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WASHINGTON — This fall Democrat Andrew Gillum hopes to give Florida — better known for running moderate Democrats for statewide office — the ideological brawl progressives have long craved to combat Republican dominance in the state.
Yet in the era of President Donald Trump’s strength in GOP primaries, Miami Herald political reporter David Smiley told Beyond the Bubble Tuesday Republican nominee Ron DeSantis has yet to deliver the type of bold policy discussion the GOP has grown accustomed to from its own nominees.
Gillum last week shocked Florida Democrats by defeating a field of better-funded candidates, giving the state’s eager left the ideological counterweight it’s long desired to counter the partisan champions Republicans have run statewide in Florida.
“In Andrew Gillum — who brought [Sen.] Bernie Sanders, Ind.-Vermont, to Florida in the last weeks of the campaign — you have an unabashed progressive who talked about supporting Medicare-for-all …wants to end private prisons, wants to raise the corporate tax rate to close to 8 percent in order to create a billion more dollars to raise teachers’ salaries,” said Smiley.
“[He] campaigned really hard on the idea that Democrats should not run to the center in a Florida midterm election where the [party], over the last 20 years, has looked to moderate candidates to try to carry a purple state,” he added..
Republicans have faced plenty of their own ideological candidate upsets in Florida statewide primaries, including the state’s junior Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Florida, who defeated former Gov. Charlie Crist in 2010 at the height of the tea party’s dominance of conservative politics.
This year the party nominated conservative Rep. DeSantis, who conservative groups once championed to replace Rubio in 2016, before Rubio decided to seek re-election.
Smiley said fellow Republicans, dismayed by DeSantis’s rise over better-funded GOP rival Adam Putnam, now complain about “a policy- less campaign” that relied solely on the endorsement of the president.
“This seems to be a post-ideology Republican party where embracing Donald Trump seems to be more important than how you feel about the free market or any other policy position you could come up with or sell to voters,” said Smiley.
Also in this episode, from off the campaign trail, Ozy political reporter and Nicholas Fouriezos unloads his reporter’s notebook on how Georgia voters are feeling about Democratic gubernatorial nominee Stacey Abrams’s personal debt.
McClatchy’s Beyond the Bubble show is produced by Jordan-Marie Smith and Davin Coburn. Alex Roarty, a national political correspondent for McClatchy, and Andrea Drusch, Washington correspondent for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, recorded this episode at McClatchy’s Washington Bureau, September 5, 2018.