Sporting red-white-and-blue sneakers and a matching bedazzled manicure ahead of Florida's primaries on Tuesday, Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz smiles and tells voters she is "running for reelection to Congress." That's true—with a caveat, reports the AP. Wasserman Schultz is seeking her 12th term by running in a new district after Republicans scrambled the state's congressional map earlier this year. The fallout pushed Wasserman Schultz, a former national party chair with powerful ties in Washington, to cross district lines from her Fort Lauderdale exurb and become the only white candidate in an area of Broward County that has helped send Black Democrats to Congress since 1992. That's yielded an uncomfortable fight following the US Supreme Court decision that effectively cleared former Confederate states, including Florida, to reshape House districts.
"For her to come in like this is just another Broward seat, it's a complete erasure of our history, our fight for Black access," said former Rep. Sheila Cherfilus-McCormick, 47, who is Black and resigned from the seat in April while facing an ethics investigation but now wants it back. Another Black candidate, 27-year-old progressive organizer and substitute teacher Elijah Manley, said Republicans' redistricting ploy is not Wasserman Schultz's fault. But she "had other options," Manley added, including running in her new home district, which was gerrymandered to include the more conservative Gulf Coast. "Instead, she stabbed us in the back, trying to take away Black representation," Manley said, pointing to Congressional Black Caucus warnings that it could lose more than a quarter of its 60-plus members this fall.
Wasserman Schultz, 59, is by far the best funded out of five Democratic candidates and benefits from Florida rules that do not require a majority to win primaries. She argued that she can ably advocate for the whole region after representing wide swaths of Broward as a state and federal legislator across three decades. "I'm not air-dropping myself into this district," she told the AP. "I have represented diverse communities. I know how to tailor my service to them and represent a district more broadly." President Trump began pushing Republican-run states to redraw House boundaries last year to help preserve the party's fragile majority. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis responded with an effort that intends to reduce five Democratic seats to three. Broward, the state's most Democratic county, now has just one presumed-Democratic district anchored in and around Fort Lauderdale.
Nationally, white lawmakers typically hold some of the 115-plus House seats where the voting-age population is majority non-white. Wasserman Schultz does it in her existing north Broward-Palm Beach district, which was drawn after the 2020 census to be 42% Hispanic, 18% Black, and about 6% Asian American. White voters compose the remaining third. But a white lawmaker is a rarity for majority or plurality Black districts, like the new Florida 20th. The district is 42% Black, 23% Hispanic, 4% Asian, and the rest white. Going into November, an AP analysis found that Wasserman Schultz is the only white Democrat positioned to represent any of the remaining districts with a Black majority or plurality. "The whole mission was to take away Black power, so we don't have representation to understand our lived experience," says Broward NAACP President Marsha Ellison. "That may not be important to Debbie, but it's certainly important to us."
,
uBlock 
,
and
Ghostery 
)
