Almost all of Florida’s elected Democratic National Committee members are condemning U.S. Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz’s decision to run for reelection in a district previously drawn to ensure black voters’ representation but targeted for redistricting by Gov. Ron DeSantis this year.
“Our party cannot credibly denounce the dismantling of black political power by Republicans while treating one of Florida’s few remaining majority-black districts as a political opportunity for an incumbent seeking a safer seat,” a group of ten elected Florida DNC members wrote in a statement released Tuesday as reported by the Miami Herald.
All but two of the party’s 11 non-officer, elected members signed the letter, according to the Herald’s Claire Heddles.
The letter followed Wasserman Schultz’s announcement that she would run for Florida’s 20th District after DeSantis and the state Legislature rearranged congressional district boundaries in South Florida, leaving just three left-leaning districts in a region with five Democratic incumbents.
Wasserman Schultz, in Congress for more than 20 years, chose to run in a safe blue seat where a Democrat is all but guaranteed to win in the general election, instead of in one of the surrounding districts, newly drawn to favor Republicans.
Critics say she chose to take her $2.5 million war chest to an easier Democratic-leaning district to ensure her own political power.
“We cannot claim to defend voting rights, racial justice, and representation while undermining Black political power when it becomes politically convenient,” the Florida DNC members wrote.
In an interview with the Herald, Wasserman Schultz shrugged off criticism as coming from political opponents.
Black candidates have been sounding alarm bells for weeks about her plans for the 20th District race.
“It’s not really surprising that that criticism is coming from folks who are already running for the job,” she said.
But the DNC members’ statement marked the most forceful condemnation of the congresswoman’s decision from within the party she once led.
Wasserman Schultz was DNC chair from 2011 until 2016.
That’s the year she resigned under fire on the eve of the party’s convention, dealing a blow to its hopes of demonstrating unity in the face of the threat from Donald Trump.
She was forced to step aside after a leak of internal DNC emails showed officials actively favoring Hillary Clinton during the presidential primary and plotting against Clinton’s rival, Bernie Sanders.
“Debbie Wasserman Schultz has made the right decision for the future of the Democratic party,” Sanders said at the time, adding that the party leadership must “always remain impartial in the presidential nominating process, something which did not occur in the 2016 race.”
The Sanders campaign had long claimed that the party establishment had its “finger on the scales” during the bitter and surprisingly long primary, but the embarrassing revelations proved to be the final straw for a figure who had been a lightning rod for tension within the party.
Wasserman Schultz’s DNC tenure was also marked toward its end by criticism from then-U.S. Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, D-Hawaii, who at the time was the committee’s vice chairwoman.
Gabbard had blasted Wasserman Schultz for limiting the number of Democrat primary presidential debates.
The limited debates were also seen as Wasserman Schultz trying to engineer Hillary Clinton’s election over Sanders.
Gabbard, who later quit the Democrat party, joining the GOP, has been serving as President Trump’s national security director.
She identifies as Black, so there is no problem. Transrace, is a new word for this