Florida Democratic Party leaders said Monday that almost the entire state delegation to the national party convention supports making Vice President Kamala Harris the party’s presidential candidate.
Before noon Monday — less than 24 hours after President Joe Biden dropped his bid for reelection — state Democratic Chair Nikki Fried said 236 of Florida’s 254 convention delegates had pledged to support Harris.
Fried and other Democratic Party leaders said in a video news conference that state Democrats are unified. They’re excited about the prospect of Harris becoming the nation’s first woman president and about the Democrats’ prospects of avoiding another Donald Trump presidency. Several South Florida delegates offered similar assessments in phone interviews Monday.
“While the state of this race has changed, our mission has not,” Fried said, adding that the state’s Democrats would “move forward as one team to elect Kamala Harris as president and defeat Donald Trump in November.”
She also used what’s become a line used by many Harris supporters, that voters would view Harris favorably in comparison to Trump. They’ll prefer a “former prosecutor against a convicted felon.”
That’s an allusion to Harris’ early career as district attorney in San Francisco and attorney general in California and Trump’s May conviction by a New York jury on 34 felony charges of falsifying business records.
The contest for who will succeed Biden at the top of the Democratic ticket is already essentially over. Fried noted that all of the potentially viable alternative candidates have already pledged their support of Harris.
Broad support
Among Florida delegates, support was broad. It included first-time delegates to people who’ve been to many conventions, delegates from voting blocs that are important Democratic constituencies, and party activists who have supported Biden for years as well as those who originally favored other candidates for the party’s nomination in 2020.
The show of unity came together quickly and easily, several delegates said in the hours after Biden’s Sunday announcements that he wouldn’t run for reelection and was endorsing Harris.
“I’m supporting Kamala Harris because she can beat Donald Trump, period. She’s the strongest candidate we have,” said Stephen Gaskill, of Palm Beach County, a delegate and former president of the Florida LGBTQ+ Democratic Caucus. “The bottom line is she’s just the best person for the job.”
Charles Horowitz, a first-time delegate from Broward will also, at age 21, be voting this year in his first presidential election. “She is the most qualified person for the job,” he said. “She’s been vetted, she’s been tested.”
“We all recognize that we need to be united. There was no reason for anybody to suddenly create a mini primary. Because we are up against a threat to democracy in Donald J. Trump,” Horowitz said.
Mitchell Berger, who founded the Berger-Singerman law firm based in Fort Lauderdale, has been involved in campaigns and government for 50 years. The longtime, close associate of former Vice President Al Gore raises money for presidential, gubernatorial and U.S. Senate candidates, among others.
“Vice President Harris has done an exceptional job and matured in office greatly. I have personally seen her three or four times this year in various settings, not just political, campaign settings,” he said. “She is perfectly suited to be president. I’ve worked closely with presidents and vice presidents. And she has learned and grown and is capable of leading the free world and the United States.”
Berger said she would excel at making the case against Trump, especially compared to Biden, whose message had become constantly overshadowed by the drumbeat of questions and speculation about his health.
The Associated Press, which published a survey of Democratic delegates, reported that as of 6:15 p.m. Monday its unofficial tally found 1,315 delegates backing Harris, with 1,976 needed for the nomination. No results were yet reported for many states. The AP’s Florida number, 210, was a lower late Monday afternoon than the state Democratic Party’s.
U.S. Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz of Weston, the senior Democrat in the Florida congressional delegation and former chair of the Democratic National Committee, said the “vast majority” of her congressional colleagues support Harris.
Late Monday, U.S. Rep. Sheila Cherfilus-McCormick joined her South Florida Democratic colleagues in the House in endorsing Harris.
“Vice President Harris has consistently showed up for Florida to help us fight on every front and ensure everyone has a right to live freely and equitably. When someone shows up for you, you show up for them,” she said.
Samuel Vilchez Santiago, chair of the Orange County Democratic Party, said he and all the state’s representatives on the Democratic National Committee are supporting Harris for the nomination. The DNC is the governing board of the national Democratic Party.
Previous Harris support
Some of Harris’ new supporters aren’t all that new.
Berger said he met Biden decades ago when, working for Jimmy Carter’s 1976 presidential campaign in Pennsylvania, he was assigned to work as a staffer for a young U.S. Sen. Joe Biden, who had been tasked with leading campaign efforts in the state.
