August elections — not November — may be the real prize for Miami street protesters
Amid the street protests that broke out after George Floyd’s death, Florida activists took up bullhorns and used social media to promote Zoom meetings about the “next steps” for the movement.
Nearly 800 people conferenced in to a June 6 call in Miami, according to the social justice organization Dream Defenders. Three days later, 270 people spoke during a virtual Miami-Dade County public safety committee and encouraged commissioners to “defund police.” And on Tuesday, Miami-Dade County commissioners took the first of two votes needed to revive an independent review panel overseeing the county’s police force, another proposal advocated by demonstrators who marched on South Florida’s streets after Floyd was killed last month by Minneapolis police.
Efforts to steer street protests into local civic action may already be reaping dividends for left-leaning organizations in South Florida pushing to reduce incarceration, shift police resources to social services and end the system of cash bail, which they say discriminates against communities of color and the poor. But with meaningful local and state races on the ballot this summer, progressive activists also want to funnel protesters to the voting booth during the often-overlooked August primaries to help elect candidates who share their views on criminal justice.
“Part of the goal with the coalition is to reduce the population of people in prison and hold police accountable. We feel ready for this moment,” said Nailah Summers, a co-founder and spokeswoman of the Miami-based Dream Defenders, founded in 2012 following the killing of Miami teen Trayvon Martin by a neighborhood watchman in Central Florida.
The group is part of a coalition of political and social organizations involved in the ongoing protests. “This is a huge opportunity,” Summers said.
While most political focus nationally is on the November presidential election, South Florida voters will cast ballots Aug. 18 in races for state attorney and sheriff, politicians with direct control over policing and prosecutions who are now facing waves of demonstrations that in some cases are focused on them. A majority of the seats on the board of the Miami-Dade County Commission — which sets the police budget for the largest police agency in the southeastern U.S. — are also up for grabs in August as new term limits push longtime incumbents out the door.
The bulk of mail ballots start going out from Miami-Dade’s elections office in just four weeks and the county’s politicians know it: Candidates for mayor, state attorney and commission have participated in marches and spoken at rallies. Organizers and political operatives hope the hundreds participating in those near-daily marches will take note and show up to vote in an election that, based on the past, is likely to see about one in five Miami-Dade voters participate.
“We’re going to see an influx of people who are going to vote because they now know their local voice lends a voice to the national stage,” said state Rep. Shevrin Jones, one of six Democrats campaigning to represent Florida’s majority-Black Senate District 35 straddling Broward and Miami-Dade counties.
Jones is among candidates running in the Democratic primary who have participated in demonstrations. “You have the activists and others out there who are focused on supporting people who are in touch with the community. And candidates might not think that people are watching who’s fighting for them, but the constituents are very well aware of who’s out in the streets.”
Drawing more national attention to Miami’s protests and the August elections: Sybrina Fulton, a social justice activist and the mother of Trayvon Martin, who is running for the Miami-Dade County Commission seat in District 1. The killing of her 17-year-old son sparked outrage around the country, and Fulton — who worked on a 2018 docuseries about her son with rapper mogul Jay-Z and is getting campaign help from Hillary Clinton — has become a national figure and paid public speaker on issues of social justice.
Fulton doesn’t embrace everything about the protest movement. Her opponent — the Black mayor of Miami Gardens, Oliver Gilbert — is not among the politicians targeted by protesters as someone who ought to be removed from office. Both are Democrats running in a nonpartisan race.
Still, Fulton marched Sunday with protesters in downtown Miami. And Summers, the co-founder of the Dream Defenders, which occupied the Florida Capitol for a month in 2013 after Trayvon Martin’s killer was acquitted, said Fulton’s candidacy is a sign of how far the movement has come.
“The fact she’s running for office is an indication of staying power of the movement,” Summers said. “This is about long-term change.”
Other politicians also participated in Sunday’s march in Miami, such as Miami-Dade mayoral hopeful Alex Penelas — a Democrat and former county mayor in the 1990s — and Miami-Dade’s state attorney, Katherine Fernández Rundle. Fernández Rundle, a Cuban-American Democrat, marched downtown — even though on several occasions this month, protesters have gathered outside her office to criticize her handling of cases involving the deaths of inmates and citizens at the hands of corrections and police officers.
“Vote her out!” a group of protesters chanted on June 2 outside the Miami-Dade Pretrial Detention Center as members of the Dream Defenders passed out fliers calling for Fernández Rundle to be ousted from office this summer.
The Dream Defenders are among a loose coalition of nonprofits that are trying to influence campaigns called Freedom 4 Florida. The coalition, which includes groups such as New Florida Majority, Latino Justice and Organize Florida, is focused on the races for state attorney, judge and sheriff in particular.
One such race, for Broward sheriff, is already seeing the influence of the ongoing criminal justice protests. On Monday, Broward Sheriff Gregory Tony — the county’s first Black sheriff — released a campaign video promoting his efforts to punish his own deputies who have been accused of misbehaving. The ad includes 2019 video of two deputies wrestling Black teenager DeLucca Rolle on the ground in a north Broward suburb, an incident that drew national condemnation and led Tony to fire one of the deputies.
“I took on police brutality. I fired the bad cops,” Tony says in the ad. “Police brutality is unacceptable. Ending it starts with who’s in charge.”
Florida Democrats — whose goals don’t entirely overlap with those of thousands of demonstrators with varying views and agendas — are also hoping to harness the energy of the protests in November to support Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden against President Donald Trump in a state known for razor-thin election margins. Party leaders say they have been sending staffers to protests around the state to register new voters.
Recent protest movements like the Women’s March and March For Our Lives have yielded mixed results in national and statewide elections. But when it comes to local elections, few veteran campaign operatives expect voting patterns to change in a way that would significantly alter the outcome of this summer’s races.
Chris Norwood, a Black, Miami-based political consultant, is among the campaign veterans who believe incumbents and favorites with established campaign machines and gobs of campaign cash aren’t likely to be defeated by upstarts backed by protesters. For instance, in the race for state attorney, Fernández Rundle’s opponent, former American Civil Liberties Union attorney Melba Pearson, had about $15,000 in campaign cash to spend at the beginning of June, compared to more than $400,000 for the 27-year incumbent. Even Fulton, whose announcement that she’d qualified to make the ballot drew multiple stories from national publications, is expected to face a difficult campaign against the better-funded, more established mayor of Miami Gardens.
“I don’t see it happening. And it’s not because I don’t want to see it,” Norwood said of activists’ hopes to change the outcome of countywide and commission races. “I don’t see a race where it can happen.”
There are signs, meanwhile, that the ongoing protests are beginning to motivate conservative voters. On Sunday, there were two pro-Trump rallies on opposite ends of Miami-Dade County.
Nelson Diaz, chairman of the Republican Party in Miami-Dade County — where the families of hundreds of thousands of voters immigrated from countries run by repressive, socialist regimes — believes calls to “defund police” and leftist symbolism seen during some protests are part of the reason his office is being swamped by voter registration calls. Protesters, for instance, spray-painted the symbol of the Soviet revolution on a statue of Christopher Columbus at Bayfront Park last week.
“Nothing moves voters in Miami like a hammer and sickle,” he said.
Miami Herald staff writers Samantha Gross and Aaron Leibowitz contributed to this report.
This story was originally published June 16, 2020 at 2:31 PM.
