Oliver Larkin spent most of the 2024 election season spamming out “I’ll be blunt” emails on behalf of Adam Schiff for a campaign outfit called Revolution Messaging. “We had a massive fundraising list from the Trump impeachment, and I was up until 3 in the morning sending emails and texts. And in those first 24 hours, we raised like $1.6 or $1.7 million.”
Chained to his computer screens in a Deerfield Beach bungalow 3,000 miles from Schiff’s campaign headquarters, he began to feel disconnected from man’s innate feedback loops of longing and satisfaction. “Trump loved to single him out, he was attacking Schiff all the fucking time, every week, calling him ‘Pencil Neck’ or ‘Watermelon Head’ or ‘Shifty Schiff,’ and every time something like that happened it was like, this could raise ten thousand dollars, this could raise twenty thousand dollars,” the candidate told the Prospect. “When you are raising that amount of money it is just this insatiable beast.”
One night in January, a friend of his parents invited him to a Joe Biden fundraiser at a palatial South Miami home. “There were Gaza protesters outside and I remember driving past them distinctly thinking, How did I end up on the wrong side of this?” Schiff was also on that side, vowing to stand with Israel in debates, meekly saying that Israel needed to abide by the laws of war while vowing to vote against having the State Department even study whether the country was doing that in Gaza.
In March, Larkin flew out to Burbank, where cease-fire protesters disrupted the selfie line the night before the primary and drowned out Schiff’s victory speech the next day. The campaign’s response to the protests and the growing genocide was mostly silence: “From the top down it was just ignored,” Larkin said. In a way, he understood. “There was such a fear of Trump getting back in office that it froze people.”
The day after the 2024 election, and Kamala Harris’s loss to Trump, came the inevitable “mopey all-staff call,” complete with the inevitable “live to fight another day” bullshit pep talk. “Every election cycle it’s like a running joke in the industry. November comes around and you’ll see, this firm laid off 10 people, that one laid off 20. And it’s always the 24- and 25-year-old staffers that are under the gun to crunch out 35 emails a week for four political clients, not having any lives beyond sending emails and fundraising and feeding the beast.”
He’d been sucked into the campaign email life after taking an internship at a prestigious ad firm in Miami, only to learn the starting salary was $27,000 a year. His first job at Revolution Messaging paid nearly double, but he was laid off just three months after joining when management “decided they didn’t want to pay my salary for a few months.” Upon being hired back, he joined an ultimately successful effort to unionize the consultancy, but the negotiating team needed to offer concessions to secure their first union contract, so he ended up taking a voluntary buyout.
“The level of betrayal that I feel toward the people who pull you in and force you to make this compromise and make that compromise so we can defeat Donald Trump, [who took] this bright-eyed kid and metabolized [me] into someone who was willing to take whatever if it meant being able to keep a job” had pushed Larkin, he says, to “a crisis point.” He needed, he knew, to log off, but also to fight back. And the villain was close at hand: Broward County, Florida, Larkin’s home, is represented in Congress by one of the two or three most hard-line pro-Israel Democrats in Congress, Jared Moskowitz.
MOSKOWITZ IS NOT THE MOST VIVID EMBODIMENT of Democratic Party complicity in Israel’s extermination campaign in Gaza and beyond; that distinction belongs to New Jersey’s Josh Gottheimer, the notorious former protégé of right-wing pollster Mark Penn, whose congressional office is a finishing school for private equity lobbyists and whose brother-in-law Bradley Tusk owns the crisis PR firm that coordinated the relentless vilification campaigns against Zohran Mamdani and Gottheimer’s primary opponent in his unsuccessful run for New Jersey governor, Mikie Sherrill.
Moskowitz, who was only elected for the first time in 2022, comes across as harmless and endearing. His social media feeds are full of dad jokes and sports references and self-deprecating references to his height. He founded the bipartisan Congressional Sneaker Caucus, in a seeming effort to take back the moniker “J6,” and seems to have a fresh pair for every occasion. Matt Gaetz described him as—and it goes without saying he’s grading on quite a curve, but still—“the kindest human I know.”
But in the three years since he was sworn in, Moskowitz has sponsored or co-sponsored bills to: prohibit the State Department from citing Gaza Health Ministry death or casualty statistics in any communication or correspondence on the Middle East conflict; designate the century-old Muslim Brotherhood an international terror organization and impose financial sanctions on its millions of members; expand the Abraham Accords to fast-track weapons shipments to any country willing to ally itself with Israel; override the Biden administration’s brief spring 2024 pause in shipments of 2,000-pound bombs to Israel; formally censure Rashida Tlaib for saying “from the river to the sea”; officially pronounce the phrase “from the river to the sea” genocidal hate speech calling for the eradication of the Jewish people; impose international financial sanctions on Palestinians who attempt to bail other Palestinians out of jail; and much much more. Moskowitz also supported legislation to sanction the International Criminal Court nearly a year before Trump administration sanctions effectively shut the institution’s attorneys and staffers out of their bank and email accounts. He threatened to withhold funding from the United Nations on grounds of antisemitism, and joined angry official condemnations of France for suspending arms shipments to Israel, of Amnesty International for publishing a meticulously documented report on the genocide in Gaza, and of Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-WA) for describing Israel as “racist.”
Within the small faction of congressional Democrats who spent 2024 relentlessly lobbying the Biden administration to display even more unquestioning support for Benjamin Netanyahu’s open-ended extermination campaign, Moskowitz was clearly a flagship member.
