Wasserman Schultz stands strong for U.S. District 23
Debbie Wasserman Schultz has faced her constituents more than a dozen times since she was elected to the Florida Legislature in 1992 and to the U.S. House of Representatives in 2005.
She has never lost an election. She must be doing something right. Still, Republicans routinely field a candidate or two to take a crack at piercing what appears to be her iron wall of support in District 23, which heavily leans Democratic. Hillary Clinton won the district with 61 percent of the vote two years ago.
This time out, Wasserman Schultz’s perennial Republican opponent — Joseph Kaufman — is joined by Tim Canova and Don Endriss, both running as “no party affiliation” candidates.
Kaufman is a counter-terrorism researcher, writer and lecturer who lives in Tamarac. He says his three prior attempts to unseat the congresswoman have increased his name recognition and improved his odds. He won the three-way Republican primary in August with 44.7 percent of the vote.
Kaufman was an early supporter of President Trump and believes the president “has done a fantastic job of bringing prosperity and projecting strength around the world. … I don’t care if he’s said a few curses. I care about him doing — about what he does.”
Endriss appears to be an ego-inspired candidate. He is running under the “TechParty” banner, a party that seems to be of his own invention.
Canova, a law professor at Nova Southeastern University, is a more serious candidate. But he is not the same candidate he was two years ago, when he challenged Wasserman Schultz in the Democratic primary and captured the nation’s eye.
In that campaign, Canova was less angry and more likable. He secured the endorsement of Sen. Bernie Sanders, who was running for the Democratic presidential nomination. At the time, Wasserman Schultz was head of the Democratic National Committee and Sanders and his supporters believed she was biased toward Clinton’s campaign.
Sanders’ support helped Canova raise money from across the country. It also helped him raise what he calls an army of volunteers. They polled 10,000 voters in face-to-face interviews and from what they were hearing, Canova says he was feeling good about his prospects going into Election Day.
But it wasn’t even close. Wasserman Schultz won the primary by 14 points.
The voters spoke, just as they had for 25 years.
Stunned at the loss, Canova concluded the only explanation was ballot box hanky panky. He argued that the way to check the vote count was to look at the paper ballots filled out by voters.
He made a request of Broward Supervisor of Elections Brenda Snipes and filed a lawsuit to back it up. For reasons unclear, Snipes destroyed the paper ballots one year after the election, a year sooner than the required two-year retention dictated by the law. In Canova’s mind, that was the clincher.
We believe Canova is confusing incompetence with conspiracy. Wasserman Schultz has proven over and over that she has the support of voters in her district.
In our view, with good reason. Throughout her 25-year career, Wasserman Schultz has been a consistent supporter of traditional liberal values. She favors, for example, a $15 minimum wage, environmental protections and appropriate gun control. She’s strong on Everglades restoration, on protecting Social Security and Medicare, and on the Affordable Care Act. She’s an opponent of Trump’s tax program that, she believes, exacerbates income inequality.
About Donald Trump she says: “He has eroded the trust of Americans in their government by repeatedly, without compunction, lying about provable facts.”
She says Trump has undermined Planned Parenthood, attempted to take away medical care for the needy, advanced a draconian immigration policy and is working to overturn Roe v. Wade, among other things.
She believes, like most of the scientific community, that climate change is a real threat to our way of life and must be attacked on multiple fronts, from making wider use of alternative energy, to increasing controls on greenhouse gases.
It should come as no surprise that Canova supports most, if not all, of the Wasserman Schultz issues. After all, he was a Democrat until earlier this year. They part company, most notably, on the issue of incumbency.
Canova thinks incumbents get tainted by Washington if they stay too long. Wasserman Schultz believes length of service better equips and positions someone to serve their constituents.
We think some incumbents deserve to be retired by the voters, but Debbie Wasserman Schultz isn’t one of them. On the contrary, we think she should stay as long as she keeps serving her constituents with distinction. We suspect that will be for a very long time.