Florida Is Poised to Become Way Less Insane After This Election Season—but Only if Its Democratic Candidates Work Together

3 min readAh, Florida. You crazy-go-nuts national lunatic preserve. Where else could we top off a night of complete absurdity with the revelation that a sitting congresscritter was snooping through a constituent's mail? From the Orlando Sentinel:On the security video, [Republican U.S. rep. Randy] Fine—wearing a red hat and blue shirt from his campaign—is seen walking into the front porch, ringing the doorbell, then looking around for a moment before opening the wall-mounted mailbox and rifling through individual letters.He does not remove anything from the mailbox, nor does he place anything inside.Fine is famous for his venomous social-media Islamophobia. Maybe he was looking for tiny Al Qaeda terrorists hiding amid the supermarket circulars. And, if you were wondering, Randy the Peeper won his primary with 57 percent of the vote. In other news ...Item: If you could pick one white Democrat who would district-hop to take advantage of race-based gerrymandering, wouldn't you have chosen rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, who is now the Democratic candidate in Florida’s 20th congressional district? I would have.Item: I wish the Republican primary in the 19th congressional district never ended. Jim Schwartzel is now my lifetime enemy because he closed down the circus by being a relatively mundane rich-guy Republican, albeit one who squashed the president's chosen candidate (Catalina Lauf). However, now we have only memories of a primary field that included: forgotten nuisance Madison Cawthorn; two failed Illinois politicians, one of whom (Lauf again) once lost an election to the other one (Jim Oberweis); and two criminals pardoned by the president (Chris Collins, formerly R-NY, and John Strand). Schwartzel will win in November, despite this offense against democratic buffoonery, the bastid.Item: Alex Vindman, thank you for your service. You remain a Resistance Hero for your whistleblowing during Trump I, Impeachment I. However, you made a pretty lousy political candidate, and, in state representative Angie Nixon, you ran into a serious political buzzsaw. From The New York Times:The group of volunteers for her underdog Senate campaign sat inside a union office in suburban Broward County, a liberal stronghold in the increasingly Republican-leaning state. It was a small group, maybe a dozen people. But don’t worry, Ms. Nixon’s political director, Rachel Gilmer, reassured them: “This tiny room is part of many, many tiny rooms” across the state, she said, with more volunteers also ready to knock on Democratic voters’ doors. This is the best political advice I've heard out of a Democratic campaign in years. Those "many tiny rooms" got together on Tuesday and swamped an opponent who had the blessing of the national party establishment and a vast spending advantage. As a former field organizer—Udall '76—every one of my cynical cockles is warmed by stories like this.For now, the left is rejoicing in Ms. Nixon’s triumph. And others are examining the outcome to figure out how the heck she did it. The huge disparity between her fund-raising and Mr. Vindman’s was nowhere to be seen in the results. Ms. Nixon won by 12 percentage points, besting Mr. Vindman in every major metropolitan area except West Palm Beach. She won big not only in Duval County, where she lives, in Jacksonville, but also in Miami-Dade County, the state’s most populous, and in Broward County, where Mr. Vindman lives.This is what Aristotle called "a proper ass kicking." However, Nixon is also DSA-affiliated, so, naturally, there are many prominent Democrats who are rending their blazers over this development. However, consider that there were only two major statewide Democratic primaries on Tuesday. For governor, David Jolly won going away, and Jolly is a former Republican. For the Senate, Nixon won easily as a preposterous underdog. This is not a paradox. It is evidence of a potentially powerful—and blessedly heterodox—political party. If Jolly and Nixon are not on the same podium once a week for the next two months, somebody is asleep in one or both of those campaigns. Fck the pollsters who, because they've come to look backwards, see every new dawn as a sunset.