Some Florida Democrats are looking for who to blame after struggling during the 2024 elections, continuing a downward slide for the party in the state.
Vice President Kamala Harris only got 43% support in Florida. President Biden got almost 48% support in 2020. Democrats also only won six of Florida’s counties this election cycle, when they won almost a dozen last cycle.
Florida Senate Democratic Leader Jason Pizzo isn’t shy about where he places the blame. In an interview with WFSU, Pizzo points his finger at National Democrats, who he believes has had ineffective messaging for Floridians. He also places blame with certain members of the Florida House Democratic caucus, which he didn’t name specifically but identified as being far left and very active on social media.
He called them Republican’s favorite Democrats because he believes they have pushed for socially divisive issues like defunding the police, which allows Republicans to get a pass on how they are failing Floridians economically.
“I don't want, nor is it necessary, nor is it important, nor is it pressing to talk about transgender high school athletes, CRT, woke AP African, all this book banning, all this ***, it's all allowed deflection and distraction from actually rolling up our sleeves and taking care of the issues that are most important to families,” he said.
Pizzo said when those members do talk economics, they do so in a way that is unnecessarily demonizing successful people. One issue he points to is rent control. Some of the Democrats in the House tried to fight a preemption in 2022 that keeps Florida cities from passing rent control ordinances. At the time, Pizzo called rent control socialism. Now, he said some members of the left were trying to misrepresent who are actually landlords.
“Most of the landlords were not, you know, huge corporations. They might have been retired teachers or plumbers who had one or two apartments as an investment as basically as their nest egg, and there was no cap. And this is what people fail to realize. But while we were all sympathetic to the tenant, the landlord who owned that unit, it's not a homesteaded unit, so there's no cap on their property tax increases. There's no cap on their insurance. They have debt service and mortgage payments that they're making on that unit,” he said.
Although he didn’t name her explicitly, one of the more progressive members of the Florida House who is also active on social media and backed rent control is Orlando Representative Anna Eskamani. She said its Republicans, not Democrats, waging a culture war.
“It’s not the Left that's talking about those issues, it's the Right. So, and I think that's a really important distinction here every issue he just named, it's not Democrats who are filing a bill, it's Republicans who are filing a bill to distract from real issues,” she said.
Eskamani backed the Orange County rent control ballot initiative that the state legislation preempted. She said would have exempted mom and pop landlords and allowed rent raises with property tax increases. She believes pushing for issues like rent control is part of the reason she has been successful.
“Ironically, the one that he's railing about, rent control, the voters in Orange County voted for it, approved it," Eskamani said. "That was, by the way, the same cycle where we had a penny sales tax on the ballot for transportation, and voters rejected that, and there was millions of dollars spent in support of the penny sales tax referendum campaign-wise, and millions of dollars spent against rent stabilization by the Florida realtors, and it still passed.
"So, I mean, it is an issue that voters really care about, because they're feeling exploited by their corporate landlords. I mean, they pay high rents and don't get benefits from that. I'm a renter still, so I empathize with that too.”
Both politicians pointed to their electoral success this cycle as evidence that their vision for Florida Democrats is how to move the party forward.
Pizzo won his Broward seat by about 58%. Eskamani also won her seat by 58%, though hers was more Democrat-favored.
Both had Republican challengers, but Pizzo’s opponent, Imtiaz Mohammad, was a Democrat in 2020 and received little political contributions or support from the GOP.
Greg Pull, Eskamani’s challenger, got $40,000 in political donations, including over $23,000 directly from Florida GOP sources.
It wasn’t all losses for Democrats against Republicans this cycle either. Democrat Leonard Spencer flipped Orange County’s House District seat 45. Florida House Minority Leader Fentrice Driskell said they were able to win that seat by talking about kitchen table issues.
“If you look at the Florida House Democratic caucuses platform over the past few legislative sessions, it actually includes no culture wars. What happens is the Republicans, the extremist Republicans, tend to bring these fights to our doorstep,” she said.
She said her caucus in the house is united on core values, but members represent 35 different constituencies.
“I think that it's important to stay focused on the issues and not so much what divides us. I think it's really easy to try to, you know, Monday morning quarterback an election and pick apart all the things that went wrong," she said.
"I'm really interested in figuring out how we move forward and how we uplift the stories of everyday Floridians who, frankly, are getting trampled by the Republicans inaction on property insurance and housing affordability. That's our opportunity right now.”
One element to disagreements between Pizzo and Eskamani is that both are on political watcher’s shortlist of potential contenders for the 2026 Democratic gubernatorial nomination. Certainly, what direction to take the struggling party would be one of the issues at center stage during that contest, regardless of who runs.
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