Democrat Donna Deegan Wins Jacksonville Mayor’s Race In DeSantis’s Florida. Now, That’s A F**king Nice Time!

Florida has lately been a source of ongoing woe, so I admit I was a little choked up last night when Democrat Donna Deegan defeated Republican Daniel Davis in the Jacksonville mayoral race. The current Republican mayor, Lenny Curry, is term-limited out of office, and Davis was considered a favorite to win the Republican stronghold. Jacksonville has elected only one Democratic mayor, Alvin Brown, since 1993.

Jacksonville was also the most populous city (954,614) in the US with a Republican mayor. Now, that’s Fort Worth, Texas (935,508).

Deegan, a former local TV anchor and founder of a breast cancer research organization, whooped Davis 52 to 48 percent. She is also Jacksonville’s first woman mayor. Cherelle Parker made similar history in Philadelphia last night. (Parker technically only won the Democratic nomination for mayor, but Democrats account for 85 percent of the city’s electorate. It’s OK if she starts measuring the drapes.)

Republicans can’t spin this as a fluke victory because Deegan ran against a MAGA extremist soft-focus loon like Kari Lake. Davis, chief executive of the local chamber of commerce, was considered a business-friendly “normal” Republican, and he’d crushed Deegan in fundraising by a margin of four-to-one. Yet Davis did embrace DeSantis-style positions on the LGBTQ community. He said he’d sign some gross loyalty pledge to the bigoted Moms for Liberty regarding education, medical care, and “moral upbringing of their children.”

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During her victory speech, Deegan held up a photo of her grandfather and talked about the “five generations of love” her family had for Jacksonville.

“I made a decision when we got into this race that, no matter what happened, no matter what the landscape was like, we were going to lead with love over fear,” Deegan said. “We would not go with division. We would go with unity.”

It’s not surprising, given her professional background, that Deegan is a skilled communicator, but her speech was a true barnburner that called out Florida’s right-wing reactionary politics in the most moving way.

“I’m so excited about creating a city that sees everybody, that brings everybody in, that gives everybody a voice, a city that truly does finally reach its absolutely amazing potential,” she said. “And the only way we were ever going to do that was by bringing everybody together. We have the most beautiful mosaic of a city that you’ve ever seen in your entire life, and everybody’s going to have a voice in a Donna Deegan administration.”

After her daughter embraced her and the crowd cheered, Deegan continued: “This is about my kids. This is about your kids. This is about creating a city where our kids will want to stay and raise theirs.”

Boom.

Davis had trotted out the boilerplate Republican smears against Deegan. He criticized her for supporting racial justice protesters after George Floyd’s murder and claimed that she would make Jacksonville the murder capital of Florida (homicides have significantly increased over the past eight years with a Republican in charge). Deegan deftly deflected this nonsense, stating (correctly) that improving police accountability would actually help lower the crime rate.

“In addition to putting more officers on the streets,” Deegan said during their debate last month, “we need to focus on things like literacy and food deserts and other things that contribute to what ultimately are higher crime numbers.”

Gov. Ron DeSantis had endorsed Davis but in the half-assed manner that we’ve come to expect. He’s no electoral Svengali, and Trump world happily pointed out that the candidate DeSantis backed in the Kentucky’s gubernatorial primary came in third, as in neither first nor second.

DeSantis didn’t bother tweeting his lukewarm endorsement until late March, well after Davis had been forced into a runoff against Deegan. He didn’t visit Jacksonville to personally campaign for Davis, although Sen. Rick Scott did go door to door on Davis’s behalf, which probably didn’t help. Hey, if DeSantis wants to bail on Florida Republicans while mounting a likely doomed presidential campaign, we won’t stop him.

Jacksonville is in Duval County, which DeSantis won by 11 percentage points against Charlie Crist, who I assume was trying.

According to the New York Times, Republican voters outnumbered Democrats by about 3.5 percentage points. This means Deegan won both independents and crossover Republican voters.

“Everyone said it could not be done in Jacksonville, Florida. We did it because we brought the people inside,” Deegan said. “I can’t tell you how many people from across the political spectrum reached out to me and said, ‘We want you to know, I’ve never voted for a Democrat before. I’m going to vote for you.’”

Even Wonkette might’ve suggested Florida was a lost cause after DeSantis and Marco Rubio smacked their Democratic opponents upside the head last year, but perhaps that was premature. Deegan has laid out a road map for success that Democrats can follow elsewhere. Ashley Walker, Deegan’s political consultant and my new favorite person, said, “Democrats in Florida have to eat the elephant piece by piece. We have to go win in these local areas that are purple and get down to the base of some local campaigns to have any chance of coming back statewide.”

Damn right.

[New York Times / The Guardian]

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