A first step to making Democrats in Florida relevant again
And some exciting news otherwise
Welcome to a Saturday evening edition of Progress Report.
If you celebrated Thanksgiving, I hope that you had a fun and relaxing holiday. If you don’t celebrate Thanksgiving, I hope that you had a fun and relaxing Thursday.
In this evening’s newsletter, Thomas Kennedy, our man in Florida, is back with some new insight into how the party can start to move forward with reforms that will broaden its base and presence in the minds of voters. Then, for premium subscribers, we’ll look at some of the bigger — if unsung — stories happening around the country.
by Thomas Kennedy
The 2022 midterm elections were brutal for Florida Democrats, as their top-of-ticket candidates lost by 15 points amid depressed turnout from voters that did not flip to Republicans.
The past few weeks have been filled with finger-pointing, diagnoses, and proposed plans for rebuilding the party. Many of those proposals — including my own — involve long-term investment in building organizational infrastructure, but there is one thing Florida Democrats could do right now to improve their prospects: Open up their primaries to independent voters, known in Florida as NPAs.
This is not a radical or far-fetched idea that I’ve plucked out of the ether, nor is it some random thought that I’m tossing at a dartboard out of desperation. It’s been proposed over and over again, by people with high-ranking roles within the party.
Back in 2019, Aaron McKinney, former State Committeeman for the Miami-Dade Democrats, wrote an op-ed advocating for opening up the Democratic primary process. Later that year, the Miami-Dade Democratic Executive Committee passed a resolution calling for the same. And earlier this year, Miami-Beach Mayor and former Florida Democratic House Minority Leader Dan Gelber wrote a letter to Florida Democratic Party Chair Manny Diaz urging him to take the necessary steps to open our primaries.
There are a number of reasons to pry open the party’s primaries, each of which serve to expand the appeal of the party and the size of the Democratic coalition.
First, party primaries in midterm and presidential years are held in late August, which means that campaigns have just a little over two months to do voter outreach for the general election in November. Through most of the election cycle, we spend precious resources targeting Democratic primary voters with increasingly hyper-partisan language that might not resonate with the broader electorate.
About a third of all Florida voters are independents. Opening our primaries will incentivize our candidates and organizational efforts to listen and speak with more voters who hold different views and opinions. It will force us to craft a more appealing message that resonates with a larger pool of voters.
That doesn’t mean that we modulate our views and opinions towards conservatives who don’t hold our values, but the reality is that a lot of NPAs are working people who don’t feel represented by either party, care about working class pocketbook issues, and are not being intentionally and meaningfully outreached by Democrats beyond superficial get out the vote efforts that take place late into election season.
There is an argument that open primaries will result in more “centrist” or “moderate” candidates, but that’s not necessarily true. After all, the party nominated a former Republican for governor this year.
A majority of Florida voters have proven themselves ready to support progressives issues when presented to them through nonpartisan statewide ballot initiatives. Restoring voting rights to those formerly convicted of felony offenses, raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour, and legalizing medical marijuana are just some examples of things that Floridians approved with over 60% of the vote when given an opportunity to weigh in on them.
While Floridians support progressive issues and economic policies geared towards helping working people, the party hasn’t always rallied behind them (see the $15/hour minimum wage in 2020, for example). Instead, many Democrats running for office in Florida have chosen to focus on niche issue that don’t resonate with voters, or otherwise engage in cheap sloganeering that neither inspire confidence nor provide substance.
A recurring message from Florida Democrats is to simply point at the Republicans and say that if you don’t elect us, you’ll be stuck with these lunatics. While Republicans in Florida are extremists who have overseen a deepening property insurance crisis and skyrocketing housing prices while defunding public education, refusing to act on climate change, and curtailing civil liberties, their more than two uninterrupted decades in power suggest that Floridians need a more substantial pitch in order to ditch them.
By opening up the primaries, we’d be giving more than a third of voters in Florida a reason to pay attention to pay attention to Democratic campaigns and consider different candidates’ credentials and policies. Instead of having to introduce themselves to the states with precious few weeks left, a Democratic nominee will be well-known by a massive segment of the voting public.
Democrats have good ideas and a vision for progress and democratic inclusion in Florida and we need to articulate that to the growing number of NPA voters who feel disenfranchised by the two party system. Opening our primaries is not a silver bullet that will fix all the issues with which the Florida Democratic Party is currently grappling, but it’s something that we can do right now to begin steering us in the right direction.
Thomas Kennedy is an elected Democratic National Committee member from Florida. You can find him on Twitter and Instagram at @tomaskenn
Some might slay it’s been a slow news week, and politically speaking, they’re not wrong. But there was plenty going on out at the picket lines and some important headlines that went under the radar, including a promising update on abortion rights, so let’s dig into it, notebook style:
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