Florida can be ground zero for rebuilding the Democratic Party after sweeping losses | Opinion

The old adage, “As goes Florida, so goes the nation,” should be weighing heavily on Democrats. Florida has gone from blue, to purple, to pinkish, to MAGA-hat red in recent years, and America has followed. This isn’t just for demographic reasons, and it isn’t just because Republicans gained voters. It’s also because Democrats lost them. Just look at Miami-Dade County.

But there is good news: The party can win those voters back.

Bill Clinton told me years ago that you don’t win an election by tearing down your opponent, you win by building up your supporters. Today, Democrats are too blinded by their hatred of Trump to build up anything except their own blood pressure. They are the party of anger rather than hope. They have invited Trump to siphon away their voters, and siphon he has.

Many of Florida’s Democratic voters are Trump Democrats — the modern-day Reagan Democrats. They embody the Gipper’s famous line: “I didn’t leave the Democratic Party; the Democratic Party left me.”

The party can win these voters back, but it must first recognize that it has strayed. Right now, Florida Democrats are stuck in the denial stage of grief. When they get to anger, they need to direct it inward, not at President Joe Biden or other scapegoats. After that, they need to move quickly to acceptance.

From there, the path back to relevance will require mastering the three M’s: Money, Message, and Messenger. The Democrats seem to only focus on raising money, which will never be enough. Every winning movement in American politics has started with the message and messenger. Get those right, and the money follows naturally.

As for message, we watched an out-of-touch Democratic message fail spectacularly in 2018 and 2022, resulting in the election of Gov. Ron DeSantis twice — including by a staggering majority the second time.

If the Democratic Party keeps showing up with a message of open borders, DEI, crime-ridden cities, inflation, higher taxes, socialism, men in women’s sports, Hamas on campuses, and other ideas voters have repeatedly rejected, can the party really keep crying “What went wrong?” The answer should be obvious: The party went wrong.

Fixing the message requires a return to commonsense. We need a Democratic Party that celebrates hard work and economic opportunity, that supports law enforcement and keeps our cities safe, and that welcomes immigrants legally and rejects unrealistic sanctuary city policies. The party should be about opportunity and success, family and parents, and ensuring everyone has a chance to make it to the starting line, not determining who wins the race.

When it comes to reforming the message, this is less like a renovation and more like a new construction. We need to tear down leftist “woke” policies and rebuild a modern, Clintonian party in their place, one that is in touch both culturally and economically with the American people. Anything less than a reconstruction would be doing the same thing and expecting a different result.

As for the Messenger, we need someone who has a genuine connection to the people, someone who takes the time to find Florida — the real Florida. The voters don’t want to hear about their gender, religion, race or sexual orientation. They want to hear about their patriotism, their love for the state and its people and their vision for the future.

If Florida Democrats can do all of this, they can lead a revival that surpasses even Donald Trump’s comeback story for its unlikeliness. That revival can then spread nationally.

The country’s democratic system depends upon having two viable, healthy parties to counterbalance each other’s less desirable tendencies. By failing to be healthy and viable, our party has created Trump. If Democrats want to call him Frankenstein, that makes them Dr. Frankenstein.

Florida can be the starting place for a national Democratic renewal that makes every Floridian feel that they have a place in building a brighter future.

Philip Levine, a cruise industry entrepreneur, is a former two-term mayor of Miami Beach and onetime Democratic candidate for governor of Florida.