Revealing Herself

Faced with a winnable race in the newly redistricted Florida, Debbie Wasserman Schultz decided instead to carpet-bag on the sole remaining majority minority district in the state, because, I guess, actually campaigning is too much of a chore.

Not long ago, it seemed like 2026 might be an epic comeback year for the Florida Democratic Party. Barely two months into President Trump’s second term, they gained ten points on their 2024 numbers in two North Florida special elections. Then Miami voted in a Democratic mayor for the first time in 30 years. And this March, the state House seat containing Mar-a-Lago and Jeffrey Epstein’s pedo palace down the street flipped blue, after Republicans had previously won the seat by nearly 20 points.

Trump’s approval ratings in the state hover in the low to mid-40s, as the DeSantis brand has gone into wind-down mode alongside the massive torture cage known as Alligator Alcatraz, into which the Trump and DeSantis administrations jointly disappeared thousands of migrants before authorities quietly decided $1.2 million a day was too costly, even for President Ballroom. A state that hasn’t elected a Democratic governor since Lawton Chiles won his fifth statewide race in 1994 has a gubernatorial candidate in former Republican congressman David Jolly, who has explicitly modeled his campaign after the publicity stunt that put Chiles on the map, in which the U.S. Senate candidate walked 1,000 miles from Pensacola to Key West in 1970, shaking hands and giving speeches about the problems and aspirations of the people he met along the way.

But then Debbie Wasserman Schultz announced she would be running for Congress to represent Florida’s 20th Congressional District, a dense parcel of central Broward County directly north of the district she currently represents. Gov. DeSantis’s last-minute gerrymandering gambit had divided her current district, the 25th, into the far corners of four new districts, none of which were the 20th, but the appeal to a political insider was obvious: The 20th contains the largest concentration of Democratic voters in the state.

The disincentive to run was equally obvious: The district was explicitly drawn back in 1991 to be a majority-Black district, in accordance with a provision of the Voting Rights Act that was just largely scrapped by the Supreme Court in a decision met with the universal condemnation of Democrats, mostly because it represented the latest gambit in a long campaign to gut the VRA and suppress the votes of low-income minorities. Ironically but predictably, the 20th survived the gerrymander demographically intact; as currently constructed, roughly half of its population is Black, a quarter is white, and about 65 percent are registered Democrats.

What on earth would possess lily-white Wasserman Schultz, who was warning about the Supreme Court plot to gut the VRA long before it was cool, to parachute into a race alongside four viable Black candidates, less than four months before the primary?

……… 

The real mystery, [Former Broward Mayor and candidate in the same district Dale] Holness claims, is why Wasserman Schultz would choose not to run in the district in which she actually lives, the new 22nd District, which voted for Trump by about nine points in 2024 but by even higher margins in favor of a ballot initiative enshrining the right to an abortion, and swung to Biden by three points in 2020. 

Because, even though running in her own district is safe, she feels entitled to a massively Gerrymandered seat so she will not have to break a sweat.

It's all about the self-entitlement that comes with being a senior member of the Democratic Party establishment (There is no Democratic Party establishment).

It's just careerist selfishness.