Florida Republicans special election ran a "no woke" agenda but their campaign flopped- Vote Blue!

Democrat Tom Keen is the new State Representative-Elect for Florida House District 35, which represents parts of Orange County and Osceola County.

Echo opinion by Scott Maxwell published in the Orlando Sentinel:

Something weird is happening in Florida. Democrats are winning. For the first time in years.😀😇

When Navy veteran Tom Keen surprised the political establishment Tuesday, flipping a legislative district from red to blue, it was huge.

How huge? Well, the last time voters cast ballots in this district, Republicans won by 11 points. On Tuesday, they lost by 3. That’s a big swing — especially in a race where Republicans massively outspent their opponents.

More significantly, from a big-picture standpoint, this Democratic flip in Central Florida comes on the heels of other big, surprising Democratic swings.

In Jacksonville — Gov. Ron DeSantis’ home turf, where a former head of the Republican Party of Florida had been mayor for years — voters also switched allegiances last year, putting a Democrat in the mayor’s office instead.

And in South Florida, Democrats barely lost a special election last month in a legislative district where Republicans had dominated by 30 points just a year before.

As one who has covered politics in this state for more than a quarter of a century, I can tell you this is not normal. 

For years, Florida Democrats have racked up one loss after another. Sometimes by wee margins. Often by landslides. But almost always consistent losses.

Yet now — after a few years of a GOP supermajority in Tallahassee fuming about Disney, drag queens and rainbow flags while insurance rates skyrocketed and SAT scores dropped — voters seem ready for a course correction.

It’s way too early for Democrats to start predicting a blue wave in November. They’ve done so many times before, only to be proven wrong, often in painfully embarrassing fashion.

But these recent results show a markedly different trend, possibly for two main reasons:

One is that, for the first time in recent memory, Democrats seem to have their act together. Instead of spending all their time carping on social media, they actively worked on get-out-the-vote initiatives.

The other is that middle-of-the-road voters — NPAs and moderate conservatives — seem to have finally had enough of the culture wars. They’ve seen too many books pulled from school libraries, too many laws passed trying to tell parents how to raise their kids and too many votes for clearly unconstitutional laws that were later overturned by the courts.

Screaming about Pride flags isn’t all that amusing to people who have seen their home-insurance jump 102% over just three years.

Yet Keen’s GOP opponent, Erika Booth, leaned heavily into the culture-war agenda. Literally, the No. 1 priority listed on her website was to “Fight Joe Biden’s woke agenda.” 

Booth did not talk about improving education or courting better-paying jobs. But fighting “Sleepy Joe” and “trans-education.” The homophobic boogeyman tactic seems pretty played out.

Interestingly, even Republicans seem to know their own culture-war crusades are backfiring. In one of the oddest, underhanded tactics in this race, Republicans set up a bogus campaign committee where they pretended to be Democrats and bashed Keen for supporting Gov. DeSantis’ signature “Don’t Say Gay” legislation. (Yes, that’s the phrase the Republicans used to refer to their own bill❗😳😧)

Another tactic that backfired was the scheme that led to this special election in the first place, giving Democrats the opportunity to steal the seat in Orange and Osceola counties. 

It never needed to happen. It only did because DeSantis decided to give the district’s former Republican rep a position running a state college. The gift was part of a trend of DeSantis handing out cushy higher-ed jobs to political buddies who have about as much higher-ed experience as my cat, Leona.

It was obvious cronyism. But Republicans figured: Who cares? We always win the seats anyway.

Only this time, they didn’t. This time, they faced an electorate that seemed fed up with the histrionics. So, while Booth ducked debates and put out missives about transgender issues, Keen focused on property insurance, affordable housing and reproductive rights.

Keen wasn’t originally backed by the establishment Democrats in the primary. But he campaigned alongside their progressive stars in the general, including Maxwell Alejandro Frost and Anna Eskamani, while continuing to stress his interest in the serious issues that mattered to all Floridians.

And it apparently resonated, not just with Democrats, but with moderate Republicans and NPAs. We know this because, while only 7,300 Democrats cast ballots in Orange County Tuesday, Keen fetched more than 9,400 votes.

Democrat Tom Keen won because people who weren’t Democrats wanted him in office. And that’s why Republican operatives all over Florida were quaking Tuesday night. They threw everything they had at this race and only managed to turn voters off.

Again, I still think it’s way too early to predict a blue wave in Florida in 2024. It’s hard to overstate the money-advantage Republicans will have. Democrats haven’t unseated a Republican from statewide office in more than three decades. If Trump is on the ballot in November, he’ll energize the Republican base in a way few other candidates can. And it’s worth re-emphasizing that Democrats still aren’t turning out at the polls the way Republicans do. A slightly higher percentage of Republicans still cast ballots Tuesday.

But for now, we’re seeing a trend that says moderate voters have had enough of the culture chaos and are looking to balance the scales a bit — which is something Florida hasn’t seen in a long, long time.

#VoteBlue