If there was any hope of unseating Florida’s incumbent, DeSantis-appointed Republican senator, Democrats decided yesterday — by a vertiginous 12-point margin — to blow it up.
Ukrainian immigrant and retired Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman would be right to harbor grave reservations about his adopted country. For the third time, it has kicked him in the head: sacked from a national security post for courageously exposing a corrupt president; denied an Army promotion by the same, vindictive president; now, assaulted by his own political party.
But he’s a big boy. He’ll get over it. What lucid, levelheaded Democrats will never get over, though, is democratic socialist Angie Nixon’s Senate primary defeat of the moderate Vindman. And at that, Republicans will never stop laughing.
For one year, nine months and nearly two weeks America’s synaptically active population thought The World’s Daftest Voters were those who returned a convicted felon etc. etc. etc. to the White House. The neurons-firing folk stand corrected; the matter, updated; the madhouse, ascendant. The World’s Daftest Voters are, rather, Florida’s Democrats — the primary-ballot majority, anyway.
First elected to the Florida state House in 2020, [Nixon] received endorsements from Reps. Maxwell Frost, Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib.
[War veteran and former director on the National Security Council] Vindman received endorsements from Sens. Mark Kelly, Jack Reed and Tammy Duckworth; also the Miami Herald.
The two Democrats were vying to serve the last two years of Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s term, which is up in 2028. Whoever wins the November election will still need to run again in 2028.
On 15 July, Nixon told the Tampa Bay Times that Democrats are “chasing moderates who … don’t fight for working families.”
On 14 July, the Miami Herald wrote that Vindman “understands the main issues affecting the lives of Floridians” — working families.
The Herald added that Vindman’s “foreign-policy expertise would be crucial as a member of the Senate,” what with Trump running psychotically amuck across the globe. Sorry, globe. Instead you’ll get a political hack-election denying-naturally-Trump-endorsed Ashley Moody redux.
The simple, logical, incontrovertible choice laid before Democratic voters was so extraordinarily, almost embarrassingly obvious, the betting market odds of a Vindman primary victory ran as high as ninety-six percent.
For months, then, he ran a general election Senate campaign. Sure, thought the Vindman camp, the überprogressive activist types there shall be, come 18 August; but c’mon, ain’t no way a voting totality would be stupid enough to nominate a pink Democrat in red Florida.
Whereupon Ms. Nixon ginned up a solid ground game, and done thumped Mr. Vindman — who outspent her 16 times over, although his spending, too, was geared toward November. (Alex, you should not have listened to Satchel.)
Observed the Tampa Bay Times: “Get past the hyperbole and scaremongering” — to wit, Florida’s ghoulishly moronic Sen. Rick Scott: The Democrat party is run by AOC Mamdani … Some of them want all the capitalists killed — “much of what democratic socialists support is no more radical than expanding the safety net created by President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal.”
Which is true. Also true is that center-left Democratic pols like Vindman support the same safety-net expansions that democratic socialist pols and their supporters hysterically claim they’re against, indifferent to, or altogether ignore.
In short, the ever-virtuous D.S.A. practices sheer demagoguery. The very kind a Donald Trump could admire.
And so it goes. Such is politics. The much deeper problem with democratic socialism is … socialism — the word. It’s still a significant bugaboo in America’s moderate-to-conservative realms, which is to say, where the votes are.
Especially down there. “We won’t see [democratic socialism] in Florida,” said the chairwoman of the state’s Democratic Party to the Tampa Bay paper last month. “[We have] hundreds of thousands of Floridians who left their homelands fleeing socialism…. It won’t happen here.”
Said St. Petersburg councilman Richie Floyd, Florida’s sole democratic socialist in elected office: “We’re not making a play for the statewide races. We don’t have sway that way yet.”
Then, this gem. “Floyd said Democrats shouldn’t worry about democratic socialists.”
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