The Patriot Post® · Florida Used to Be a Swinger

There he was, the former Democrat candidate for governor, lying on the floor of a ritzy South Beach hotel room, snuggled up next to a pile of his own puke. And with a male, er, escort no less.

That was March 13, 2020, and less than two years earlier, Andrew Gillum, the corrupt and drug-addicted former Tallahassee mayor, had come within a whisker of being Florida’s first black governor. But a relatively unknown Republican congressman, Ron DeSantis, barely edged him out, 49.59% to 49.19%.

And the rest, as they say, is history.

Florida used to be the swingiest of swing states, the electoral-vote must-have for both Republicans and Democrats. But then, after the 2000 Bush-Gore fiasco, during which the Democrats and their mainstream media accomplices came within a too-early network call and 537 Palm Beach Jews for Buchanan of stealing the presidency, Florida began to turn red.

It started with a succession of excellent Republican governors — Jeb Bush, Rick Scott, and now DeSantis — who began by fixing the state’s schools, making it more business-friendly, and opening it up to overtaxed Republicans from New York and other liberal East Coast enclaves.

Today, Florida is solidly red and boasts 30 electoral votes, making it the nation’s third-largest haul behind only Texas and California. And last night’s primary elections did nothing to help the beleaguered Democrats’ cause in the Sunshine State.

As expected, Trump-endorsed Congressman Byron Donalds won the Republican gubernatorial primary, and he thus becomes the solid favorite to replace the term-limited DeSantis as the state’s next governor — and thus the state’s first black governor.

That’s pretty cool, no? Unless, of course, you’re a race-driven identity-politicking Democrat — in which case you’re reaching for the Maalox because you know anything that depresses your heretofore lockstep black voting base is an existential threat to your hold on power.

Donalds, a husband and father of three boys, has a really nice bootstraps story, too. Born and raised in Brooklyn by a single mom, migrates to Florida, graduates from Florida State University with a degree in finance and marketing, then tackles careers in finance, insurance, and banking before becoming a U.S. congressman representing Florida’s 19th Congressional District.

Donald Trump’s long-ago endorsement of Donalds will likely help Republicans nationally among black voters, as Donalds inevitably makes his way into the spotlight and becomes better known across the nation. (Back in the day, the networks would hide a black Republican like Donalds from public view, but that’s a lot tougher to do in the age of social media.)

Elsewhere in Florida, in the Senate race on the Democrat side, a crazy whitey-hating Democrat Socialist named Angie Nixon beat Alexander Vindman — yes, that Alexander Vindman, the pasty-faced witness from Trump’s first impeachment trial — by double digits, 56.1 to 43.9, despite having been outraised by him 16 to 1.

Trump, for one, couldn’t control himself. “SleazeBag Vindman loses tonight to a Radical Left Lunatic,” he gleefully Truthed. “How cool is that???”

Indeed, how cool is that?

And — where have we heard this before? — none of the pollsters saw it coming. Nixon will thus be a prohibitive underdog against Republican incumbent Senator Ashley Moody, as well as a serious thorn in the Democrats’ side as they try to appear semi-normal for the American people in the run-up to the midterms.

Here, the Democrats will be fighting among themselves because their gubernatorial candidate, David Jolly, is a former Republican and an outright rejector of the party’s lurch toward socialism. So don’t expect to see Jolly and Nixon campaigning together.

Florida was also a referendum of sorts for the Jew-haters in the Democrats’ midst. Last night, two incumbent members of Congress, Jared Moskowitz and Debbie Wasserman Schultz, both easily beat Democratic Socialist challengers in their respective primary races. Here, though, Nixon will more than make up for those two losses with her extreme anti-Israel rhetoric.

It’s interesting, too, how the Democrat establishment had to sit back and watch what happened in Florida last night, as opposed to finding just enough votes for their candidate to drag him across the finish line — like they did last week in Wisconsin, where David Crowley barely beat Francesca Hong, and like they tried mightily to do two weeks ago in Michigan, where Abdulrahman Mohamed “Don’t Call Me a Democratic Socialist Even Though I Most Definitely Am One” El-Sayed barely hung on in that state’s Senate primary, even as his double-digit lead evaporated.

Sorry, Democrats: Florida is a law-and-order state, a voting-integrity state. There’s no machine-run Milwaukee in Florida, and no Detroit either.

But back to Donalds, who has a great opportunity to put the lie to the Republicans’ so-called shredding of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. With an asterisk for its population of transplants, Florida is in the South, after all, and Donalds is black. And a statewide win by him would do just that.

A word of friendly advice toward Donalds, though. Having watched him on TV for a few years now, I can confirm that he’s an honors graduate of Ron DeSantis Charm School — which is to say that he’s not a schmoozer, not a glad-hander, not a natural politician. Instead, he’s a serious and capable man with a good moral compass. But he’s going to have to work on those soft skills, those stump skills, and hone those Trumpian “connective” tissues, if he’s going to one day become our nation’s first real black president.

But first things first, right?