Florida Democratic Party Chair Allison Tant stated the obvious: "We took a shellacking." But she said the party will pick up the pieces from Tuesday's drubbing and keep working to restore a semblance of a two-party system in Florida.
"We're going to retool and move forward," she said.
Tant said the "national headwind" was a big problem in Year Six of the Obama presidency, along with the Republicans' lopsided advantage in the product that dominated the race for governor: money to buy TV ads. From the Democratic leader's point of view, the election looks like this: Gov. Rick Scott had the advantages of incumbency, vastly more money and wrote his campaign $12.8 million worth of checks -- and still barely won, at last count, by slightly less than 66,000 votes.
"I'm mystified," Tant said, by another disappointing Democratic turnout in South Florida, where this time fewer Democrats showed up in Miami-Dade, despite what she called an "unprecedented" grass-roots vote-building effort for an off-year mid-term election.
"Clearly we have to do things better," Tant said. She vowed that Democrats will continue to hold Republicans accountable while speaking up for middle-class families in Florida on issues such as education, health care and the minimum wage.
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