Candidates now settle in for long haul to November
Tallahassee Mayor Andrew Gillum pulled off a stunning victory over Gwen Graham in the Democratic primary Tuesday and advanced to face Republican U.S. Rep. Ron DeSantis in November for Florida governor.
Gillum becomes the first African American major party candidate for governor in Florida history. His campaign received a second wind this month with an endorsement from U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders, another influx of cash from liberal billionaires George Soros and Tom Steyer and Sunday’s “Souls to the Polls” events staged by many African American voters.
“I want you to know that this thing is not about me,” Gillum told jubilant supporters in Tallahassee. “This thing is about every single one of us. … I sincerely believe that what is going to deliver us to victory is that there are hard-working people in this state who think they deserve a voice in their government, and we’re going to give it to them.”
DeSantis, meanwhile, easily dispatched Agriculture Commissioner Adam Putnam to win the bitter GOP primary. Supporters at his party in Orlando chanted “Ron! Ron! Ron!” when he was declared the GOP nominee Tuesday evening.
With 99 percent of the precincts counted, DeSantis had 56.5 percent of the vote to 36.5 percent for Putnam.
On the Democratic side, Gillum had 34.2 percent of the vote to 31.4 percent for Graham, with former Miami Beach Mayor Phil Levine third with 20 per-
cent and Palm Beach billionaire Jeff Greene fourth with 10 percent. Winter Park businessman Chris King was fifth with less than 3 percent.
Graham, a South Florida native and North Florida congresswoman, made Central Florida a key part of her focus from the beginning.
Not only did she base her campaign in Orlando, she moved to the city for the duration of the campaign — though she still voted in Tallahassee.
Graham appeared at 10 p.m. at her election day party at The Social in downtown Orlando with her family, including her mother, father, husband, children and siblings, as cheers and screams of, “I love you Gwen!” emitted from a crowd of supporters.
She said she had spoken to Gillum, whom she called a longtime friend.
“I said, ‘Andrew, go out and win this damn thing … because this is too important for the state of Florida,’ ” Graham said. “This election was never about the candidate, it was always about the importance of the future of the state that we all love.”
A large number of female voters had packed into The Social to support Graham, including Orlando lawyer Elizabeth Bryan, who held up a pink “Women for Graham” sign.
But as the votes started to trickle in after 8 p.m, crowds watched as Graham’s lead against Gillum started to shrink.
“Oh no!” one woman shouted as she looked up at the TV over the bar.
The Democratic race had seemingly started to gel in the last few weeks, with Graham having pulled into a steady lead after months in which the lead switched back and forth between her and Levine.
But Gillum, in the middle of the pack in most polls earlier this summer, started to make inroads in August.
He appealed both to progressives, making appearances with Sanders at the University of Central Florida and in Tampa, and to the African American community, often citing the primary’s Aug. 28 date as the day the Rev. Martin Luther King gave his “I Have a Dream” speech in 1963 and the day Barack Obama won the Democratic nomination for president in 2008.
In Central Florida, he was backed by Orange/Osceola State Attorney Aramis Ayala and state Rep. Carlos Guillermo Smith, D-Orlando, who both became vocal advocates.
“Congratulations to Andrew Gillum on his victory tonight,” Sanders said in a statement. “Tonight, Floridians joined Andrew in standing up and demanding change in their community. That’s what the political revolution is all about and Andrew Gillum is helping to lead it.”
On the GOP side, Putnam, despite accumulating a massive war chest and parlaying his long-time connections with state and local Republicans going back decades, saw his lead suddenly disappear after President Donald Trump endorsed DeSantis in June.
Trump and national politics dominated the first of just two debates between the two, held in Kissimmee a few weeks after the president’s endorsement. Despite Putnam’s attempts to return the conversation to his deep knowledge of state and local issues, embodied by his slogan, “Florida First,” he never overcame Trump’s insertion into the race.
“I’m the luckiest guy in the state,” Putnam told supporters in Polk County. “It’s been said whenever one door closes another door opens, and sometimes you look so long at the closed door you miss the one open for a while. I’m not going to dwell on the closed door this evening, I’m going to focus on the call to put Florida first.”
DeSantis used his platform as a frequent guest on Fox News to run a campaign mostly devoid of the traditional trappings of a campaign, which his campaign manager Brad Herold derided as “Columbia shirts and BBQ dinners.”
Despite his campaign being based in Orlando, DeSantis held relatively few events in Central Florida, the most prominent being a July appearance with Donald Trump Jr.
“We did have the support of someone in Washington,” he joked to supporters in Orlando after he was declared the winner. “If you walk down Pennsylvania Avenue, he lives in the house with pillars in front of it. … I’d like to thank the president for his support and for viewing me as someone who’d be a great leader for Florida.”
Trump tweeted his congratulations Tuesday. “Such a fantastic win for Ron DeSantis and the people of the Great State of Florida,” he wrote. “Ron will be a fantastic Governor. On to November!”
King, the biggest long shot in the race, had been running since March of 2017 and kicked off his campaign at one of the senior housing sites his company built in Orlando.
But despite loaning his campaign more than $3 million, including an initial loan of $1 million out of the gate, King’s poll numbers never really moved out of the bottom half of candidates.
King, who lives in Winter Park, cast his ballot at Glenridge Middle School on Tuesday morning.
“I’ve learned that Florida is a big state,” said King, who owns a real estate investment firm and was running for public office for the first time. Staff writers Kyle Arnold, Gray Rohrer and Gabrielle Russon contributed to this report.