With Rep. Kendrick Meek vacating his seat for the unenviable task of running against Charlie Crist for the open Senate seat in Florida, that leaves a vacancy in this D+34 seat (the 13th most Democratic in the nation) based in the mostly-African-American suburbs to the immediate north of Miami. Like most vacancies in such dark-blue districts, it’s attracting a crowded and diverse field in the Democratic primary.
The vacancy may produce a first: the first Haitian-American Congressperson. (Creole-speaking Haitians have a different set of concerns from non-Haitian African-Americans, with a focus on immigration.) It’s the district with the nation’s largest Haitian population (at least 16%, according to most recent Census estimates), and it’s a community that Meek pays close attention to.
Three of the most prominent candidates already in the race are from the Haitian community: former state Rep. Phillip Brutus (the first Haitian-American elected to the state legislature), state Rep. Yolly Roberson, and activist Marleine Bastien. However, there may be several stumbling blocks preventing a Haitian candidate from winning: first, three candidates may split the Haitian vote, letting someone else win, and second, Brutus and Roberson are divorced from each other and are now bitter rivals, for whom the battle is seemingly personal.
With the Haitian vote split, odds would instead favor one of the non-Haitian African-American candidates. Shirley Gibson, the mayor of Miami Gardens (the largest city in the district with about 100,000 residents, although one that didn’t exist until a few years ago, cobbled together out of unincorporated Carol City and its environs) just announced her candidacy on Tuesday, while state Sen. Frederica Wilson has been in the race since February.
There’s one reason this race should be of particular interest to the netroots — as I observed several weeks ago, New Dem Kendrick Meek is one of the biggest ideological mismatches with his district in the entire House, compiling the 126th most liberal record last Congress. In the quest for “Better Dems,” he’s doing us a big favor by getting out of the way without the time and expense of a primary fight (of course, his moderation, like that of Artur Davis, was probably in large measure due to his eagerness to move to statewide office — understandable, but not something we have to thank him for, either).
And now, like the vacancy in AL-07 and the functional equivalent of a vacancy in LA-02, we have a free shot at electing a progressive to a dark blue seat previously held by a centrist… something the netroots needs to get on top of. There’s only one problem… I really don’t know much of anything else about any of these candidates, and the information out there is pretty inconclusive. So, I’m turning this over as a crowdsourcing question to any SSPers who know more about this district than I do: what else do we know about these candidates, especially where they might fall ideologically?