Donald Trump’s victory in November had led the Democratic Party nationally to engage in some serious soul searching. In Florida, it was the second successive electoral blowout, and the conversations about how to cope with that reality are underway.

Take the discussion held last Thursday night, sponsored by the Hillsborough County Democratic LGBTQ+ Caucus in Tampa.

“Democrats are the best at losing, losing, losing,” said Mike Drapak of The Hillsborough Society, a political commitee formed in the aftermath of party infighting with the Hillsborough County Democratic Executive Committee. “And that’s really where we need to start, and we need to start being self-reflective.”

Party members need to stop “pointing fingers” and instead look at themselves in the mirror start “ understanding exactly what it is we’re doing that’s making people dislike us,” Drapak said.

Gov. Ron DeSantis couldn’t resist pouncing on the party’s problems last week, declaring that Pizzo’s announcement that he would run for governor as a political independent was necessary “because people know if you have a ‘D’ next to your name in this state, you are dead meat. Because this party is a disaster.”

Much of the discussion last week among the Tampa Democrats last week centered on messaging. Nick Clemente, who lost a state House race to Republican Traci Koster in November, said the Florida Democratic brand is “ unequivocally broken.”

“How do we talk about regular folks who might listen to podcasts about UFC, who might listen to podcasts about NASCAR or speed metal and not about politics?” he asked the audience of around 50 people. “How do we connect with them on our values and the things that we have in common that maybe we can help fix the brand, so people aren’t ashamed to be Democrats?”

Logan Mueller, president of the University of Tampa Democrats, said a major problem in his opinion is that the Democrats were still campaigning “like it’s 1996.”

“They’ve won the information battle right now,” he said of the GOP.

“With the internet and podcasts and videos, we do not have any boots on the ground. All the largest podcasts and these things that people are connected to are all very conservative. There is no means that we can push a message, and on top of that, we don’t have a unified message that we can share with everybody. We don’t have a positive economic message that everybody wants. The reason Trump was also partially successful was that he sold optimism. He sold making America great again.”

‘Too complicated’

Sabrina Bousbar agreed with Mueller.

The 28-year-old Pinellas native campaigned for Joe Biden in 2020 and later served as a senior adviser in his U.S. Department of Health & Human Services’ Administration for Strategic Preparedness and Response. She ran for Congress last summer, finishing second behind fellow Democrat Whitney Fox in Florida’s 13th District. (Fox went on to lose to GOP incumbent Anna Paulina Luna).

“We’re a little too complicated,” she said. “We try to have messaging for every single silo, but we don’t have a cohesive message with everyone.”

Mueller said he encounters a lot of his fellow students at UT who prefer registering as non-party-affiliated rather than a Democrat.

“They don’t want to associate with a party that has kind of lost the messaging war,” Mueller added. “[The party] has a lot of negative strings attached to it. And by registering as an independent, it kind of avoids the mess that has kind of been created over a long period of time. And the way forward is actually running an economic positive message, because young people do care about the economy, just as much as anyone else does.”

The fourth member of the panel was Tamika Lyles , an Osceola County Democrat seeking the party’s’s nomination for U.S. Senate next year. She complained that Democratic candidates wait too long to connect with the electorate.

“They don’t see us until it’s primary time or general election time, when we’re knocking on a door and we’re trying to give them that message. They’re not hearing it,” she said.”Because the first thing they say is, ‘Where have you been the whole year? What have you been doing the whole year?’ What was the messaging like the whole year when all of this was going on? So we need someone who is continuously speaking that language.”

A common theme among Democrats in the aftermath of the 2024 election nationally and in Florida is “meeting voters where they are.”

As someone who has worked with organized labor around the country, Drapek said, he’s found “a significant amount” of misogyny, homophobia, and racism in the American heartland.

“We need to understand that,” he said. “And we need to learn on how we can message in a way that doesn’t actually bring the most radical people of that end to the table, but some of the people who want some of the same things that we do.”

While there was plenty of talk about messaging, or the lack thereof, there wasn’t as much dialogue about policy and how to adjust to an electorate that has shifted to the right over the past five years.

Latino vote

When it comes to the Latino vote, a key demographic in Florida that supported Trump by double-digits over Kamala Harris last fall, a member of the Pinellas Hispanic Caucus suggested a possible opening would be to reengage specifically with Venezuelans who are upset about a U.S. Supreme Court decision last week that immediately strips Temporary Protected Status, or TPS, from hundreds of thousands of themselves.

In a survey of 408 Venezuelan residents in Florida conducted last month by Florida International University’s Latino Public Opinion Forum , nearly half of those who reported voting for Donald Trump in 2024 now say they either regret their decision or have mixed feelings about it. More than 70% say they oppose Trump’s decision to end humanitarian parole for Venezuelans.

“We should use this as ammunition,” said Bousbar, who is of Moroccan and Columbian descent. The GOP has targeted Latinos in Florida since Barack Obama left the political scene more than a decade ago.

“Latinos started going more Republican each election cycle. And so now, though, that we’re seeing the actual impact of this anti-immigration — illegally sending people back to their countries, or also putting them in jails without notification or telling their families or any form of legal structured procedure that they should have in the state and in the U.S. — we have to take that and communicate to them,” she said.

“We should be putting Spanish radio ads, Spanish TV messaging around the laws that Donald Trump has done around the Latino communities, specifically Venezuelans and Cubans and within the state of Florida because maybe we can get that pendulum to come back our way.”