This post was originally published on this site.
—
It didn’t take long after the primary polls closed on August 18 for Jared Moskowitz, a moderate Democrat who has represented a South Florida congressional district since 2023, to declare victory—not just over his opponent, union organizer Oliver Larkin, but also the Democratic Socialists of America, which had backed Larkin’s campaign. “Florida is known for hurricanes,” Moskowitz told Politico. “And so the DSA is a disaster area in Florida—and there’s no federal reimbursement coming to help these people.” On X, around the same time, he sent a message to the leftist streamer Hasan Piker, who had campaigned for Larkin: “My condolences.” The following morning, almost as an afterthought, Moskowitz returned to X to thank his family and his voters for their support. “My dad died of cancer 4 years ago,” he wrote. “He would have enjoyed all of this. I miss him.”
Moskowitz is both pugnacious and extremely online, which also means he’s a bit of a troll. And Moskowitz had reason to gloat. The biggest source of the campaign’s bitterness had been perhaps the one issue the two candidates agreed on: Moskowitz himself, a staunchly pro-Israel centrist who at times resembles a Republican. Indeed, Moskowitz has described himself as a “[Ron] DeSantis Democrat”—a nod to his stint as director of the Florida Division of Emergency Management under the state’s term-limited, MAGA-lite governor. (It’s not clear if there are other DeSantis Democrats, or if Moskowitz is a caucus of one.)
