The Democratic Party's Political Gift to Ron DeSantis

[In It to Win It]

I thought this was an interesting article from New Yorker

The New Yorker

https://archive.ph/A4RPG

The story of Doral began as an immigrant’s dream. In the nineteen-fifties, a Polish real-estate developer and his wife set their eyes on a vast swampland, where they planned to construct a premier golf course. The resort, which they named the Doral Hotel and Country Club, attracted scores of Latin American visitors throughout the years. Luxury condominiums filled pastures where cows once grazed, and a sprawling downtown area featured schools, parks, and a trolley system. With time, Doral also drew in corporate executives, among them Donald Trump, who made a hundred-and-fifty-million-dollar offer for the club, in 2012, and renamed it Trump National Doral.

State Democrats issued a clarion call to the Party’s national leadership, urging them to double down on their investment in the county. The opposite happened: after investing nearly sixty million dollars in the 2018 midterm election, Democrats spent less than two million in last year’s race. For the first time in twenty years, Miami-Dade went Republican, with Ron DeSantis beating his Democratic opponent, Charlie Crist, by eleven points. It was clear that the Democrats’ passivity had come at a cost, but also that the G.O.P. messaging on everything from parental rights to the threat of communism was appealing to a growing segment of the electorate.

In the midterms, Florida proved to be the only state in the country where the red wave fully panned out. Along with DeSantis’s trouncing of Crist, Republicans flipped three House seats, and the number of registered Republicans in Florida surpassed that of Democrats—a historic first. Andrea Mercado, who leads the liberal advocacy group Florida Rising, estimated that Republicans had outspent Democrats by more than three hundred and fifty million dollars. Some losses, as in Doral, where Republican turnout far exceeded that of Democrats, were particularly hard to process. Mercado saw them as an unmistakable sign of entrenched G.O.P. gains, and she said that Democrats had only themselves to blame. “The reality is,” Mercado said, “you just don’t win the races that you don’t run.”

This year, Fabio Andrade, a sixty-five-year-old Colombian American executive, spent most of his time in Doral. The city—also known as Doralzuela, for its growing Venezuelan diaspora—is where Republicans, last winter, opened the Party’s first Hispanic Community Center in Miami-Dade County. Andrade is the founder of Republican Amigos, a group of Latinos dedicated to energizing the Party’s base in South Florida.

Halfway into the networking session, Andrade slid into a booth and urged everyone around him to fill up their drinks. His party’s gains, Andrade told me, hadn’t happened overnight. For him, it went back to the mid-nineties, when he settled in Miami and took a job as an airline manager. Thousands of Colombians were fleeing the country’s protracted conflict between leftist guerrillas and the conservative government; many of them landed in South Florida. At the time, Andrade saw the need to rally local politicians around the Colombian government’s cause. He reached out to members of Congress and lobbied for their support. Chief among the Colombian community’s demands was the need for asylum. “They listened to us,” Andrade said, of the Florida Republicans in Congress. “I guess they were making an investment in the future—making sure they did it right for us, because tomorrow we would be there voting.”

[LakeArenal]

1. I have heard many times right here on DU that money is wasted on races like Florida.

It happened twice in Wisconsin where a little Dem attention and some finding, I believe, would have made a huge difference.

[In It to Win It]

2. While I understand why people say that, if we write states off then

how do we ever hope to expand the party?

Winning in several states is a long shot for Democrats, but not investing means we never will win. That means we'll never go beyond 51 senate seats because everywhere else would be considered a waste of money or not worthy of investing.

In 2024, the closest thing we have to flipping is Florida and Texas, two states we have been getting beaten in. I understand why people think it's a waste, but if we stop trying, then these are states that we'll never win.

[LakeArenal]

3. Exactly.