This Is Mostly Crap
Published at 22:02 on 1 June 2023
This is how a member of the center-right might want to see Florida politics, because it lets him play pin the blame on the liberals, but it really doesn’t explain what happened very well.
The Florida Democrats already tried the hardcore centrist strategy. In 2022, in fact. And we all know how well that worked out. Charlie Crist, their candidate for governor, had previously served as the Republican governor of Florida.
The Florida Democrats fail, not because they tack to the right or to the left, but simply because they are grossly incompetent as an organization.
I have told this story before, and I will now tell it again: I have done some volunteer work for the Florida Democrats. It entailed making get-out-the-vote calls. They gave me a spiel to use which had been invalidated by recent news stories. I contacted them for an updated spiel. They had none. I had to spend the first thirty minutes of my shift coming up with a spiel on my own. This is just about the absolute last thing you want your volunteers to do. You want to put out a unified, coherent message!
And it gets worse. The list they gave me was out of date as well. I called people who had already voted early or absentee. I called people exasperated because they had requested to be on the do not call list, some of them multiple times. This is very basic stuff. If someone tells you to stop calling them, you honor their request. You do not want to piss people off by continuing to call them!
Florida could be a competitive swing state today, as it once was not too long ago, were only the Florida Democrats capable of campaigning their way out of a wet paper bag.