Group spends $1.5M on ads for state attorney race
Last-minute decision made on behalf of candidate Worrell
Backed by billionaire investor George Soros, who has helped tip local races before, a group is spending at least $1.5 million on last-minute ads to help one of the candidates in the crowded race to become the next top prosecutor for Orange and Osceola counties.
Records show that a new political committee raised more than $2.2 million and spent more than $1.5 million in the past two weeks — all of it, according to organizers, on behalf of Monique Worrell, a criminal-justice reform advocate who is one of four Democrats competing in the Tuesday primary to become the local state attorney.
That political committee – called “Our Vote Our Voice” — has raised most of its money from two sources: $1 million from the Florida Rights Restoration Coalition, the group that spearheaded the 2018 constitutional amendment restoring voting rights to people who have completed felony sentences, and $1 million from Democracy PAC, a political committee set up by Soros, a Democratic billionaire and megadonor.
The last-minute, outside-ad blitz in support of Worrell mirrors the last election for OrangeOsceola state attorney, when Soros spent more than $1.3 million in the closing weeks of the 2016 campaign to elect the current state attorney, Aramis Ayala, who is not running for re-election.
Three other Democrats are competing against Worrell in the Democratic primary: Deb Barra, who is the current second-incommand in the state attorney’s office; Belvin Perry, a Morgan & Morgan attorney who used to be the region’s chief judge; and Ryan Williams, a former homicide prosecutor under Ayala who left after Ayala announced she would no longer seek the death penalty in cases and who now works for a state attorney’s office based in Ocala.
Ayala initially endorsed Barra but then switched her support to Worrell after Worrell entered the
race. The $1.5 million spent since Aug. 6 by Our Vote Our Voice is more twice as much money as the total amount the four candidates have spent — combined — through their own campaigns, according to fundraising records.
Some of its ads promote Worrell. Others attack Perry, the wellknown judge who presided over the Casey Anthony trial, because Perry changed his voter registration from Republican to Democrat last year.
Some of the ads aren’t entirely accurate. One spot, for instance, calls Worrell a “former prosecutor.” Worrell used to lead a unit in Ayala’s office that investigates claims of innocence by people who have already been found guilty, but she has never prosecuted a case.
Only registered Democrats can vote in the primary because an independent candidate — Orlando criminal defense attorney Jose Torroella — also qualified to run. The winner of the Democratic primary will face Torroella in the November general election.
Desmond Meade, the executive director of the Florida Rights Restoration Coalition, said he established the Our Voice Our Vote political committee to promote changes to the criminal penal system and the rights and needs of former felons who have served their sentences. And it is doing so by paying for television ads, radio spots and neighborhood canvassers boosting Worrell, who Meade said would help both causes through policies such as charging fewer children as adults and reducing the use of cash bail.
“The money that we raised is for promoting the voices of returning citizens,” Meade said.
For her part, Worrell said she welcomed the help — and dismissed criticism that her supporters are attempting to buy an election.
“I am ecstatic to have the support of that group as well as the other progressive groups who have rallied behind the movement for criminal justice reform,” Worrell said. “Money does not buy elections. Money helps to disseminate messages to people.”
Barra did not immediately respond to request for comment.
Perry accused criminal-justice reform supporters of trying to use a local prosecutor’s office to achieve policy goals they have been unable to win in Tallahassee, where Republicans control both the Governor’s Office and the Legislature.
“They’re trying to get state attorneys to rewrite the law,” Perry said. “That’s the job of the Florida Legislature.”
And Williams criticized Worrell’s dependence on outside interest groups and what he called a pattern of dishonesty in ads.
Another national organization, a progressive outfit called the “Working Families Party,” has paid for repeated mailers promoting Worrell and has also donated $125,000 to the Our Vote Our Voice political committee. And a group controlled by the American Civli Liberties Union of Florida has paid for mailers promoting Worrell and criticizing the other candidates that some of the other candidates have called misleading.
“We saw this with Ms. Ayala in 2016,” Williams said. “When no one’s looking in the last week you get the rush of money and the lies take on bigger scope and scale.”