Wasserman Schultz’s FL-20 run ‘undermining Black political power,’ DNC members say
Almost all of Florida’s elected Democratic National Committee members are condemning Congresswoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz’s decision to run for reelection in a district previously drawn to ensure Black voters’ representation but targeted for redistricting by Gov. Ron DeSantis this year.
“Our party cannot credibly denounce the dismantling of Black political power by Republicans while treating one of Florida’s few remaining majority-Black districts as a political opportunity for an incumbent seeking a safer seat,” a group of 10 elected Florida DNC members wrote in a statement released Tuesday.
All but two of the party’s 11 non-officer, elected members signed the letter, as well as the Florida Democratic Party’s first vice chair, Daniel Henry.
The letter follows Wasserman Schultz’s announcement that she would run for Florida’s 20th District after DeSantis and the state Legislature rearranged congressional district boundaries in South Florida, leaving just three left-leaning districts in a region with five Democratic incumbents.
Wasserman Schultz, in Congress for more than 20 years, chose to run in a safe blue seat where a Democrat is all but guaranteed to win in the general election, instead of in one of the surrounding districts, newly drawn to favor Republicans.
Wasserman Schultz lives in Florida’s new 22nd District, which stretches from Coral Springs to Marco Island. Her previous voters were split five ways in Florida’s new voting maps, but only a small portion of them were drawn into the 20th District.
Critics say she chose to take her $2.5 million war chest to an easier Democratic-leaning district to ensure her own political power.
“We cannot claim to defend voting rights, racial justice, and representation while undermining Black political power when it becomes politically convenient,” the Florida DNC members wrote.
In an interview with the Miami Herald Friday, Wasserman Schultz shrugged off criticism as coming from political opponents. Black candidates have been sounding alarm bells for weeks about her plans for the 20th District race.
“It’s not really surprising that that criticism is coming from folks who are already running for the job,” she said.
But the DNC members’ statement marks the most forceful condemnation of the congresswoman’s decision from within the party she once led. Wasserman Schultz was DNC chair from 2011 until 2016.
READ MORE: Wasserman Schultz to run in former Black-majority district targeted by DeSantis
A federal judge drew three Black-majority districts in Florida under the Voting Rights Act in 1992 to ensure Black voters could elect candidates of their choice, resulting in the state’s first Black congressional representatives since Reconstruction.
Florida’s 20th District was one of those three districts, first represented by Alcee Hastings and more recently by Sheila Cherfilus-McCormick, who resigned her seat last month but is campaigning to return to Washington.
DeSantis’ office intentionally focused on the 20th District, his map drawer told state legislators, in anticipation of the Supreme Court ruling last month in Louisiana v. Callais undermining the longstanding application of the federal Voting Rights Act as a remedy to racial discrimination.
Wasserman Schultz fended off criticism that she is profiting from an attack on Black voters’ political power in the district by arguing that Broward County was DeSantis’ target.
“Ron DeSantis and Donald Trump came in and intentionally tried to blow up, or they did blow Broward’s congressional districts to smithereens so that they could dilute Broward’s power,” she told the Herald Friday, arguing that she’s long represented Broward County and should remain in power because of her experience.
For Florida’s DNC members, the decision is part of a much larger political project targeting Black voters.
“This decision reinforces the same message Republicans have pushed for years: that Black representation does not matter,” they wrote. “It does matter. Representation matters. Lived experience matters.”
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