Florida — The Counter-Current
Tarek Abou Ghazala — Editor
On the same night that Republican strongholds fell in Texas, Kansas an
On the same night that Republican strongholds fell in Texas, Kansas and South Carolina, Florida held.
The Republican congressman Byron Donalds won the governorship against the Democrat David Jolly, becoming the first Black governor in Florida's history and — according to the coverage — the first Black Republican elected governor of an American state; only three Black governors had been elected before, all from the other party. The Republican senator Ashley Moody held her seat against the Democrat Angie Nixon by about 51% to 48%, a seat to which she had been appointed to succeed its previous holder.
It is worth noting that when Donalds won his party's nomination in August, his victory speech did not mention the president's endorsement once, after months of a campaign built on that very endorsement, and turned instead to the cost of living and to the wider state electorate.
This article is what saves the whole issue from oversimplification; without it, what precedes it would be advocacy rather than analysis.
A reader who follows six articles about winners from one side is liable to come away with a naive picture of pushback: a wave with a single direction flooding the map. It is not so. Pushback is the resultant of divergent local balances; every arena has its own people, history and weight, and the instrument that succeeds here fails a few hundred miles away.
More telling still: a symbolic door opened on the right of the map that night exactly as one opened on its left. Whoever read Bottoms's win in Georgia as evidence that doors open from one direction only had his reading contradicted by Florida in the same hour. This is among the most useful things the law of pushback offers anyone seeking fairness: it does not operate on behalf of a team, and it cannot be hired by a camp.
The verse from Hūd settles the matter at its root: difference is not an accident to be dissolved by a decisive election, but a standing condition. Whoever expects one night to end disagreement has asked of the law something that is not in it.
Limits of this reading
- Florida's resilience may owe to long-term shifts in the composition of its electorate and its registration rolls rather than to "resisting a wave"; a single night's data cannot separate the two.
- Moody's margin (about three points) in a seat considered safe is a datum with two opposite implications, and should not be pressed in one direction only.
- The description "first Black Republican elected governor" is taken from election-night coverage and is worth verifying against historical references before publication.