It’s Val Demings’s moment, this time for real. The Florida Democratic congresswoman, who’d made it to Joe Biden’s veep short list only to see Kamala Harris get the nod, has embraced a challenge to Republican Sen. Marco Rubio that few of her peers would entertain. Now, the spotlight is hers, and the Democratic Party is investing considerable hope in her. Will it pay off?
Demings, 64, has a compelling biography, especially for a party that has struggled to define its stance on law enforcement during a period of rising crime: She was the first black female police chief in Orlando. Despite Biden’s efforts to distance Democrats from the movement, down-ballot candidates have found themselves bedeviled by “defund the police,” a cause taken up by the far Left and lawmakers who mostly represent safe blue districts. But Democrats also represent a large number of minority voters who are directly affected by perceived racial disparities in policing yet are no less concerned about crime and public safety.
Demings ascended to the top of the Orlando police department, where she began working in 1983, the daughter of a maid and a janitor. Her father worked at an orange grove. She had six older siblings and no bathroom in her Jacksonville home while she was growing up. That’s not insignificant in a race against Rubio, whose background as the son of a maid and a bartender has been a major asset to his ability to relate to Hispanic and working-class voters in a large, diverse state.
Because of Demings’s career in law enforcement, she was recruited as the only non-lawyer on the House team that prosecuted the first impeachment case against former President Donald Trump. While that went nowhere in the Senate, it helped her bond with liberals nationally. “And just like when I was a law enforcement officer, when I saw someone breaking the law, I did not stop and think about, well, my goodness, what will the judge do?” she told NPR after Trump was acquitted. “What will the jury do down the road? I did my job to stop that threat and then go to court and plead my case.” The House impeachment managers were received as heroes by the resistance — something that could come in handy as she tries to raise money beyond Florida.
Indeed, raising money has so far been a strength of her young campaign. Demings outraised Rubio for the second quarter in a row. She announced a more than $8 million haul last month. The website Florida Politics described the cash intake as “more than any candidate has raised at this stage of a Senate campaign in Florida history.” Demings’s campaign manager hailed their efforts as “a campaign that goes everywhere and cedes no ground.”
The Demings fundraising juggernaut answered a question many local Democrats were starting to ask about her: Where exactly does she go? There were rumbles that the candidate was scarce locally. But Demings raised a great deal of her money on Facebook and out of state. She wasn’t an absentee candidate, her supporters maintained.
“The payout from Demings’ all-in-on-Facebook campaign — the first of its kind for a major Florida candidate — did more than just surprise Republicans and Rubio allies,” wrote Politico’s Marc Caputo, a reporter based in the Sunshine State. “It also reassured national Democrats that the key swing state — which has turned a deeper shade of red in recent years — can still command the kind of money that Democrats need to win here statewide.”
The Democratic primary field isn’t clear, but only former Rep. Alan Grayson is seen as an obstacle to Demings’s nomination. There has been a dearth of public polling in the race, but she is the presumed front-runner. “Money talks,” said one Democratic strategist in Florida when summing up the race.
This isn’t the first extended look national Democrats have taken at Demings since she first won her House seat in 2016, the same year Rubio captured a second term after weighing retirement following an unsuccessful bid for the Republican presidential nomination. The New York Times described her as a “finalist” for the vice presidential slot on the Democratic ticket last year, reporting at the time, “If she is chosen as the vice-presidential nominee, her career could prove to be a political asset against an incumbent president who is building his re-election campaign around his call for law and order, while attacking Mr. Biden as weak on crime.”
The Gray Lady went on to note that in the aftermath of the George Floyd protests, her career in law enforcement could be a liability too. Orlando was no stranger to police misconduct controversies during Demings’s tenure, leading an early supporter to tell the newspaper, “I just don’t know that picking a cop would send the right message right now.”
Biden picked a prosecutor instead, another woman of color whose nickname, at least among critics, was, ironically, “Kamala the Cop.” And that is another thing driving the renewed interest in Demings: buyer’s remorse over Vice President Kamala Harris. Harris has her admirers, but her poll numbers remain lackluster — and were bad before Biden’s own job approval ratings began their descent in August. She continues to be dogged by charges of phoniness, unlikability, and poor management. None of the issues in her portfolio have gone swimmingly, least of all the still-raging border crisis (though her advisers are quick to point out that she was only tasked with addressing the “root causes” of migration).
Even a simple PR video about space travel was panned for including child actors rather than real aspiring astronauts and for her own over-the-top performance. There have been persistent rumors that if Biden does not run again in 2024, ambitious Democrats won’t necessarily clear the field for Harris. The most prominent name keeping his options open is Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg. Business Insider reported that Buttigieg’s top donors are pressing him to run if Biden doesn’t.
