Hardy may be surprise in congressional race
TALLAHASSEE — On his Twitter profile, state Rep. Omari Hardy calls himself a “troublemaker extraordinaire.” We’ll soon know if that’s an ideal label to win a highly coveted seat in Congress.
Hardy finished his first session Friday as a member of the Legislature, a place he calls “an accelerated academy of public service,” but if this ambitious young Democrat has his way, he won’t be going back to Tallahassee next year. He’ll be headed to Washington instead.
Hardy has his sights set on winning the seat vacated by the death of Alcee Hastings on April 6. He launched his campaign with an online video in which he said he’ll run as an “unapologetic progressive.”
This will be an unusually crowded field. Hardy is one of 10 Democrats who have so far declared for the District 20 seat in Broward and Palm Beach counties, and there will likely be more.
The outspoken freshman from West Palm Beach is the youngest candidate in the field, at 31.
Eight of the 10 announced hopefuls are from Broward, including Sen. Perry Thurston, Rep. Bobby DuBose and two county commissioners, Dale Holness and Barbara Sharief. So far, only Hardy and Priscilla Taylor, a former county commissioner and legislator, are from Palm Beach.
If Gov. Ron DeSantis ever calls a special election, the campaign will play out all summer from Hallandale Beach to Riviera Beach — the first election held under a new Republican-sponsored law that puts new restrictions on mail ballots and drop boxes.
If the Broward candidates split their county’s share of the votes and Hardy dominates in his home county, he has a narrow path to a victory. His youth is an asset: Astute voters know Congress is a seniority-bound institution where it takes years to climb the ladder to prominence.
Wherever Hardy goes, he attracts attention, shakes up the status quo and doesn’t stay long. He beat a three-term incumbent to win a Lake Worth Beach commission seat four years ago and won a five-person Democratic primary for House District 88 last summer in knocking out another incumbent, former Rep. Al Jacquet.
The battlefield for Congress is vastly bigger and it’s obviously Broward-based, but Hardy says that doesn’t matter.
“I think that effective leaders can come from anywhere,” he said in an interview on the historic Capitol steps. “As a constituent of Alcee’s, I didn’t care where he was from. I cared about what he was doing, who he was doing it for, and why. That’s what matters.”
If Broward roots matter in this special election, Hardy has an answer for that, too. He grew up in Lauderdale Manors, east of I-95 between Sunrise and Oakland Park boulevards. He attended Dillard Elementary and St. Thomas Aquinas High, then graduated from the University of Miami and became a teacher.
A fact that says something about Hardy’s potential is 168,351 — his number of Twitter followers as of Friday. It’s mostly the result of a viral video that showed him in a long shouting match with Lake Worth’s mayor for silencing him for protesting city utility shutoffs during the pandemic.
“Those three minutes were three years of frustration in a nutshell,” Hardy said. “I went to sleep that night thinking it was over for me politically … I learned a valuable lesson. If you stand up for people, people will stand up for you.”
Twitter followings are easily exaggerated, but Hardy has one. “It means that I have an audience,” he said. “I have something outside the Legislature that could be leveraged. … If it didn’t matter, Republicans in the Legislature wouldn’t watch my tweets.”
Some of Hardy’s colleagues in the House say he’s making a mistake by leaving the Legislature so quickly to run for a higher office. Democrats need all the good leaders they can find, and a rising star is walking away after one session.
A lot of legislators can have careers that last decades without once drawing national media attention. Hardy was featured on “60 Minutes,” criticizing racial disparities in Florida’s COVID-19 vaccination programs in a controversial segment that was highly critical of DeSantis. On the House floor in Tallahassee, he’s been a forceful debater in support of Medicaid expansion and police reform and in opposition to the Republican agenda. He said Black Floridians need more vocal leaders to speak up for them.
Hardy showed a knack for attracting attention at a young age. He was featured in a 1999 Sun Sentinel feature story about a school mentoring program that used photos and videos. In the lead paragraph of Christine Walker’s story, nine-year-old Omari audaciously said his goal was to be “the first black president of the United States.”