Lies in a key Florida Senate race show the ugly side of politics | Opinion

Sages through the centuries have observed that truth is the first casualty of war. If you’ve been watching the political campaigning this year, you might agree that truth frequently becomes a casualty of the wars on today’s political battlefields.

Moreover, other than the race for the White House, there’s arguably no better example anywhere of politicians trampling truth to death than in the race for an obscure legislative seat in North Florida.

Here’s why it’s such a sought-after prize: The Republicans hold 24 of the Florida Senate’s 40 seats. Having three-fifths of the members gives the GOP a so-called supermajority.

When they’re united, as they usually have been at the behest of Gov. Ron DeSantis, they can pass virtually anything they want while the 16 Democrats have little or no parliamentary leverage to block it.

Flipping a single Senate seat from red to blue would help the Democrats solve that problem. Unfortunately, partisan gerrymandering has left most of the state’s legislative districts dominated by one party or the other, so few seats are up for grabs in the Nov. 5 general election.

However, there’s one closely divided and fiercely competitive exception. It’s Senate District 3, which is centered in Tallahassee and Leon County, by far the district’s most populous area.

Leon is a predominantly progressive county where the Democrats can count on the votes of many of Tallahassee’s 60,000+ college students and from most of the state government’s worker bees, if not their Republican bosses.

While you might expect District 3 to be safe for the Democrats, it’s not. That’s because it sprawls into 12 other counties, most of them rural and poor. Once dominated by “Blue Dog Democrats,” they’re now Republican strongholds except for majority-Black Gadsden County.

Legislative redistricting following the 2020 Census made District 3 more competitive, and in the 2022 election cycle, Republicans seized the opportunity by nominating Corey Simon to challenge veteran incumbent Loranne Ausley, a Democrat who’d spent 12 years representing the area during two separate stints in the House before claiming this Senate seat in 2020.

Simon, a former football player at Florida State and in the NFL, benefited from his support of parental choice in education and from riding the coattails of then-popular DeSantis. There was also a racial and ideological aspect to the Simon-Ausley contest: She’s a liberal white Democrat, and he’s a conservative Black Republican.

In the redistricting, Simon was among the 20 senators with odd-numbered districts who got two-year terms, so he immediately had a target on his back. To challenge Simon, the Democrats chose attorney Daryl Parks, formerly a law partner of the noted civil rights lawyer Ben Crump.

With both parties freely spending in an effort to win this key race, voters in District 3 have been subjected to an endless barrage of contradictory TV ads in which each candidate repeatedly accuses his opponent of being a liar, primarily on issues related to abortion and the cost of homeowners’ insurance — major statewide themes for the Democrats this year.

The constant talk of lying lends credence to the title of an important new book by Stephen Brill. Published at an especially appropriate time, election year 2024, its title, “The Death of Truth,” sounds like an obituary headline, and in a sense it is.

This 317-page book can’t be adequately summarized here, but it deserves to be read because a lot of what has gone wrong in American society is succinctly summarized in its subtitle: “How social media and the internet gave snake oil salesmen and demagogues the weapons they needed to destroy trust and polarize the world — and what we can do about it.”

This well documented book provides a wake-up call that should be heeded by everyone who’s rooting for our democracy’s survival on today’s political battlefields.

Robert F. Sanchez, of Tallahassee, is a former member of the Miami Herald Editorial Board. He writes for the Herald’s conservative opinion newsletter, Right to the Point. It’s weekly, and it’s free. To subscribe, go to miamiherald.com/righttothepoint.

This story was originally published October 31, 2024 at 1:00 PM with the headline "Lies in a key Florida Senate race show the ugly side of politics | Opinion."