Democratic Mayoral Win in Jacksonville Is a Huge Middle Finger to Ron DeSantis

Jacksonville has only had a Democratic mayor once in the past 30 years. Jacksonville’s county, Duval, has voted for Republicans in every election since 1976—until it narrowly voted for Biden in 2020. And now a Democratic candidate will be leading Florida’s largest city again.

On Tuesday, Jacksonville made history and sent shockwaves across the state and even country in electing the city’s first female mayor in its almost 200-year history: former journalist Donna Deegan. Deegan also beat a DeSantis-endorsed Republican by four points.

Deegan was born and raised in Jacksonville and has been a longtime news anchor for the city, having begun her career as an anchor in 1984. A three-time survivor of breast cancer, Deegan also created the Donna Foundation, which supports local women living with the disease.

Her platform focused on broad topics: “Good Infrastructure,” “Good Health,” and “Good Economy,” but within those buckets, Deegan was not afraid to point to systemic issues that need fixing—from stopping “a handful of well connected people” from benefiting from city contracts, and opening deals up to minority-owned businesses, to fixing crumbling infrastructure in “neglected neighborhoods.”

Notably, Deegan’s victory comes in the aftermath of an election cycle in which Ron DeSantis cruised to reelection by almost 20 points—in Duval County, DeSantis won by 12. And yet, in this election, DeSantis’s own endorsed candidate, Daniel Davis, lost to a Democrat by four. That is a 16-point partisan swing, just since November.

The results are all the more eye-popping when considering that Davis is no political stranger around Jacksonville. From 2003 to 2010, he served on Jacksonville’s City Council, even serving as council president from 2007 to 2008. In 2010, he advanced to represent parts of the county in the Florida state House. While serving in the legislature, he also was appointed president of the Jacksonville Chamber of Commerce, a position he has held since.

Up to this point, Jacksonville had been America’s largest city with a Republican mayor; now it becomes yet another city that Republicans are growing to be more and more out of touch with. The Republicans deployed the traditional playbook they’ve grown so used to, and it failed them.

A Davis-approved ad attacked Deegan for saying she attended Black Lives Matter protests after the killing of George Floyd in 2020. DeSantis himself also endorsed Davis as “the proven law and order conservative Jacksonville needs to tackle the city’s greatest challenges and seize its biggest opportunities.” And as DeSantis continued to whine about and attack the media, Deegan, a former journalist, cruised to victory.

It seems the assumption that such tactics (whipping up racist fearmongering around police reform; attacking journalists) would impress “conservative Jacksonville” in fact played a part in making it reliably conservative no more.

Meanwhile, DeSantis ended the night 0–2 on his endorsement record, as his preferred candidate for Kentucky’s gubernatorial race, Kelly Craft, also lost her election to Trump-endorsed Attorney General Daniel Cameron, who famously refused to hold the cops who killed Breonna Taylor accountable.

Republicans have made their position for 2024 clear, forcing through an extreme abortion ban overnight in North Carolina that will decimate reproductive health access in the South.

Similar measures are also being considered in the Nebraska and South Carolina Republican-majority legislatures.

North Carolina Republicans voted late Tuesday night to override Democratic Governor Roy Cooper’s veto of a bill banning abortion at 12 weeks. They were able to squeak the restrictions through after Representative Tricia Cotham switched her political affiliation to Republican. She had previously expressed support for abortion rights, but pulled an abrupt about-face in early April that two of her former aides described as a “deeply petty, personal” decision.

The new abortion restrictions, which go into immediate effect, technically ban abortion after 12 weeks, but in reality, the window could be much shorter. People would also only be allowed to get a medication abortion until 10 weeks of pregnancy, and to get one, they would have to go to three separate, in-person appointments that are 72 hours apart.

Under the new law, abortions are technically allowed up to 24 weeks if the fetus has a “life-limiting anomaly,” but the anomaly must be “uniformly diagnosable,” even though such defects are rarely so clear-cut. Doctors also have to tell patients that such anomalies do result in live births with “unpredictable and variable lengths of life,” meaning they will have to try to convince patients to carry the pregnancy to term if there’s a chance the baby will live—even if only for a few moments.

