"We Didn't Have a Ground Game" A Democratic congresswoman on why she lost her seat [View all]

[tulipsandroses]

“We Didn’t Have a Ground Game”
A Democratic congresswoman on why she lost her seat

Shalala’s seat had been reliably Republican for years before she won it, but plenty of people assumed she was safe in 2020. Shalala herself felt a little differently. “I felt vulnerable, very vulnerable, because it was a presidential year, and Trump was going to do very well in my district,” she said. “There was going to be a huge Republican turnout. They turned out 85 percent of their voters, and Democrats turned out only 75 percent of their voters. And that made the difference.” On Tuesday’s episode of What Next, I spoke with Shalala about her loss and what Democrats can learn from it. Our conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Mary Harris: Your seat was supposed to be relatively safe.

Donna Shalala: Yeah, I know, but I didn’t trust the polls because I could feel that there was going to be a real challenge in my district. I saw the attack ads, but I also heard from people as I walk through Little Havana, for example. I was called communist once in the primary, but now it became a consistent theme.

What do you make of the fact that we’re a few weeks out from the election and we seem to have this split ticket situation where Joe Biden won, but down ballot, a number of representatives and people, even at the state level, did not gain ground when that was the argument for Joe Biden to be top of the ticket a few months back.

I think that if we had run against a reasonable Republican, we would have gotten beaten. Donald Trump so turned off people that were Republicans that they voted for Joe Biden. But they then straight-party voted after that. And the turnout by Republicans cut both ways. It helped Joe Biden with suburban women, for example, and others that were just turned off by Trump, but it didn’t help the down ballot.

“Joe Biden is going to need a two-year strategy or we’re going to lose the House of Representatives.”
— Rep. Donna Shalala
Republicans registered a huge number of voters, probably a quarter of a million voters. In the last 60 days, they registered 5,000 in my district alone. Even though people had poured millions into Florida, we just never got the kind of sophisticated ground game that they put together. So we learned a lot of the process. We simply have a lot of work to do.

Snip---
No, it was a completely different set of issues because the president had mismanaged COVID.Our economy, when I ran before, was in much better shape. It was a disaster now, because I represent a tourist area. I represent the cruise lines, the hotels on Miami Beach, the restaurants. It was a completely different race in terms of issues.

What did that mean when you went out and spoke to people? Did you feel like those issues were resonating with the voters?

I felt like the governor and the president’s mismanagement of COVID was biting. But I also felt the pressure on the economy because once people ran out of their unemployment and their savings, they just wanted the economy open at any cost.

[link:https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2020/11/donna-shalala-house-democrat-defeated-what-happened.html|



I don't live in her district. I live in SWFL. A beach town, lots of small businesses that depend on tourism, weekenders, vacationers. There was a lot of griping about opening the economy. I'm sure people voted with that in mind.