Florida governor's race gets down in the gutter

Florida governor's race gets down in the gutter Continue to article content ...

Florida governor's race gets down in the gutter

Continue to article content

Based on their bios, the clash between former Republican Rep. Ron DeSantis (left) and Tallahassee Mayor Andrew Gillum on racial grounds in Florida's gubernatorial election seemed inevitable. | Chris O'Meara/AP Photo

MIAMI â€" Dog-whistle charges. Black minstrel-voice robocalls. A claim that a candidate “justified slavery.”

In the contest for Florida governor, race dominates the race.

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Whether measured by rhetoric, tactics or strategy, the campaign between Republican Ron DeSantis and Democrat Andrew Gillum is shot-through with racial politics, putting the nation’s rawest and most sensitive issue at the center of one of the hardest-fought elections of the year.

The clash, judging by the candidates’ bios, seemed inevitable.

Gillum, Tallahassee’s mayor, is the Florida Democratic Party’s first African-American nominee for governor and its most liberal. He is the first statewide black candidate who refused to shy away from talking about race, accusing DeSantis of everything from using racist code words to giving so much “harbor” to racists that they think he’s one of them.

DeSantis hails from a heavily Republican congressional district with a small minority population and fashioned his political identity as a hard-right politician and commentator on conservative media. His campaign has privately acknowledged he was unprepared to face an African-American candidate or talk about race in a mainstream general-election campaign.

“Race has been an issue from the very beginning in this campaign, not because I introduced it,” Gillum said in a Wednesday interview with Comedy Central’s Trevor Noah at a popular restaurant in North Miami, a majority black city.

“I'm kinda black,” Gillum said, referencing the darkness of his skin. “Really black.”

“Kinda,” Noah, lighter-skinned, interjected. The two fist-bumped.

From the start of the interview, Gillum blamed DeSantis for injecting the issue into the campaign by using the phrase “monkey this up” in a FOX interview the day after the Aug. 28 primary. And, though DeSantis denied racial intent, Gillum told Noah that DeSantis was using coded language: “He said exactly what he meant to say. He communicated exactly what he wanted to say to his voters, to his constituents, and then, when he got called on it, he tried to run from it.”

DeSantis backers say Gillum is not just “playing the race card,” he’s doing it to avoid uncomfortable questions about a federal corruption probe at City Hall in Tallahassee.

“This is an attempt by the Gillum campaign to continue to distract the media from his involvement in an FBI investigation, countless news reports on him asking for and taking free stuff from lobbyists, using city funds to pay for a trip related to his campaign, accepting contributions from an undercover FBI agent and not reporting it in his disclosures,” the DeSantis campaign said in a written statement.

Gillum has called the effort to call him a “crook” â€" a theme of both Republican Party ads and multiple tweets from President Trump â€" part of a bigoted attempt to question the success of a black man.

The racial controversies in the campaign found fertile soil in the nation’s largest and most dynamic swing state. The fast-growing state is home to a mélange of the white working-class and retirees, a significant African-American population and a growing Hispanic population.

It twice elected President Obama and then chose his photo-negative in President Donald Trump, who first rose to political prominence within the conservative movement by spreading the debunked conspiracy theory that the first African-American president was born in Kenya.

Trump campaigns today for DeSantis in Fort Myers, seat of heavily white and Republican Lee County. Obama campaigns Friday for Gillum in Miami’s historically black neighborhood of Overtown.

“The environment today is absolutely a function of Trump and Obama, the way the discourse has gone, the way people talk about race now,” said state Sen. Perry Thurston, a member of Florida’s legislative black caucus who ran unsuccessfully in 2014 for Florida attorney general.

“Traditionally we’ve had candidates who straddled the line and didn’t want to be too supportive of quote unquote black issues and they didn’t want to talk about race,” Thurston said. “It’s a touchy subject. And it’s painful. But it’s good to get it out in the open to talk about these issues.”

Gillum, he said, is being both tactical in going on offense over race and is also speaking from the heart because facing prejudice is part of the African-American experience. He asserted that DeSantis’ refusal to apologize over the “monkey this up” comment set the tone of the campaign.

