Democrats flipped two Republican held seats in the Florida Legislature tonight. One of them is in Hillsborough County, which starts about twenty minutes from where we meet.
Florida special elections, March 25
- Senate District 14, Hillsborough: Brian Nathan (D), a union leader and Navy veteran, beat Josie Tomkow (R) by 408 votes, a margin of half a point, out of 80,016 cast
- House District 87, Palm Beach: Emily Gregory (D) beat Jon Maples (R) by about 2 points, in a district Trump carried by more than 10, out of 33,429 cast
- Seats flipped: two, both from Republican to Democrat
Read that margin again. 408 votes.
Four hundred and eight. That is smaller than the crowd at a decent community meeting. It is smaller than one precinct. It is a number you could personally move with a phone, a clipboard, and a couple of Saturdays.
Every single argument for door knocking, for ballot chasing, for reminding your neighbor that there is an election on a Tuesday in March, lives inside that number. This is what people mean when they say elections are won on turnout, and for once we do not have to explain it with a metaphor.
The seat had been empty for 224 days
Senate District 14 opened up when Jay Collins resigned to become Governor DeSantis’ lieutenant governor. It then sat vacant for 224 days before voters were allowed to fill it. Most of a year, with roughly half a million Floridians having no state senator at all.
When the election finally happened, they picked the other party.
What this means for us, specifically
Hillsborough is our neighbor, our media market, and in a lot of cases our commute. A Democrat winning a state Senate seat there is not a national story that happened to somebody else. It is the same voters watching the same local news we watch.
It also breaks the thing that makes people give up here, which is the belief that the outcome in Florida is decided before anybody votes. It was not decided. It was decided by 408 people who showed up.
