The real shame of it all

The sad thing about the destruction of Florida over the past twenty years is that each Republican Governor has only won by a few points. In each election, somewhere in the range of 46% to 49% of Florida voters have stood against the Republican candidate. All we’d need is for that number to rise to 50.1% in the next election, and suddenly Florida would be back on track again for the first time in decades.

Of course half the battle is that we have so many toxically defeatist folks on our side who keep loudly insisting that we’re going to lose no matter what, due to voter suppression or cheating or whatever the narrative is this time. What these defeatists don’t understand, or don’t care about, is that they’re costing us votes with this rhetoric. Who’s going to bother to put in the work to try to win an election, or even bother turning out to vote in it, if they’re being told by activists that it can’t be won anyway?

In the 2020 election we proved that sufficient turnout can overcome any amount of voter suppression. We all saw what Donald Trump and Louis DeJoy did to the mail-in vote, and we still won. We saw Trump try to get his own court appointees to overturn the results, and we still won. Then weeks later we saw the Democrats win two Senate seats in Georgia, where voter suppression had things highly stacked in the Republicans’ favor, simply because Stacey Abrams asked us to put in the work on voter registration and outreach, and we put in the work.

The Republicans don’t have a magic lever that they can use to just alter the margin of victory as they see fit. Cheating is hard work, and there are limits to how severely they can suppress the vote. We can defeat Ron DeSantis, and other Republicans around the nation, in 2022 with sufficient voter outreach and turnout.