Floridians Vow to Year-Round Push for Real Freedoms, Stand Up to DeSantis’ Extremism

Voter Suppression and Disinformation Won 2022, Robust Community Organizing Will Ensure Floridians Get Leaders with Real Solutions in 2024

11/08/2022 Florida 

As results come in showing a GOP lead in top-ticket Florida races, Andrea Mercado, executive director of Florida Rising, the state’s largest civic engagement organization issued the following:

“Florida’s GOP is demonstrating that it can only win through suppressing the vote and using corporate donors to outspend their opponents by millions. 

Floridians want real solutions to the real problems we’re facing and that’s not what the dishonest campaigns of DeSantis, Rubio, and their Party offer.

Voters in Florida have demonstrated, time and again, that they can win for working people in victories such as the first $15 minimum wage in the South, voting rights restoration to returning citizens, medical marijuana legalization, and Tenants Bill of Rights in Broward and Miami-Dade counties. 

What was missing in 2022 was early and deep investment to take on DeSantis and his Party. Democrats must learn that they cannot win the races they don’t run and correct a pattern of too little and too late in our state.

As DeSantis will try to use the state over these next two years as a springboard for his own ambitions, we will be working at the local level to push back against his politics of discrimination and division and demand leaders address the runaway housing crisis the GOP has ignored.  Every Floridian deserves a home in which they feel safe, a say in our democracy, an education that prepares them for success, and a job that can provide a good life for them and their families.  

The past twenty years of GOP rule in Florida have only made life harder for Floridians.  Tomorrow, we continue the work to make elected leaders put people first instead of their corporate donors.”

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