But DeSantis’s top surrogate and former colleague, Congressman Matt Gaetz, said DeSantis didn’t apologize because he felt he did nothing wrong, except for misspeak. He also said Gillum might be employing a risky strategy by aggressively talking about race: Florida is politically dominated by Republicans, and whites far outnumber African-Americans by registration and in pre-Election Day ballots cast. More Republicans have also voted so far as well.

“Let’s go to the data: do you see African-American turnout is fundamentally different in this election than in other elections? Maybe by a point or two,” Gaetz said. “But I haven’t seen anything in the early voting or vote-by-mail returns that suggest a swell of African-Americans are voting as a result of Andrew Gillum playing the race card. And we’ll see if Andrew Gillum playing the race card and playing it at every hand coalesces the white vote.”

Florida Democrats have lost races for governor for the past 20 years in Florida by nominating moderate, centrist white candidates â€" and Democratic voters have stayed home. Gillum’s nomination, largely the product of a shrewd campaign funded by out-of-state billionaires against multiple white centrists who divided up the white and moderate vote, represents a radical departure from his predecessors.

So far, most polls show Gillum with a lead that’s within the margin of error or just outside of it, an advantage that Democrats partly attribute to the racial controversies that have overshadowed the campaign at times.

Shortly after DeSantis’ “monkey this up” comments, a racist group released robocalls targeting black voters that mocked Gillum by name in an Uncle Remus-style voice. It released a similar call last week. DeSantis denounced the calls, but Gillum’s campaign said his previous comments paved the way for them.

Gillum also criticized DeSantis over his refusal to refund money to a donor after the donor made racist statements about Obama, and noted that DeSantis spoke at conferences organized by a conservative who made controversial comments about African-Americans â€" a charge that caused DeSantis to lose his temper at last week’s debate.

“How the hell am I supposed to know every single statement someone makes?” DeSantis said loudly during the debate as he interrupting the moderator.

Gillum then mocked DeSantis: “As my grandmother used to say: ‘a hit dog will holler.’ Mr. DeSantis has spoken. He’s got neo-Nazis helping him out in this state. He has spoken at racist conferences. He’s accepted a contribution â€" and would not return it â€" from someone who referred to the former president of the United States as a ‘Muslim n---.’” Gillum spelled out the racial epithet onstage, letter by letter.

At the same time, the Florida Democratic Party released an ad that brands “RACIST” in big red letters across DeSantis’ face and ends with his image morphing into Trump’s.

On Wednesday night, on Comedy Central’s The Daily Show, Gillum added a new line to his parade of horribles: “He authored a book justifying slavery.”

But contrary to Gillum’s claim, DeSantis never justified slavery in his 2011 book, “Dreams From Our Founding Fathers: First Principles in the Age of Obama.”

DeSantis instead criticized the first African-American U.S. Supreme Court, Justice Thurgood Marshall, for criticizing the founding fathers who “devised” a government that “was defective from the start” because it allowed for slavery. DeSantis said the criticisms "miss the mark" because the founders needed to compromise over slavery to create the United States and that “the philosophical foundations of the Constitution are incompatible with slavery.”

In talking so frequently about race, Gillum might be damaging his brand â€" a brand that might otherwise appeal to independents, said Jose Mallea, a Republican political consultant who managed Sen. Marco Rubio’s 2010 campaign in which he faced former U.S. Rep. Kendrick Meek, a prominent African-American.

“Independent voters don’t like hearing the negativity. It’s a turn off,” Mallea said.

But Meek said Gillum had no choice. Meek said running for office as a black man can be a “Catch-22” if an opponent brings up race because the African-American candidate gets labeled as a race-baiter, rather than the other way around. He said Rubio and former Gov. Charlie Crist, to their credit, didn’t use words like “monkey around” or have racist supporters who didn’t hide their prejudice.

“It’s a different time, a different landscape in Florida. I didn’t have to deal with this,” Meek said. “DeSantis did this. He nationalized Mayor Gillum as the spokesman to call out racism, not only in Florida but in America.”

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