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 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.
“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’s 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.
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.
And 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.
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.
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in the video news conference in front of a wall plastered with campaign signs — including some that were suddenly out of date because they touted what was the Biden-Harris campaign until Sunday.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.”
This is a developing story. Check back for updates.
Anthony Man can be reached at aman@sunsentinel.com and can be found @browardpolitics on Bluesky, Threads, Facebook and Mastodon.
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