Electing Demings to the Senate won’t give Democrats a do-over on Biden’s veep decision. But it would give them a second chance to give her a national profile, in hopes that it might work out better than it has with Harris. She would arrive in Washington something of a giant-killer.
“Beating Marco Rubio won’t be easy,” said the Democratic strategist. “Lots of things electorally don’t favor us right now. But if Val did it? You can bet people will take notice.”
For Demings, these are the positives. But you don’t have to look very hard to find the negatives. She remains vulnerable on the issue that took her out of the running for vice president. The Orlando Sentinel reported that police reformers haven’t warmed to her candidacy even if other liberals have, quoting one area leader as saying, “Nothing’s changed.” An analysis by the newspaper concluded that during the final 17 months Demings was Orlando’s police chief, officers used force at a higher rate than some other comparable agencies in the state and did so disproportionately against black suspects. At the same time, Rubio’s campaign has painted her as “anti-police,” saying she has abandoned her longtime law enforcement allies to curry favor with liberal donors.
Rather than a sign of strength, Demings’s Facebook fundraising prowess could simply mean she is more popular with liberal donors, especially running against a well-known Republican target like Rubio, than with actual Floridians. As Caputo writes, “The recent road to the Senate is littered with Democratic candidates whose talent for minting money from national online donors masked weakness back home.”
Liberal donors poured money into the campaign coffers of Democratic challengers to Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell, Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, and Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas, all hated figures on the Left. Some, such as Cruz’s 2018 opponent Beto O’Rourke, made a race out of it. Others, such as McConnell’s challenger Amy McGrath, didn’t come particularly close. All of this money could have profitably been spent on other, more winnable races. Demings versus Rubio could be another such contest, waged at a time Democrats are clinging to a 50-50 Senate, under their control solely because of Harris’s tiebreaking vote.
Then there is the matter of Florida’s red hue. Elections remain competitive in the state, which famously threw the 2000 presidential race into chaos when hanging chads and only a few hundred votes separated the two major-party nominees with the Electoral College majority hanging in the balance. But more recently, the close races have gone fairly reliably to the Republicans, even if the margins aren’t always substantial.
In 2018, Republicans Ron DeSantis and Rick Scott were elected governor and senator, respectively. Many pollsters thought both would lose. That was also a bad election cycle nationally for Republicans. It’s still early, but 2022 figures to be a much better one for the GOP. Trump carried Florida for a second time, winning 51.2% of the vote statewide to Biden’s 47.9%. He now makes the state his primary residence. Scott, a former two-term governor, is running the Senate Republicans’ campaign arm this election cycle. DeSantis, who Demings considered taking a run at, is up for reelection. None of this bodes well for an upstart Democratic challenger.
“Democrats are overestimating the ‘swing’ nature of Orange County,” said Jamie Miller, a Republican strategist in Florida. “At one point, one Orlando neighborhood was the home to both U.S. senators (Mel Martinez and Bill Nelson).”
At nearly 65, Demings is young by the standards of a Democratic gerontocracy that includes Biden (78), House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (81), and House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (82). But she wouldn’t provide a new generation of leadership even if she were elected. And senator is probably where her political career would peak.
That may be a tall order. Rubio has led in every poll that has been released publicly. While below the 50% threshold some observers consider important for an incumbent, his leads over Grayson have tended to be comfortable. Up against Demings, it has depended on the specific survey. A Republican poll in August showed Rubio leading with 55% to Demings’s 45%. Redfield and Wilton Strategies also gave him a double-digit lead, 48% to 37%.
But the most recent poll, by a Republican firm, has Rubio up by a slender margin, 42% to 38% with 15% undecided. These numbers are from late September. Over a month earlier, the Democratic operation Change Research showed the two candidates locked in a 47% to 44% battle, with Rubio leading narrowly and 9% undecided.
Still, Rubio isn’t trailing, and Republicans have outperformed their poll numbers in Florida before. DeSantis was down by 3.6 points in the final RealClearPolitics polling average in 2018, with Trafalgar being the only one of the last five pollsters to test the race showing the Republican ahead. Scott similarly trailed by 2.4 points only to win on Election Day.
The question posed by Demings’s candidacy is whether her resume is attractive enough to overcome the liabilities associated with her party’s brand if the midterm elections are unfavorable to Democrats, as now appears likely.
“Democrats no longer care about appealing to the moderate middle,” Miller said. “They will try to hide the hypocrisy of their liberal policies that make our communities less safe by nominating a liberal, former police chief.”
W. James Antle III is the Washington Examiner’s politics editor.
