MIAMI — Striking a celebratory tone during a Little Havana news conference, Florida Democratic Party leaders say their aim is to flip seats in November.
Party Chair Nikki Fried cited success in school board races, including in deep-red Sarasota County, where Democratic-aligned candidates flipped board control.
“People, again, are tired of the cultural wars in our school boards,” Fried said.
But they are also acknowledging the intra-party debate underway in the wake of a primary win for a democratic socialist: State Rep. Angie Nixon, D-Jacksonville, is now the party’s nominee for U.S. Senate.
That debate is laid bare in Miami-Dade, where Democratic Party Chair Laura Kelley admits, “socialism does not fly.”
“I’m not going to be a Democratic socialist apologist. There is no room in our party for people who would support, praise Fidel Castro, Nicolas Maduro and certainly not Hamas,” Kelley said. “And so I think that the Democratic Socialists of America, as an organization, remember, they’re not the Democratic Party. They’re an organization. They’re not even a political party. They’re a group of people that are truly, truly misguided.”
With all that in mind, Local 10 News asked Fried what she thought of Democratic voters’ choice.
“Well, first of all, you know, yo soy capitalista; we’ll start there,” Fried said.
When asked whether Nixon’s nomination makes it “impossible” for Democrats to flip the Senate seat held by incumbent Republican Ashley Moody, Fried pointed to organizing efforts that have flipped GOP-held seats.
“In the last two years, we have started what’s called the Punchland Project, which is year-round organizing that, as of yesterday, we had over 1.7, 1.8 million voter contacts from phones to door-knocks and having candidates talk to candidates and to voters all over the state of Florida,” she said. “And we’ve been able to flip 37 seats because of that.”
On the flip side, Democratic voters also nominated a former Republican to be the party’s nominee for governor, former U.S. Rep. David Jolly.
“I reject the DSA,” Jolly said. “I reject socialists. I am a capitalist.”
Kelley said, “As we move forward to the elections, I think that what we’ll see is, like, a fundamental understanding of what the difference between a Democrat and a Democratic Socialist is. And they’re not the same thing.”
As disparate party voices emerge from Tuesday’s primary, Fried said everyone is in alignment on one core concern: “Our state is completely unaffordable.”
Kelley agreed.
“When we have this big tent where you can have somebody who’s quite conservative to someone who is extremely progressive, we are going to have deep policy differences,” she said. “But there is a vast majority of things that we agree on. And I think we need to focus on what we can agree on. And that is what is going to move Floridians and our communities forward in terms of affordability, in terms of humanity, in terms of community building. I think those are the fundamentals that we can all agree on.
“It’s what Floridians care about most. And, frankly, 30 years of Republican rule in this state has only made it more difficult for us to survive, to thrive.”
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