. Facts suggest there’s more missing-in-action business ahead.
At the midpoint of 2023, registered Republican voters outnumber Democrats by nearly a half-million, and, month-by-month, continue to extend their lead.
This is no small thing. Until November 2020, Republicans had never gone into an Election Day with a lead in registered voters. Never. Indeed, as recently as 2008, registered Democrats held a 700,000 voter lead, their modern-day apex in the Sunshine State.
Since then, Democrats have been bleeding voters — in registrations and at the polls. (Thanks, Obama!)
One thing outsiders gleaned from the clueless defiance resonating throughout the ballrooms of the fabled Miami Beach hotel: The party’s leader does not hold exclusive rights to the slinging of obscene invective. If you took away their ability to drop F-bombs, today’s Democrats couldn’t construct a complete sentence.
A sample: Here’s a tasteful advertisement posted to Twitter by Florida Democratic Party chair Nikki Fried.
Republicans are trying to burn our state and your @FlaDems to the ground.
Not on our fucking watch. pic.twitter.com/9vySYWr3hv
— Nikki Fried (@NikkiFried) July 8, 2023
She seems nice.
Keep that in mind as you consider their impassioned pleas to put sexually explicit content on the classroom bookshelves of second-graders. Maybe it’s the high school English teacher’s son in me writing here, but this resolute inability — or unwillingness — to express outrage without resorting to vulgarity illustrates a severely circumscribed imagination.
Whether coarseness in vocabulary contributes to coarseness in character is a study for social scientists, I suppose. But it’s revealing that the same folks who were working blue at the Fontainebleau support unfettered access to abortion — plus taxpayer funding — through birth, the medical mutilation of youngsters suffering from the current social contagion, and easily a dozen other activities that, until about two minutes ago, respectable people, Democrats included, considered depravities.
This characterization may not describe all Democrats — no characterization can — but it’s the quilt that covers the loudest and most influential of the lot.
And so they gathered on Miami Beach to demonstrate they learned nothing from November 2022. Instead, focusing their animus on Ron DeSantis, Florida’s governor, GOP presidential hopeful and chief antagonist, they dug in on relaunching the policies that doomed them to super-minority status in November.
First highlight: The far-left, obscenity-laden, grievance-riffing of famous-for-West Wing actor and keynote speaker Bradley Whitford.
Calling him “Little Ronny D” and a “cocky little wannabe MAGA dictator,” Whitford declared (using the party’s preferred present participle), “Ron DeSantis is a f—ing coward. He’s afraid of history. He’s afraid of people loving each other. He’s afraid of people who are different from him. He’s afraid of Donald Trump.”
Did we mention stuff you can believe as you want to? Yeah. This is more of that.
The evening was capped by what the elite of the elite no doubt considered the pièce de résistance, a “raucous” performance by West Palm Beach drag queen Velvet Lenore. The audience, predictably, roared.Yeah. Let that be a lesson to you about coming between drag queens and children, Governor.
In a shot at @RonDeSantis drag queen Velvet LeNore at the conclusion of @FlaDems Leadership Blue fundraising dinner in Miami Beach. DeSantis and Republicans are “trying to say drag is a crime, and it’s not,” LeNore said. pic.twitter.com/MAOEshsPls
— Anthony Man (@browardpolitics) July 9, 2023
Of course Lenore mischaracterized the legislation passed this year. Ignore the truth. Embrace the narrative. Because that’s what they’ve got.
The bubble is strong — if thankfully shrinking — with this set. We celebrate their all-is-well Gold Coast hubris, even as the Sunshine State grows noticeably more crimson by the day.
Give Democrats their we’ll-be-back weekend, knowing, once again, the presidential election, nor the balance of the Senate, will not come down to Florida-Florida-Florida.
