Andrew Gillum, Model Candidate

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http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2018/10/floridas-andrew-gillum-model-gubernatorial-candidate.html

2018 midterms 12:51 P.M.
Andrew Gillum, Model Candidate
By Gabriel Debenedetti

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Gillum’s path to victory relies in part on reshaping an electorate that broke for Trump in 2016 after voting for Obama twice, like Democrats are eager to do around the country. While DeSantis is aiming to replicate the president’s strength in a state he won with high white turnout, Gillum has veered away from the traditional Democratic path to victory. He’s still hoping to run up the score among Latino voters, but after a primary win fueled by unexpectedly large margins among African-Americans, in Jacksonville’s Duval County, and on college campuses, Gillum’s now spending more resources on pumping up turnout among black and young voters than his party has before — especially in 2016, when Hillary Clinton underperformed with both groups. The fact that he would be Florida’s first African-American governor should help, explained Meg Ansara, a Democratic strategist who directed Clinton’s battleground-states operation: The fact is “going to motivate large numbers of people of color, progressives, and young people to vote in this election who might not ordinarily vote in a non-presidential race.”

But Gillum is also the most progressive statewide candidate nominated by Florida Democrats in recent memory, testing the left bound of acceptability in the ultimate purple state, just as DeSantis is the most Trumpian.

The morning after the primary, DeSantis said Florida voters shouldn’t “monkey this up” by electing Gillum, and the Florida GOP’s ads have since warned Spanish speakers of the “MISERIA” of socialism, tying Gillum to Sanders. DeSantis rose to prominence in the first place only after gaining Trump’s approval through his repeated Fox News appearances last year, and he even ran a tongue-in-cheek ad featuring himself building a Trump-style wall of building blocks with his toddler daughter and reading The Art of the Deal to his baby son. Gillum, meanwhile, campaigned in the primary on a single-payer health-care system, abolishing ICE, and impeaching Trump. “Our voters are going to stay home if they have to choose between someone pretending to be a Republican and someone who is a real Republican,” he said at a rally with Sanders in August.

It’s all a bet that, in the age of Trump, Democrats have little room for wishy-washiness, even in the closest states. Still, it’s not always an entirely comfortable fit: Gillum has at times tacked to the middle, raising money with both Clinton and Bloomberg in recent weeks, and he himself is a longtime player in the state capital of Tallahassee — DeSantis is now on the attack over gifts that Gillum appears to have received inappropriately as mayor — and has not always governed his city as an ardent progressive. “If you look at his time as mayor, dude was a very practical, pragmatic mayor. He was not the more liberal mayor in the [primary] race,” said Steve Schale, a veteran Florida Democrat who ran Barack Obama’s efforts in the state.

Yet the publicly fiery campaign is necessary for Gillum’s wager to work: that by painting himself as an unapologetic agent of progressive change, he’ll energize the Democratic base he needs on his side, but also that he won’t alienate middle-of-the-road voters who, he hopes, will be more horrified by DeSantis’s close relationship with Trump. Gillum may not sound like Charlie Crist or Alex Sink — Democrats’ last two gubernatorial nominees — on the stump, but DeSantis is stylistically miles from Rick Scott, Crist, and Jeb Bush — Republicans’ last three governors.

And that’s the point.

“Donald Trump has sort of changed the game for a lot of people. You now have people who, before, may not have ever considered a candidate with the kind of progressive values that I hold, except when you look at the alternative. Not just Donald Trump, but also the guy I’m running against, who wants to be Donald Trump,” predicted Gillum, sitting in a cramped holding room between his campaign bus and the auditorium stage. “We’re building a different kind of constituency, and it includes some of their people.”