Let’s face it — taking on Ron DeSantis in this cycle amounts to nearly an insurmountable task. In choosing Charlie Crist as the nominee, however, Democrats seem incapable of even putting up a worthy effort.
First, the ever-flexible Crist pulls a “basket of deplorables” and tells the 50% of Floridians who approve of DeSantis’ performance that they’re all haters whose votes he doesn’t want. He then goes out of his way to embrace Joe Biden as a great president, the same Joe Biden who currently has a 38% job approval rating among Florida voters in the same University of North Florida poll. (Civiqs has it at 36%.)
How can Crist possibly make this situation worse? How about … picking a running mate who ran a teachers union that demanded that DeSantis keep public schools closed during the pandemic? That oughta do it:
Charlie Crist is expected to announce he has chosen Karla Hernandez-Mats, the president of the teachers union in Miami, to be his running mate, according to four sources familiar with the decision. …
The selection of Hernandez-Mats to be on the ticket with him, indicates Crist is leaning into the fight with Governor Ron DeSantis over education.
“She’s a good choice,” said one Democrat familiar with the decision. “Ron DeSantis has doubled down on education. We know it’s going to be a focus in the campaign, and you are bringing in someone who was a teacher and who understands the issue.”
What understanding does Hernandez-Mats bring to the issue? Hernandez-Mats helped stage this demonstration in an attempt to force the school board to keep schools closed in 2020, despite all of the science indicating that children were not at risk for COVID-19 and that schools were not risks for community spread. Her union under her leadership staged a demonstration outside a school-board meeting that featured a roll-by of hearses, at least one of which had DeSantis’ picture on it:
Reminder that in 2020, @CharlieCrist’s new expected running mate Karla Hernandez-Mats, the president of the Miami teachers union, set up a protest to keep schools closed. She brought hearses outside of a school board meeting, insinuating kids would die if schools were opened up. pic.twitter.com/W7zqqCGxvM
— Will Witt (@thewillwitt) August 26, 2022
DeSantis’ campaign also produced this bon mot from Hernandez-Mats about opposition to mask mandates in schools. Note that this came from one year ago, not two, and at a time long after it was clear that children were neither at risk of nor vectors for COVID-19 transmission:
According to Charlie Crist’s running mate, teacher union boss Karla Hernandez Mats:
If you are against mask mandates in schools, you are not a parent. You are a “soldier of faux rage, false narratives, and political interests” fired up with conspiracy theories.
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— Christina Pushaw 🐊 🇺🇸 (@ChristinaPushaw) August 27, 2022
Hernandez-Mats posted this one personally in response to the Virginia parental-rights movement:
JUST IN: @CharlieCrist will reportedly announce Miami-Dade teacher union boss @KarlaMats as his running mate.
Here’s how she sees concerned Florida parents who protested at school board meetings against CRT & radical gender indoctrination, and for their kids’ medical freedom: pic.twitter.com/1IlSORLaVq
— DeSantis War Room (@DeSantisWarRoom) August 26, 2022
The DeSantis campaign will have a field day with Hernandez-Mats. Charles C.W. Cooke wonders at NRO if Crist has lost his mind, or just wants to go out in a blaze of ignominy:
A lot of new voters have moved into Florida since 2018, and the thing they care about more than anything else in the world is that the schools here were open while they were locked down up in the Northeast. …
It’s baffling. Of all the things the Democrats could hit Ron DeSantis for, they’re choosing the biggest asset he has? Somehow — somehow! — Charlie Crist looked around a state of 21 million people, and decided that his best option as a running mate was Randi Weingarten Jr.
It’s even more inexplicable given more recent events. DeSantis took on the teachers unions and school establishment with his Parental Rights in Education bill earlier in the year and got attacked by the media, corporate America, and Hollywood over the supposed “don’t say gay” legislation. The bill, which restricted gender-theory instruction to 4th grade and above and only in age-appropriate terms, turned out to be wildly popular, and not just in Florida. A couple of days before Crist’s team leaked Hernandez-Mats as Crist’s choice of running mate, DeSantis nearly ran the table with his slate of endorsed conservatives in school-board elections in an effort to wrest control of curricula and policy away from the teachers unions.
Aaaaaaand … Crist thinks this is the moment to embrace teachers unions and the indoctrination establishment, as well as school closures that have been entirely invalidated by science and reason? Really?
Is there anyone who grasps the current political mood as badly as Crist? Outside of the White House, that is?
It appears that Crist is aiming to lock in those voters who intersect on a Venn diagram in subsets of “Joe Biden is awesome,” “Florida should have shut down for two years,” and “parents should shut up about education policy.” Crist might struggle to get 30% with the direction he’s taking his campaign. Heck, that strategy might not even get to 40% in Maryland or New York — although Kathy Hochul apparently is borrowing at least a page from Crist there.
In Florida, however … ignominy, meet Democrats, and likely all the way down the ballot. How excited will Val Demings be about Crist’s running-mate choice?
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