In 2020, he was one of the 35 Floridians who were on the list of the Biden campaign’s 800 top fundraisers for that year’s campaign.
During the 2020 primary season, he helped several Democratic presidential candidates — including Harris — raise money, hoping the party would begin its transition to a younger generation of leaders.
“In 2020, I dated around,” he quipped. “I was just hoping that we could find someone who could beat Donald Trump and I was hoping it could come from the next generation,” Berger said.
Berger said Monday afternoon he hadn’t yet made a donation to the newly minted Harris campaign, but said he made a handful of phone calls to potential donors, starting to raise money for her candidacy.
In 2019, Gaskill said he supported Harris’ unsuccessful campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination.
“I liked her story. I liked her convictions. I liked what she brought to our party, and what she could do for the country,” he said.
When she ended her candidacy, Gaskill supported former South Bend, Ind., Mayor Pete Buttigieg, now the secretary of transportation. He ended up in the Biden camp, and this year was named an at-large convention delegate by what, at the time, was the Biden reelection campaign.
‘America 2008 again’
State Sen. Shevrin Jones, who is also chair of the Miami-Dade Democratic Party and a DNC member, said, “It is the Republicans’ dream to sit back and watch us fight each other and create chaos.”
That won’t happen, said Jones, who appeared in the video news conference in front of a wall plastered with campaign signs — including some that were suddenly out of date because they touted what was the Biden-Harris campaign until Sunday.
Jones said Republicans are scared and Democratic momentum is growing, similar to what he said existed in 2008 when Barack Obama was elected as the nation’s first Black president. Harris would be the second and first woman.
“We are about to make America 2008 again,” Jones said. “There is momentum coming from every sector of this country.”
Jones, who is Black, pushed back forcefully on suggestions by some Republicans that Harris represents an unqualified diversity, equity and inclusion selection by Biden. And he pointed to Trump’s recent assertion that Biden policies have hurt so-called Black jobs.
“The vice president wasn’t, and still is not, some DEI selection by President Biden, which some Republicans have repeatedly said. The vice president has been a partner to the president in this success and that we are seeing across the country,” Jones said. “The president didn’t do this alone. The vice president was there doing her Black job.”
Fried rejected the suggestions from some Republicans, including elected officials from Florida, that Biden should resign the presidency if he felt he couldn’t effectively run for reelection.
“This is pathetic of them to even say that,” Fried said. “This is a (Republican) Party that unified behind a convicted felon (and) was found responsible for raping a woman.” Trump wasn’t found guilty of rape in E. Jean Carroll’s civil suit against him for battery and defamation. The federal judge presiding over the case said the rape allegation was “substantially true.”
Suggesting Biden should resign, Fried said, shows Republicans are doing “the only thing they can do — as very small, insecure men do — is try to be bullies,” she added.
Jones, Wasserman Schutz and some of the other newly minted Harris supporters were longtime Biden backers.
As a University of Florida student in 1988, Wasserman Schultz supported Biden’s first, unsuccessful campaign for president. In 2020, Jones traveled to Iowa to campaign for Biden in advance of the state’s presidential nominating caucus.
“He’s built one of the greatest presidential records in the history of the United States,” Wasserman Schultz said. “Unlike his predecessor, Biden stared down and challenged dictators, and fought for democracy, at home and abroad.”
And Lourdes Dias, another Broward delegate, said she worked on the 1988 Biden campaign. “I was all for Biden,” Diaz said, adding she believes he’s “done an amazing job.”
But, she said, Harris is well-positioned to lead the party to victory in November. “She’s been an apprentice to him for three-and-a-half years. She’s a very smart woman,” she said.
Though too young to vote for in 2020, Horowitz said he supported Biden from the beginning. “Myself and very few people wanted this to happen. We were elected to vote for President Biden and we really wanted to be able to do that,” Horowitz said, adding it was time to move on.
“I’m just very pleased about how Democrats have so quickly united behind the vice president. These past few weeks have been hard. But we’re going to get past it and we’re going to work hard until November,” Horowitz said.
Anthony Man can be reached at aman@sunsentinel.com and can be found @browardpolitics on Bluesky, Threads, Facebook and Mastodon.
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