The law also mandates that the legislature would have to appoint a rules commission to overhaul abortion clinic regulations by October. New rules could potentially force clinics to undergo costly (and unnecessary) changes, even permanently shutting them down if they are unable to comply. It would also require health care providers to care for infants “born alive”—which health experts agree rarely occurs and could negatively impact post-birth care—and could restrict access to abortion based on a patient’s reason for wanting one.

“Abortion bans are really about control. The ability to control the lives of others. Women did not ask for your oversight. We did not ask for your approval. Women do not need to be protected. Stay out of our exam rooms,” Democratic Representative Julie von Haefen said during the debate.

Representative Diamond Staton-Williams pointed out that “if we genuinely believe in the sanctity of life, we need to recognize our medical professionals as the experts they are. The doctor’s office just isn’t big enough for the entire N.C. House to fit in.”

Chants of “Shame!” broke out after the House voted to override the veto. Cotham made an “I’m watching you” gesture at the protesters as they were escorted out.

After Roe v. Wade was overturned, North Carolina became an abortion haven in the South due to its previous law allowing abortion up to 20 weeks. The new law, combined with Florida’s hugely unpopular six-week ban, will devastate abortion access in the region.

South Carolina, which currently allows abortion until 22 weeks, is still debating a six-week ban. Democrats filed 1,000 amendments to the bill to try and block it. In Nebraska, Republicans got just enough votes to add a 12-week abortion ban to a bill banning gender-affirming care. That measure must still go up for a final vote.

When members of the white supremacist group Patriot Front marched on Washington, D.C., on Sunday, they were met by a single, acerbic counterprotester on a bike.

Joe Flood, a Washington-based writer, was out having coffee Sunday morning when he saw on Twitter that Patriot Front was having a rally on the National Mall. The Southern Poverty Law Center describes Patriot Front as a “white nationalist hate group” that formed after the deadly “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017.

Since he wasn’t far away, Flood hopped on a Capital Bikeshare bicycle and pedaled over to the Mall, where he found the rally of about 100 people in front of the Washington Monument.

“They snuck into D.C. a couple times before, and they would march around and do photo shoots and stuff, and I didn’t want them to get away this time without someone counterprotesting them and confronting them,” Flood told The New Republic.

What happened next is possibly the greatest string of insults known to man.

“I wanted them to know that they’re racists and fascists, and D.C. doesn’t like fascists,” Flood said. He called them “losers,” “incels,” “cosplayers,” and “a joke.”

The group leader was wearing a fitted blue jacket with brass buttons, cowboy boots, and a “cavalry-style hat,” so Flood shouted that he looked like “General Custer’s illegitimate son.”

“He just stopped and looked at his shoes,” Flood said, laughing. “I’d really got him with that one.”

When Flood said the group was wearing “Walmart khakis,” even the police officers deployed to the rally laughed.

The Patriot Front members then marched from the Mall to Judiciary Square, flanked by about 50 police officers on bicycles. Flood rode alongside them, leapfrogging ahead to continue shouting at the group. A few other counterprotesters joined him as they reached the end of the Mall. Once they reached Judiciary Square, the Patriot Front members put their signs into two U-Haul trucks and then got on the metro to leave.

He has now gone viral for his heckling skills, but Flood said it’s important to remember: “America is not for one group, it’s for everyone. And that’s what makes this country great. And then the fact that there are white supremacists who think that this country belongs to only one group of people, I just find completely offensive.”

Patriot Front “were a joke, basically, but they’re an evil joke,” Flood told TNR. “As a friend of mine said, ‘It’s funny till it isn’t.’ So that’s why I wanted them to know that what they were doing was not OK, and that people in D.C. hated them.”

Dianne Feinstein seems to think she was never on a leave of absence from her job.

On Tuesday, Senator Dianne Feinstein, flanked by a team of staffers, fielded some questions from the press after voting on the Senate floor, reports Slate.

She reported that she was “feeling fine,” though suffering from a nondescript “problem with the leg.”

