Stephanie Murphy puts blame for statewide Democratic losses on misguided airwave campaign

Stephanie Murphy.

Florida Democrats suffered a bruising Midterm Election even as the party beat expectations nationwide. But U.S. Rep. Stephanie Murphy isn’t ready to call Florida a red state. Rather, she puts underperformance by the blue team in 2022 squarely on the shoulders of statewide candidates.

“How do you spend $100 million in this state and then have nothing to show for it?” she said. “I think that’s political malpractice.”

The remarks, made at Tiger Bay of Central Florida, put the burden of the losses on former U.S. Rep. Charlie Crist, who lost to Gov. Ron DeSantis in a 19-point landslide, and U.S. Rep. Val Demings, who fell short in a challenge of U.S. Sen. Marco Rubio by nearly as much.

Notably, Murphy passed on running for Senate herself, then announced she would not seek another term in the House. That means for the first time since her successful campaign for Congress in 2016, she spent the campaign on the sidelines.

Murphy said she was stunned at a lack of ground game on the part of statewide Democrats.

“There has never been a campaign or you haven’t people in purple shirts and iPads, wandering through neighborhoods, asking people for their votes,” she said.

She said Democrats in Florida erred by thinking they could win by papering the airwaves, which made money for media consultants and news stations, but left few resources for any ground infrastructure leading toward Election Day.

Some of that falls on a national party too quick to abandon Florida.

“The national Democrats had decided to torch Florida,” she said. “They really did not play here the way they used to in any significant way.”

But in some ways that was predictable. Too many state losses in prior election cycles eroded a sense Florida remained in play, even with the Senate race as recently as 2018, when Republican Rick Scott unseated Democratic incumbent Bill Nelson, in a race decided by just over 10,000 votes.

Murphy notes in that race, she outperformed Nelson by more than 8,000 votes in her own district, and Democrats should have been able to run races then as well but lost most.

That’s not to deny Republicans any respect, she said.

“I will give credit to Ron DeSantis,” she said. “People voted for people who did pragmatic things that affected their lives. There were a lot of things that I would say he did that were questionable on that just from a Democratic perspective. However, people in Florida felt like they got through the pandemic relatively okay. And they rewarded that.”

So what of the future? Murphy told Florida Politics she thinks it could take Democrats years to recover from such doldrums.

“I think it takes a couple of cycles for a state this large to build the necessary infrastructure to be able to prevail,” she said.

While on stage, Murphy fielded questions whether she would consider a statewide run again herself, with some noting Scott’s Senate seat is back up in just two years.

“I’m not going to break any news today,” she said.