Category Archives: 2018 Election

The Miami New Times offers discussed #4, the Facebook group previously):

1. He spoke at a Muslim-bashing event alongside Milo Yiannopoulos and Steve Bannon.

…

3. He defended a supporter who said “bring back the hanging tree.”

…

5. He proudly associated himself with Sebastian Gorka, who has ties to a Hungarian far-right group that collaborated with the Nazis. …

If he’s not a bigot himself, he sure does pal around with them a lot.

Some people (including a commentator on this blog!) have said it’s unfair to suggest DeSantis’s “monkey” comment was an intentional (or unintentional) racist dog whistle. That’s his campaign’s line too.

DeSantis’s personal history is suggestive here. So you be the judge:

Ron DeSantis, the Trump-endorsed congressman who won Tuesday’s GOP primary for Florida governor, is an administrator on an active Facebook group where conservatives share racist, conspiratorial and incendiary posts about a litany of targets, including black Americans and South Africans, the “deep state,” survivors of February’s massacre at a Florida high school, immigrants, Muslims and, in recent days, John McCain.

…

The Facebook group, simply named Tea Party, has nearly 95,000 members, and users must join the group to post or comment. The banner for the group is an image of the Confederate, Christian and Gadsden flags flying alongside the flags of the U.S. and Israel. (It isn’t affiliated with the conservative group Tea Party Patriots.)

I’d say that at the very very least this is such a radical insensitivity to racism plus a bit of enabling behavior (being an admin for the group) as to count as the thing itself, especially for a person in public life.

Bill Nelson won primary day in Florida. Why do I say that when Nelson was uncontested in his primary, and Rick Scott — sure to be Nelson’s toughest-ever opponent — romped on the GOP side? Because Nelson, a very lousy campaigner who has never faced a tough election and now has one, will be on a ticket with two dynamic candidates who will spur turnout: Andrew Gillum (Governor) and Sean Shaw (Attorney General).

One wrinkle: Both Gillum and Shaw are Black, and this will excite the racist vote, which is not to be discounted in Florida. The Very Loud dog-whistles have already begun, with the GOP candidate for Governor Ron DeSantis blowing one loud in clear in his first post-selection TV interview, so loud and clear that the roof fell on him, and even Fox had to run a corrective.

Gillum is running as a pragmatic progressive, which is just the right note for Florida. Gillum-DeSantis is going to be quite a race:

Florida’s Republican candidate for governor, Ron DeSantis, is a Trump-endorsed lunatic …. His most viral campaign ad included a shot of him teaching his child about “building the wall” between the United States and Mexico even though Florida doesn’t share a land border with any other country. He has already begun sniping at Gillum, but the state Democrats have finally elected someone who might be able to counter bad-faith attacks from the state’s ever-surging right wing.

That’s because Gillum is a new breed of candidate for the Florida Democrats. The party is frequently beset by leadership struggles and is often the butt of jokes among reporters for its near-constant ability to lose easily winnable races in a state where registered Democrats outnumber Republicans. Rick Scott, for example, won two terms despite being a white-collar criminal and Medicare fraudster. The state’s Democratic candidates since 2000 have been former Republican Charlie Crist, former banking executive Alex Sink, Clintonite “New Democrat” Jim Davis, and Central Florida’s forgettable Bill McBride. To say Gillum’s platform is more exciting than Crist’s is like saying a Sherman tank has more firepower than a slingshot. Whether or not you like Gillum, it’s fair to say the state hasn’t seen a gubernatorial candidate like him before.

I’m sending in my contribution tonight.

I didn’t see that coming, but I’m very happy about it. Gillum is a great campaigner; as I argued previously Gwen Graham was just a dud. Florida is going to have a very interesting election season coming up.

None of the worst local candidates for judge got elected, but a couple of them sure got a lot of votes. More about that anon.