The Cojones Caucus Seeks New Members
The Cojones Caucus Seeks New Members
Standing up for people is good, actually
Welcome to a big Sunday edition of Progress Report!
Happy Easter, Passover, and/or Ramadan to all those that celebrate, and for those that don’t observe any of those holidays, I hope that you enjoyed a hard-earned day off from work. The work never stops here at Progress Report, though, and tonight, I’ve got a substantial feature on a state lawmaker and candidate for higher office who could deliver Democrats from a miserable run in an essential swing state.
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The clearest and most obvious schism in the Democratic Party is an ideological one, pitting upstart progressives against the centrist and conservatives that have long controlled how the party governs. But over the past year, an even starker and more alarming divide has surfaced, with stakes that could not be greater.
Some Democrats want to stand up to unprecedented Republican tyranny, while others deliberately shrink from the moment while tacking to the right.
“We need some Democrats to join the cojones caucus because I'm just so frustrated at the thinking that if we just keep doing the same shit, we're gonna end up with a different result,” Florida State Senator Annette Taddeo tells Progress Report. “I just think voters overall want someone to fight, and I'm not just talking about the partisan fight — I'm talking about democracy.”
Taddeo, a fiery lawmaker that represents parts of Miami-Dade County in the legislature, is running for Florida’s Democratic gubernatorial nomination in part because that cojones caucus is far too small in a state being overrun by Gov. Ron DeSantis and his coalition of bankers, real estate developers, and right-wing fanatics.
DeSantis is not unique among Republican governors, who for the past sixteen months have ridden roughshod over democracy and steered their states toward kleptocratic theocracy. But with the 2024 presidential election in his sights, the Jacksonville blowhard has bullied his way to the forefront of this new crop of MAGA-inflected strongmen.
Like so many despots, DeSantis has taken advantage of a fraught moment of social unrest and applied a mix of arrogance, malice, racism, and cold political calculation to seize power. He has blitzed every front, from his seeming mission to infect the entire state with Covid to the strident attacks on the civil and legal rights of his 22 million constituents.
It’s nauseating to see even a sampling of DeSantis’s legislative bigotry written down in one place, but the breadth of his cruelty is essential to highlight:
A 15-week abortion ban
“Don’t Say Gay” law
A sweeping ban on “divisive concepts” in the classroom
Voter suppression laws
Crippling the state’s solar industry
Bans on local Covid safety measures
None of these attacks have scared off his deep-pocketed donors, largely because DeSantis has quietly handed over vast sums of Floridians’ tax dollars to the corporations and wealthy elite that feed his campaign coffers.
The Florida Democratic Party’s structural debility and dependence on similar big-money donors have allowed DeSantis to largely steamroll over any resistance, making him a hero of the Fox News set even as so many in his state flounder. Bullies and tyrants cannot be taken down with triangulation or timidity, which makes Taddeo’s pitch particularly enticing at this moment, especially compared to the two other candidates in the race for the Democratic nomination.
Last week, for example, DeSantis called for a special session to hash out Florida’s new Congressional map after he vetoed everything offered to him by the Republican legislature. None of the maps were racist enough for DeSantis’s liking, and he browbeat lawmakers into remaining in Tallahassee and giving him the gerrymander he demanded. The map DeSantis is foisting on the legislature gives Republicans 20 seats and just eight to Democrats, a clear violation of a constitutional amendment passed by Florida voters in 2011.
A small set of progressive Democrats in the State House — including State Reps. Anna Eskamani, Carlos Smith, and Michele Rayner — all spoke out against the maneuver, but Taddeo was the only one to call for a full-on boycott of the process.
“I am standing up and saying ‘heck, no, this is not okay,’ because we already know what the outcome is gonna be,” Taddeo says. “They have the votes to do anything they want, especially when many of them are afraid of the governor. This is about something so much bigger. This governor wants to literally delete two African-American seats and it should be unacceptable to every Democrat. This is about us standing up and saying we are not going to be a part of an illegal process.”
The protest didn’t stop Republicans, but it made enough noise to earn Taddeo an invitation to write a searing op-ed in the Miami Herald that compares DeSantis’s attacks on democracy to autocracy and corruption that has so often seized her native Colombia. Taddeo was born to a Colombian mother and American father and emigrated to the United States as the South American country descended back into violence she was 17.
The op-ed suggests her aggressive tactics are beginning to catch on. Last fall, as DeSantis bullied his legislature into passing increasingly despotic measures, like protecting people that run over protestors and a ban on diversity education, Taddeo became alarmed at the lack of firm pushback from the existing Democratic candidates, Florida agricultural commissioner Nikki Fried and Rep. Charlie Crist.
The implied criticism of Crist — she doesn’t name him, but he’s the frontrunner right now — is a notable break from a closer relationship they once enjoyed, when Taddeo joined him as the nominee for lieutenant governor when Crist ran for governor as a Democrat in 2014. She was seen as a key asset for turning out Democrats after her time spent as the chair of Miami-Dade’s Democratic Executive Committee, during which she worked doggedly to field as many viable candidates as possible for rarely contested seats.