She was then asked by a reporter what the response from her colleagues has been like since her return back to the Hill.

“No, I haven’t been gone,” Feinstein responded. “You should follow the—I haven’t been gone. I’ve been working,” she continued.

She was then asked if she meant she had been working from home.

“No, I’ve been here. I’ve been voting,” she insisted. “Please. You either know or don’t know.”

The comment is curious given the gravity of how consequential Feinstein’s absence—and indeed, lack of voting—has been over the past few months. Feinstein has been absent from the Senate since February 27, having been hospitalized in early March for a case of shingles.

During that time, Democrats were unable to advance court nominees. Her absence has been used by senators like Dick Durbin as justification for why Supreme Court ethics legislation cannot be advanced. Republicans, aided by weak politicians like Joe Manchin, have been able to vote to pass inane resolutions like overturning an Environmental Protection Agency rule to reduce truck pollution.

When Feinstein was asked Tuesday about members who have called for her resignation, she deflected and was apparently wheeled away.

Slate asked Senator Sheldon Whitehouse about whether there was any optimism for Feinstein to return to being a fully functioning, contributing member of the Judiciary Committee.

“I’m gonna leave that to the medics,” he responded.

On Tuesday, eight Democrats and independents joined Senate Republicans in voting to overturn Washington, D.C.’s police reforms.

Senators Joe Manchin, Jon Tester, Jeanne Shaheen, Catherine Cortez Masto, Maggie Hassan, Jacky Rosen, Angus King, and Kyrsten Sinema all joined in the effort to overrule time and work that residents and officials have invested to make their city safer.

The new resolution to overturn D.C.’s local rule was introduced by Republicans in March, just hours after Biden and Congress killed a different bill reforming D.C.’s criminal code (that, more than anything else, updated codes that hadn’t been dusted off in over 100 years).

The resolution aims to overturn an array of reforms made in the aftermath of a string of brutal police killings nationwide. Among the reforms are provisions outlawing the use of neck restraints, like that used by Minneapolis Police Officer Derek Chauvin to kill George Floyd in May 2020.

D.C.’s reforms also call to make body-camera footage of officer-caused deaths, or serious uses of officer force, more accessible to the public. They moreover expand membership and inclusion on governing bodies like the Police Complaints Board and Use of Force Review Board—small asks given how often police departments get away with sweeping misconduct and outright violence under the rug.

The reforms also ban employment of new officers if they were previously determined by other agencies to have been responsible for serious misconduct, or if they were forced out of previous jobs for “disciplinary reasons.” Nothing radical about having baseline standards for what type of person is allowed to be empowered to enforce the law; whatever happened to “with great power comes great responsibility?”

Biden can—and is expected to—veto the Senate vote. Consequently, some shrewd pundits have characterized it all as a “messaging vote,” a low-stakes vote that allows conservative senators to say, “Look, we didn’t support this radical bill,” come election time. After all, Biden will veto it, so what does it matter anyway?

But what is the “message” to be had here, really? What does it tell voters that eight Democratic caucus members joined this farce to overturn D.C.’s democratic will? What does it tell voters that these so-called Democrats found it prudent to bend the knee to bad-faith right-wing attempts to obstruct even moderate checks on unaccountable police forces? If politics is meant to be about making an argument, about convincing people and rallying them to your side, the only message communicated by this cowardly vote is that D.C.’s autonomy is indeed up for debate, that having baseline standards for what the police can and can’t do to the citizenry is somehow an out-of-field demand, and that you as an elected official lack the conviction to stand for anything at all.

So, sure, clever punditry class: Call it a “messaging vote.” Meanwhile, as Democrats continue to allow these right-wing attacks to appear just part of reasonable debate, actual reforms will remain as moderate as this D.C. police reform actually was. In the eyes of the media and political class, the goalposts will remain the same, and the bounds of what change we can actually strive for will continue to narrow. And all of it because a handful of feckless Democrats are allowed, even encouraged, to cower and join out-of-touch attacks on even modest changes to our violent, unaccountable system of justice and power.