Florida Democrats brought out everything they could on Sunday — music and prayer, a former president, and a retired NBA superstar — in an attempt to motivate Black voters in a final pre-election push.
At Souls to the Polls rallies in South Florida and elsewhere, elected Democrats, candidates and party leaders presented starkly different visions of what the election could bring: a bright and better America if Vice President Kamala Harris is elected president and dark days ahead if former President Donald Trump returns to office.
“I know you’ve seen all of the negative hate, racist rhetoric that’s been on TV,” state Sen. Rosalind Osgood said at a rally next to the early voting site at the African American Research Library and Cultural Center in Fort Lauderdale.
“We cannot go back to the days when Black people are being lynched and mistreated. We have to take a stand against it, and I’m going to say it the way that it is. And it is our fight, and this is our time, and we can’t do it without your help,” Osgood said.
She spoke after more than 200 people marched the mile Sistrunk Boulevard from New Hope Missionary Baptist Church to the library.
Many of the marchers said they’d already voted. But Osgood and Broward State Attorney Harold Pryor said they could still affect the outcome. Before leaving, Pryor said, everyone should pull out their phones and text or direct message someone and tell them to vote.
“It’s going to affect every aspect of our lives, your well-being and whether or not you can provide and even maintain in this society for yourself and your loved ones,” Pryor said. “We can’t afford anybody sitting on the sidelines.”
There were many other efforts aimed at mobilizing African American and Caribbean American voters on Sunday.
Just off Sistrunk Boulevard, the main street of the historically Black northwest part of the city, the NAACP held its own voter turnout event.
Udonis Haslem, a star player with the Miami Heat until he retired in 2023 after 20 years with the team, urged people to vote. While there, he and Congresswoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz of Weston, a former chair of the Democratic National Committee, recorded a get-out-the-vote video for social media.
Before the Fort Lauderdale Souls to the Polls event, state Democratic Party Chair Nikki Fried said she’d been to another in Miami Gardens after morning visits to an early voting site in Lauderhill and to churches with Wasserman Schultz.
And former President Bill Clinton appeared at a Souls to the Polls event at Macedonia Missionary Baptist Church near Orlando.
Souls to the Polls events have become a tradition since Florida authorized in-person early voting in the early 2020s. They started with clergy at Black churches urging parishioners to leave services and head directly to the nearest early voting sites.
At the fellowship hall of St. John Missionary Baptist Church in Boynton Beach, the Rev. Johnny Barber exhorted the crowd of about 100 people to vote, to encourage others to vote, and to pray.
“This is a consequential election,” he said. “This is one of the most important elections that we will experience.”
It wasn’t hard to gauge the presidential preferences of a crowd full of T-shirts displaying some variation of “Kamala” or “Madame President.”
“She’s intelligent, she’s faithful, she’s determined to help the middle class,” Ramona Young, a retired criminal investigator for a public defender’s office in New Jersey, said about the vice president.
Kathleen Alexis, a Realtor from West Palm Beach, already voted but showed up as a volunteer to help with the event. She supports Harris and feels that Trump’s crudeness and negativity has been unworthy of a U.S. president.
“I’m voting blue,” she said. “I’m just tired of all the disunity.”
After speeches and prayers — and led by a group of motorcyclists — the crowd walked or rode in cars or golf carts to the early voting site on Seacrest Boulevard.
Though Souls to the Polls events are usually billed as nonpartisan, they’re aimed at turning out Democratic voters.
On Sunday, the Palm Beach County Republican Party organized people for phone banking to encourage the party’s voters to turn out and said Republicans would march in a Veterans Day parade Sunday in West Palm Beach. The Broward and Palm Beach County Republican Party chairs didn’t immediately respond to text messages about their other Sunday activities.
In Florida, Democratic turnout could make the difference in who wins a range of lower-level offices.
Chris Smith, a former Democratic leader in both the Florida Senate and Florida House, left public office in 2016. He now practices law and owns Smitty’s Wings Sistrunk, which has been part of the boulevard’s revitalization in recent years.
Smith still organizes and emcees Fort Lauderdale’s Souls to the Polls before every election.
He said he wants Broward, the state’s most Democratic county, to turn out more votes in hope that it can help change the direction of the state. So far, he acknowledged statewide Democratic turnout is “not good.”
Wasserman Schultz said Broward Democrats need to turn out every possible vote.
“We have an opportunity to make history on Tuesday,” Wasserman Schultz said. “We know that when Broward votes that the right thing happens. We need to up the numbers in our community. We really have to make sure that in every one of our precincts all across this community that we get the numbers up.”
Fried offered a more positive spin.
“We’re closing the gap. We know that there’s a lot of really diehard Democrats that are waiting for Election Day to vote for that symbolic vote to go into the polls and vote for the first female president of the United States,” she said.
Anthony Man can be reached at aman@sunsentinel.com and can be found @browardpolitics on Bluesky, Threads, Facebook and Mastodon.