Taddeo was also troubled by Democrats’ continued hemorrhaging of Hispanic voters in Florida, which represents an existential danger for the party in what will soon be a minority-majority state. The problem is particularly acute in South Florida, where Democrats’ vote share in heavily Hispanic Miami-Dade has nosedived over the past three election cycles. Hillary Clinton won the county by 30% in 2016, gubernatorial nominee Andrew Gillum won by 20% in 2018, and Joe Biden plummeted to just a 7% advantage in what should be a prime source of Democratic votes in a perennial swing state.
There is no one single reason for the re-alignment, but to even have a hope of reversing course, Taddeo says that Democrats need to reconnect with the community they’ve long taken for granted. She represents a swing district that voted for Trump by six points, putting some heft behind her words.
“It is frustrating when I hear so-called experts try to put us into one bucket: ‘Oh, they're Hispanic, so immigration must be their thing,’ when in Florida really isn't,” she laments. “We have to bring out those voters, register those voters, and to create the coalition of voters that, frankly, a lot of that is a Black and brown coalition that will bring us over the top.”
Taddeo rattles off a few examples of the most basic differences in what each Hispanic community sees as a bogeyman: Cuban-Americans and Puerto Ricans, who make up Florida’s two most populous Hispanic communities, don’t have to worry much about immigration. Venezuelan- and Nicaraguan-Americans, meanwhile, join Cuban-Americans in being fervently anti-communist, which is far less of an issue for the Colombian-American community.
Knowing how opponents are going to attack you and how to respond is an enormous advantage, especially in a state where Republicans make huge investments in Hispanic media outreach and Spanish-language radio networks lean to the right.
Just as important is showing up in the communities more than a month or two before an election, as the Florida Democratic Party has tended to do with both African-Americans and Hispanic voters over the past decade. There’s no better example of that than Mike Bloomberg giving a $100 million gift to Florida Democrats in September of 2020, or about six months too late for it to be truly useful.
Serving in the Florida legislature is only a part-time job, so Taddeo continues to run the large translation business she started in the mid-90s. With a daughter in public school and a landlord that last week tried to jack up her family’s rent by 50%, Taddeo also has more skin in the game than either Crist or Fried, which helps to animate a policy agenda that is far more progressive than theirs.
Some of the arguments she makes about the Democratic Party’s timidity echo those brought up by Eskamani and others in Taddeo’s theoretical cajones caucus. Leadership’s failure to embrace policies popular with voters in Florida is chief among them. In a state with skyrocketing inequality and soaring housing prices, shifting back to a progressive populist agenda could prove to be key.
“As long as you keep being true to your values and fighting for those values, Floridians agree with us,” she says. “We have proven that over and over again — we are passing constitutional amendments like the minimum wage of $15 an hour, overwhelmingly approved by voters. But we had Democrats that were afraid to talk about it because some businesses were against that or the Chamber of Commerce was against it. That's the problem we run into, we don't stand for our values proudly.”
Many Democrats run away from so-called “culture war” issues, no matter how unpopular book burnings and abortion bans are with voters. They fear playing on GOP turf and setting themselves up for out-of-context attack ads or Fox News segments. Taddeo, though, finds a way to tie those issues in with her economically populist message, seizing the initiative and putting a GOP that has regularly green-lit giant hikes on insurance rates and energy prices, and given out nearly $4 billion in tax breaks to major corporations, on the defensive for their kleptocracy.
“We are not getting phone calls at my office [with voters saying] ‘My corporation where I work is doing diversity and inclusiveness training, so you should do something about that,’” Taddeo deadpans. “We get phone calls about the rents and the insurance crisis. That's what we should be dealing with, but we’re not, so that will be a humongous part of the campaign.”
As I’ve written before, Democrats should embrace what I call the Republican War on Freedom, a large part of which is GOP state governments’ banning city councils from doing just about anything to help residents if it might hurt corporate profits. It’s especially egregious in Florida, where they’ve banned local minimum wage increases, rent stabilization measures, occupational safety regulations, and a myriad of other common-sense policies.
This could be a major issue in 2022 if Democrats want it to be, and right now, Taddeo is the only candidate to pursue it. She’s used the frame to attack voter suppression and the lack of home rule, and acknowledged to me she believes that municipalities should be permitted to institute at least temporary rent stabilization measures as Florida reels from the largest spike in rent and housing prices across the country.
After a late start, Taddeo is third in the polls, and she lacks the same statewide name recognition as Crist and Fried, but things are trending upward. Her support share has risen to 15% of an electorate that has largely focused on the horror show of a legislative session and is only beginning to tune into the actual primary. Now that session is over, she’ll be embarking on a tour of each and every one of Florida’s 67 counties, barnstorming to build name recognition and rally voters who need someone willing to fight on their behalf.
“I would say to everyone, please just look at Florida — as Florida goes, the country goes,” Taddeo adds. “And this guy, if DeSantis is not stopped now, he will be president. And he is a lot scarier than Trump ever was.”
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