Tangled up in blue

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“While last night’s results are tough and deeply painful, they also reflect what happens when we have little infrastructure to turn out voters and carry our message directly to them. It is deeply frustrating for Florida to have been abandoned by national donors who for years invested in races only to disappear when we needed them most … without resources, being outspent 4- and even 5-to-1 becomes unsustainable to build a successful path to victory,” she said in a statement Wednesday morning.

Jones said Republicans have “played the long game” by “investing in a statewide infrastructure with real depth and breadth,” while drawing favorable legislative and congressional maps and “implementing consistent, concise messaging.”

“Meanwhile, Democrats have taken large swaths of the electorate for granted, chased the ‘shiny object’ of the day from a messaging standpoint — oftentimes landing on disjointed, tone-deaf themes — empowered the same few consultants despite loss after loss, and failed to build a sustained presence and organization in communities across the state. The result? 30 years of GOP control and a staggering affordability crisis that is unsustainable,” he said in a lengthy statement distributed the morning after the election.

Democrats also need to “play the long game” if they want to succeed, Jones argued.

“It is unproductive to point fingers, particularly because these are not singlecycle problems,” he said. “Rather than holding Republicans accountable for their failed economic policies and lack of vision that have brought us to this dire moment, the Democratic Party and its leadership, myself included, have fallen asleep at the wheel, letting the GOP control the narrative and gain more electoral ground.”

Democratic consultants also weighed in.

“I say this with all respect to activists who tried, but there was no turnout effort in Florida. Zilch. We saw what happens when one side combined massive communications edge with a well run turnout effort competes against a side with neither,” Steve Schale, who ran former President Barack Obama’s Florida campaign in 2008, tweeted Wednesday.

Kevin Cate, a Tallahassee consultant who worked on Democratic Agriculture Commissioner Nikki Fried’s failed bid for governor, made a chilling prediction as the results poured in Tuesday: “At the rate Florida is going, an NPA candidate for governor may have a better shot than a Democrat in 2026. It’s that bad. Complete collapse. We either reset or go extinct,” he tweeted.

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BY ALEX GALBRAITH The Florida Democratic Party is

perhaps the most inept state wing of our two-party system in the entire United States.

For proof, you need look no further than last night’s election results. In a state that is pretty evenly split between Republican and Democrat registered voters, the Dems managed to get absolutely trounced in the first election post-widespread banning of abortion rights.

Following the uprisings against police violence that spread across the country in recent years, the best that Florida Democrats could manage to muster against a genuinely unlikeable career politician … was an actual cop. The best candidate they could muster to challenge sniveling shitheel (and future president?) Ron DeSantis was another goddamn Republican. It’s a move so out-of-touch with the wants and needs of their voter base that it borders on negligence.

It simply didn’t have to be this way. But the people with money and power in the state’s Democratic apparatus assured us that pulling toward the center would peel off enough disaffected GOP voters to get over the two decade-hump that Democrats can’t seem to summit. These prognosticators and consultants held onto their knowing, shiteating grins until the exact moment that they got kicked in the teeth.

The statewide bloodbath for Democrats was highly predictable. Andrew Gillum, the previous Dem gubernatorial candidate advocated for progressive ideas, and he came within a hair of taking Tallahassee despite his many, many personal problems.

Instead of seeing an opportunity to energize their base this time around, state Democrats learned the wrong lesson and trotted out a conservative that excited no one. They reaped a nearly 20-point asskicking.

To be fair, Florida Dems aren’t entirely to blame for thinking that their future lie in disaffected Republicans and “independent” voters. It’s the same model that’s made the Democratic Party a loser on the national level. Rather than offering new ideas and proposals that will energize the largely immiserated American public, Democratic Party planners have spent the last several decades questing after the votes of mythical suburbanites who feel disgusted by the direction of the GOP.

These people do not exist. They are people like our governor, who may not agree with all of the rhetoric of QAnon-addled idiots and venomous, anti-trans activists, but are willing to go along with it if it cements their power. Mitch McConnell doesn’t worry about how his moves play in the exurbs of Lexington and all he has to show for it is everything he’s ever wanted. Moderates and independents will inevitably vote for the more conservative party when the chips are down.

The Democratic Party continues to kowtow to these people at their own peril. The GOP and its acolytes are so far gone that they think Joe Biden (Joe fucking Biden!) is a socialist dictator hell-bent on insitituting sharia law in your local pre-school.

Biden’s years of work in defense of every major corporation as the senator from the country’s biggest tax scam don’t matter. The fact that he was the prominent Democrat voice defending Clarence Thomas in his eventual appointment to the Supreme Court doesn’t matter. His work to make sure that student loans are the only loans that can’t be discharged in bankruptcy doesn’t matter. To the average Fox News viewer, he has the views of a young Mao Zedong and the brain of an old Ronald Reagan.

National Democrats have responded by cutting their own policy proposals off at the knees, means-testing them to the point of uselessness so that they won’t be painted as radical bomb-throwers. It doesn’t matter, because the right-wing machine is more than willing to call anything they do a Communist plot for pedophiles.

“Take your ideas from the Republican Party platform of 1993 for a long walk on short pier, Stalin,” the endless string of Fauntleroys on Fox News’ primetime slots regurgitate directly into their viewers’ mouths.

Funnily enough, the actual solution is to become the stuff of Republican grandparents’ nightmares. With the climate crisis and ongoing inequality, we are fast reaching the point of socialism or barbarism. It’s too much to expect the Democrats — whose job, like the Republicans, is to keep the money spigot flowing for the impossibly wealthy — to start setting up barricades, but they could run candidates who nod toward the progressive views of the people who might actually vote for them.

But we’ve been in this game long enough to know better. We look forward to the 2026 gubernatorial race between Republican Marco Rubio and Democrat Randy Fine.

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