The Florida Democratic Party Needs Help Badly
Let’s pick up in Miami-Dade where we left off a couple months ago, when we saw an obvious legislative “flip opportunity” for the hard-pressed Democrats to pick up. Remember, Florida’s severely gerrymandered House has 84 Republicans and just 36 Democrats— a Democratic “Super-Minority”that has engendered Stockholm Syndrome in Tallahassee. HD-113 is a nice blue district in southern Miami-Dade that includes Key Biscayne, Dodge Island, Shenandoah, part of Little Havana and the part of Coconut Grove. Depending how it gets calculated, it’s either a D+12 or a D+17 district, pretty solid blue in either case. 57.9% of the registered voters are Dems and just 40.7% are Republicans. And yet… the local state Rep. Vicki Lopez, is a Republican, first elected, narrowly, in 2022 when DeSantis won the state by nearly 20 points.