Politics & Government

Gillum came off as the more polished and thoughtful speaker. DeSantis seemed a guy who had talking points but could only rarely put together a coherent argument.

For years, Florida has had one of the highest rates of uninsured residents. So it’s no surprise health care is a top issue for voters going into the November midterms. According to a new poll from the Kaiser Family Foundation, more than a quarter of Florida voters said health care was the most important issue they were considering this election season.

Dubbed the “Rights of Crime Victims,” Amendment 6 has garnered strong opposition from local and statewide organizations like the Broward County League of Women’s Voters and ACLU of Florida. Activists warn the proposed amendment would favor corporations and infringe upon the rights of the accused.

Even compared to other college conservative groups, Turning Point USA is a collection of some of the absolute worst pundits in America. Case in point: The group says it’s bringing American-Habsburg crown prince Donald Trump Jr. to a South Florida high school to speak at 6:30 tonight as part of TPUSA’s Campus Clash series, in which group leaders Charlie Kirk and Candace Owens appear at local schools and colleges to make libs mad or whatever it is they do.

Former New York mayor and possible 2020 presidential candidate Michael Bloomberg joined the parents of slain Marjory Stoneman Douglas students for a rally advocating gun control in Coral Springs.

Just three days after 17 students and teachers were massacred at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High this past February 14, a gun show was held at a Miami community center. Others followed even closer to the school. Naturally, many parents are outraged. In April, the City of Fort Lauderdale ended its regular gun show at the city’s War Memorial Auditorium…

Just before the November 2016 election, a federal judge forced the Florida Division of Elections to allow rejected absentee-ballot voters to correct mistakes on their mailed-in forms. Yet somehow even more ballots ended up being rejected in that election than in 2012 — and younger voters and voters of color, who overwhelmingly lean to the left, had their ballots invalidated at a far higher rate.

For the past ten years, Rhyelle, a 72-year-old Sarasota County resident, hasn’t been able to cast a ballot. He is one of the roughly 1.5 million Floridians who lost their right to vote because, in 2008, he was convicted of a felony for growing marijuana for his personal use in his home.

When the Washington Post revealed earlier this month that Ron DeSantis, Florida’s #MAGA GOP gubernatorial candidate, had appeared at conferences organized by David Horowitz — a guy who has minimized the impact of slavery in American history and argued there’s a “race war” against white people — DeSantis lashed back and insisted he was the victim of a “smear campaign.”

As he’s done nearly every day since his daughter Jaime died in the massacre at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in February, Fred Guttenberg spent this morning trying to push for gun control. Today he made his way to D.C. for Senate confirmation hearings on Brett Kavanaugh so he could ask Trump’s first Supreme Court pick where he stands on anti-gun-violence measures.

Click on a page called “Tea Party,” which boasts 94,000 followers and claims to be “the oldest and largest #TeaParty group on Facebook,” and you’ll find that one of the first posts this morning is a glaringly racist meme showing side-by-side photos of Melania Trump and a heavily Photoshopped Michelle Obama with the headline “Make the White House Beautiful Again.”

This year, record numbers of women across Florida are mounting campaigns for office, most of them progressives motivated by anti-Trump fervor and emboldened by the Women’s March. The so-called Pink Wave had its first real test Tuesday, Primary Day. And the early returns suggest the wave is real.

After last night’s primary results made it official, Floridians assumed newly minted GOP gubernatorial candidate Ron DeSantis, a Confederate-flag bumper-sticker come to life, would run a wild, dog-whistling, and entirely Trumpian campaign against Democrat Andrew Gillum. But people perhaps didn’t expect DeSantis to start throwing around racial slurs this early…

The running joke among Florida political journalists is that the state’s inept Democratic Party runs a centrist from Tampa every single year for governor. The past few decades of Democratic gubernatorial candidates have been milquetoast centrists who love palling around with their Republican colleagues in Tallahassee and sharing stories about staggering home from bars during their time at FSU. Florida, it seems, does not create populist firebrands.

Broward School Board candidate Elijah Manley called board member Rosalind Osgood a “demonic entity” in a Twitter thread fired off Sunday afternoon. Manley also accused Osgood of violating election laws by intimidating voters and campaigning within 100 feet of the African-American Research Library and Cultural Center

It was blindingly sunny and at least 90 degrees as Emma Collum made her way through an Oakland Park neighborhood of colorful ranch houses with manicured front lawns. Dressed in a T-shirt bearing her name, light-blue shorts, and a Dolphins hat, the fast-talking 33-year-old with long dark hair and a…

The number of progressive women running for office in Florida has nearly quadrupled in two years. The 235 candidates Ruth’s List Florida is supporting in this November’s election is an uptick from approximately 60 who ran for office with the organization’s backing in 2016.

Donald Trump won the 2016 presidential election by running as an anti-establishment, outsider candidate. (Russia may have helped, too.) In 2018, the Democratic party is responding by propping up outsider candidates of their own, often with political positions substantially to the left of traditional Democratic candidates. Many of South Florida’s…

Miami Dolphins wide receiver Kenny Stills has been kneeling during the national anthem to protest the racist American justice system for portions of the last three NFL seasons. Stills is extremely serious about his activism — in February, he took a road trip in an RV to meet civil-rights supporters…

Boca Raton’s GEO Group — the single largest contractor for Immigration and Customs Enforcement — absolutely does not want anyone to accuse it of caging people or separating families. GEO is so upset by such allegations that it threatened to sue Dream Defenders, a Florida civil rights group, all…

Even in the “Gunshine State,” the National Rifle Association is rapidly becoming politically toxic. After the Parkland school massacre February 14, every politician closely aligned with the NRA took a rightful beating: Sen. Marco Rubio was ridiculed on live TV during a CNN town hall, and GOP gubernatorial candidate Adam Putnam has still not lived down calling himself a “proud NRA sellout.”