Renzo Downey
Agriculture Commissioner Nikki Fried hopes the Sunshine State can reclaim the Florida Man label with high turnout for Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden.
Florida’s lone statewide-elected Democrat addressed reporters alongside union leaders Monday before casting her ballot at the Leon County Supervisor of Elections Office in Tallahassee.
“The Florida Man has been a negative connotation, and what I am saying is we’re going to flip that analogy and flip that metaphor because the Florida Man here in our state is strong, is resilient,” Fried told reporters, “and we are going to change that metaphor because we’re going to come out and vote and we’re going to make sure that we get Donald Trump out of the White House.”
Across the state Monday, the Biden campaign hosted multiple events in an effort to win over voters from working-class families, a group the President made inroads with in 2016.
Union leaders — American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten, American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees President Lee Saunders and Service Employees International Union President Mary Kay Henry — held a virtual labor rally and phone bank Monday. Working families and unions held a press conference in Orlando as well.
In the Supervisor of Elections Office parking lot, Fried said Biden and his running mate, California Sen. Kamala Harris, would protect the rights of workers, including collective bargaining. But as with most of 2020, the Commissioner at the head of the Florida Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services’ focus fell on the COVID-19 pandemic.
“Joe Biden and Kamala Harris are the only ones with a plan,” she said. “They’ll beat COVID-19, help us reopen safely, get real economic relief to our families, protect our health care, strengthen our unions and create millions of good-paying jobs.”
Florida Education Association Secretary-Treasurer Nandi Riley said teachers and students were excited to return to classes for the fall semester despite the pandemic. But school concerns haven’t been answered, she said.
“We have been let down by our current administration,” Riley said. “They have really left us hanging to try to figure out how to navigate on our own.”
AFSCME Florida organizer Cristopher Serrano said Trump has failed to secure aid for businesses, schools and the unemployed. The Senate and the President haven’t backed Democrats’ HEROES Act, which Serrano put at Trump’s feet.
“Our front line workers, our nurses, our sanitation workers, our first responders and many others are being laid off each and every day without relief,” Serrano said. “Employers tell us many more will be on the chopping block just when we need them the most.”
Florida is seeing a “K recovery,” Fried says, benefiting Wall Street while the rest of the economy worsens, including for working and middle-class Americans. Nationally, 12.6 million workers were unemployed in September, including 770,000 in Florida.
“When you speak to the individual voters who are working-class citizens, they know that Donald Trump was all smoke and mirrors,” Fried said. “The only people that he cared about was the top one-percenters, his donors, the people that are participating in the stock market, not the people that are working 9-to-5 jobs plus overtime just to make ends meet and still now are losing their jobs because they were the first ones who were laid off.”
In Florida, the state’s tourism economy has been hit particularly hard, falling beyond agriculture as the state’s largest industry.
Beating the pandemic, according to the Commissioner, is the only way for the tourism economy to return despite the President arguing tourism could recover without a vaccine. But Florida Republican Sen. Rick Scott said Monday that tourists won’t return to the Sunshine State until the pandemic subsides.
Fried and the union leaders also took aim at Gov. Ron DeSantis, whom she called one of the President’s enablers.
Floridians have suffered a “one-two” punch with the pandemic and failed unemployment system, said Florida AFL-CIO legislative and policy director Rich Templin. That was brought on by “abject failure” from both the White House and Governor’s Mansion, he added.
“We spelled out exactly what he had to do through executive order to fix the problem,” Templin said of the unemployment portal, which crashed in the early weeks of the pandemic. “He refused to lift a finger. That is why Florida’s workers desperately need a leader, an ally, a friend in the White House.”
Real Clear Politics’ polling average currently shows Biden up by 1.5 points over Trump in Florida. FiveThirtyEight currently gives Biden a two-thirds chance to win the state with an expected margin of 2.2 points, a slight tightening in recent days.
Florida is a must-win battleground state for the President with 29 electoral votes.
Democrats currently hold a lead in vote-by-mail ballots, with 1.8 million voters to Republicans’ 1.2 million. However, Republicans have closed the gap and overtaken Democrats in early voting, with 1 million votes to Democrats’ 766,794 as of Monday morning.
While there has been historic turnout across the state, Fried acknowledged Democrats’ current lead is thin, commenting “I still have PTSD from 2018.” But while she added that the Biden campaign is working like it is 10 points behind, she suggested there could be surprises on Election Day.
“Just because there’s a Republican ballot turned in, I wouldn’t count that it’s for Donald Trump,” Fried said. “As I’ve traveled the state, every three out of four Republican voters that I have spoken to are just not going to do another four years of Donald Trump and are actually voting for Joe Biden.”
Templin says nearly 40% of Florida union members are registered Republicans.
“We’re talking to those voters, we’re reaching out to them in a very pattern, systemic way,” he said. “What we are hearing back is they’re done. They’re done with the chaos, they’re done with everything they’ve been through over the past four years.”
