‘We’ve lost representation’: Black voters face new reality after Wasserman Schultz victory
Florida’s 20th District has lost Black representation as critics question whether Democrats are doing enough to protect Black political power.
A historically Black congressional district in Florida is now without Black representation after U.S. Congresswoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz defeated four Black candidates to win the Democratic nomination to represent the district’s more than 400,000 Black residents.
“We’ve lost representation to someone who doesn’t have our lived experience,” said Elijah Manley, one of the congressional candidates defeated by Wasserman Schultz in Tuesday’s Democratic primary contest. Manley, a 27-year-old educator and organizer, told theGrio he is “extremely disappointed” by the election results.
“It’s like a war on the Black community, and just not having that voice in Congress from Broward County is definitely painful. It’s going to be hard for our community to feel heard,” he said.
Despite swift pushback when she announced her intentions to run in Florida’s 20th Congressional District, Wasserman Schultz, a veteran Democrat on Captiol Hill who once chaired the Democratic National Committee, declined to run for re-election in her current 25th district, which became more competitive.
In May, following the U.S. Supreme Court gutting the Voting Rights Act of 1965, Florida Republicans voted to redistrict the state’s congressional maps, largely diluting Black and Latino voting power to give Republicans better advantages in elections. The same was done in states across the U.S.: Texas, Louisiana, Alabama, Tennessee, North Carolina, Missouri, and Ohio. As a result, several Black Democrats in Congress have or are in jeopardy of losing their seats. Florida’s 20th Congressional District is one of few majority-Black districts left in the South.
Critics accuse Wasserman Schultz, who faced a tougher re-election in her district, of ignoring the political crisis facing Black voters and the Black electeds who represent them in exchange for her own political survivorability.
“I think it was only about her and her holding on to power,” said Manley. “For her to say, ‘Oh, I have experience and I have clout’ and that is more important than Black opportunity district having a voice that understands its experiences, to me, was just selfish.”
Reecie Colbert, a political commentator and national radio host, told theGrio, “We can’t rely on the benevolence of white Democrats to ensure that we have representation, and I think that district is a perfect example of that. When it comes to power, people are going to choose their own power over our representation.”
Colbert said she rejects any suggestion that Wasserman Schultz’s victory on Tuesday night reflects a stamp of approval from Black voters in Florida’s 20th district. The Sirius XM host of “The Reecie Colbert Show” noted that, collectively, the Black candidates in the race earned more votes than Wasserman Schultz.
“The reality is that the vote was split, and she was able to win with the plurality of the votes,” said Colbert.
“She’s going to have to do her work because well over a majority of the voters in the district, 55%, voted against her. She should understand that the majority of the district voted against her,” said Manley.
The former U.S. congressional candidate, who has lived in the Broward County district his whole life, says a lot is at stake for Black Floridians, as they are for the more than 46 million Black Americans across the country under the leadership of the Trump administration and Republicans in Congress.
“This administration and the Republican Party, they’re attacking the Black community and our Black voices at a level we haven’t seen in quite a long time. We’re talking about the Black federal workers in the federal workforce, on DEI, on voting rights, on civil rights, on the criminal justice system,” he told theGrio.
Black representation matters because elected officials from the community often “champion” the issues that matter most to Black voters, says Colbert.
“You see an emphasis on Black unemployment. You see an emphasis on Black maternal health, on civil rights, on voting rights. I could be wrong, but I have not seen people who are not Black take up the mantle, who are not also trying to be president or trying to be governor or something like that,” she told theGrio.
Considering the stakes, Colbert said some of the Black candidates should’ve had more foresight and strategy by dropping out of the race to coalesce power behind a strong Black candidate to defeat Wasserman Schultz. What’s more, she said, it sends the message that what Wasserman Schultz did is a “winning strategy.”
Manley agrees that some of the other Black candidates should have stepped aside. He specifically called out former Congresswoman Sheila Cherfilus-McCormick, who resigned in April due to an U.S. House of Representatives ethics investigation brought after she was indicted for theft, money laundering, and making illegal campaign contributions.
“You have somebody with a federal indictment who had no business at all running and should be ashamed of herself for running,” said Manley, who also said another candidate, Luther Campbell, best known as rapper Uncle Luke, did not have the campaign funds or a “chance” at winning the nomination.
“But at the end of the day, everyone ran. They had the right to run. They just should have considered really what was at stake,” he added.
At the heart of the conflict over Wasserman Schultz and Florida’s 20th district is a larger critique of the Democratic Party and its lack of prioritization of Black voters and the issues they care about.
“Black people are literally just seen as the afterthought, and that we are people who will forever do our part to help the Democratic Party, but nobody will ever stand with us,” Manley told theGrio.
As for Wasserman Schultz, Colbert said she expects that the longtime Florida congresswoman will “support Democratic priorities,” but explained that “Black priorities go beyond just what Democrats tend to focus on and what the Democratic Party at large tends to focus on.”
She added, “[They] do not have the same lens towards solving issues that acutely impact our community. That’s just a fact.”