The Gottheimer figure behind Moskowitz was his late Brooklyn-born father Michael, a Renaissance lawyer-lobbyist who moved to Coral Springs, Florida, in 1980 when its population was a quarter of its current size and within a decade emerged as the boss of the local political machine. When two city attorneys opened an investigation into one of his developer clients in 1991, Michael Moskowitz threatened to spend $50,000 to oust the vice mayor if he didn’t sack them; they were quickly gone.
In the 1990s, Michael Moskowitz hosted countless star-studded fundraisers for various Clinton and Clinton-adjacent campaigns, managed Lois Frankel’s first congressional campaign in 1992, and served as Rep. Peter Deutsch’s highest-profile financier in 1994. He represented the Gore campaign during the Florida vote recounts, and helped young Jared land internships with Al Gore and Joe Lieberman in college at George Washington University. Jared won his first election by 25 votes at the tender age of 25 for a seat on the city commission of Parkland. “I would not be as effective as he is because of who he knows and who his father knows,” an opponent said afterward.
Neither Moskowitz was publicly concerned with foreign policy until, in one of his first acts as a state representative, Jared sponsored a resolution asking the FBI to solve the cold case of Bob Levinson, a Coral Springs resident and former FBI and DEA agent who had disappeared in 2007 after embarking on an off-the-books CIA assignment in Kish Island, a free-trade zone in Iran. The Iranian government claimed it did not know what had become of him; a video his captors had sent his contact list contained traces of Pashtun-language music that suggested he’d wound up in Afghanistan, and the CIA paid Levinson’s wife $2.5 million to refrain from filing a lawsuit that would have revealed more about the nature of his assignment. But when the Obama administration began talks to iron out a comprehensive nuclear nonproliferation agreement with Iran, a small but prominent collection of Zionists headquartered in Florida reacted with horror, with Mike Moskowitz at the center. Levinson’s case was frequently invoked as evidence the Iranians were not to be trusted.
When Florida Democratic Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz resisted Moskowitz’s efforts and announced her support for the deal, she tearfully called it “the most difficult decision I have had to make in the nearly 23 years I have served in elected office.” (Moskowitz: “Debbie has disappointed her constituents and our community.”) The Moskowitzes’ own congressman, longtime family friend Ted Deutch, inveighed passionately against the deal; Lois Frankel waited until the last minute to announce she would vote against it, then reversed her position once Trump announced he was backing out of it.
But the JCPOA seemed to mark a turning point, after which Israel and Zionism never seemed far from the focal point of Moskowitz family politics. That same year, the younger Moskowitz began working behind the scenes to devise ways of defunding, punishing, and ultimately criminalizing solidarity with Palestine. In 2016, then-Gov. Rick Scott held a signing ceremony to celebrate the near-unanimous passage of the young representative’s first anti-BDS law, which required a state agency to bar companies from state contracts whose principals had expressed support for the movement to boycott Israeli goods and services. “Florida’s friendship and partnership with Israel is unbreakable and we will not support acts of hatred in our state,” Moskowitz told reporters.
After Ron DeSantis was elected governor in 2018, he appointed the Broward state representative his emergency management director, the only Democrat in his administration, just weeks before he proclaimed his intention to make Florida the “most pro-Israel state in America.” The following June, DeSantis, Moskowitz, and some 88 other staffers, politicians, and donors including the Adelsons and Randy Fine, made a splashy state pilgrimage to Israel that included a large banquet at a co-working space located in an illegal West Bank settlement, a ceremony at the newly relocated Jerusalem embassy in which DeSantis signed a law expanding on Moskowitz’s 2016 bill, and a tour of the Gaza border wall. Moskowitz took the opportunity to sign an agreement allowing the governor’s office to deploy Israeli emergency personnel to disasters in Florida and vice versa. (DeSantis invoked the agreement two years later when the Surfside condominium tower collapsed, inviting a large team of IDF commanders and Israeli volunteer coroners to help sort through the rubble and recover bodies.) Moskowitz also told reporters he had looked to Israel as a model for responding to the COVID-19 pandemic, and made sure that the very first vaccine doses delivered to the state were used to inoculate Holocaust survivors.
Moskowitz jokingly called his role “Master of Disaster,” and he came to it with sterling credentials, having served during the entirety of his state representative career as general counsel to AshBritt, an ultra-connected “rapid-response” emergency and disaster response firm his father counted as a client that operates more like a lobbying slush fund than a logistics firm. The company owns no trucks or heavy equipment and outsources every physical job it takes on to subcontractors, specializing instead in cultivating the contacts necessary to win contracts and exploiting loopholes to charge a fat markup for their services. Though AshBritt was frequently accused by Democrats and Republicans alike (including Pam Bondi) of cutting corners and systemically defrauding government relief programs, nothing ever stuck, no doubt thanks in part to its powerhouse lobbyist BGR Group, whose co-founder Haley Barbour was then the sitting governor of Mississippi and chairman of the Republican Governors Association.
By resigning in mid-2021, Moskowitz escaped reputational damage over Florida’s lackadaisical response to the coronavirus pandemic, which by September 2021 was killing more than 300 people a day even though vaccines had been widely available for nearly a year. The timing of his resignation might have raised eyebrows, especially given the $4.13 million he earned as a private pandemic consultant in the year between his resignation and his decision to run for Congress, but Mike Moskowitz had been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and would be dead by the end of January 2022, just a month before his old friend Ted Deutch decided abruptly to retire from Congress to take an $800,000-a-year post heading the American Jewish Committee. By the first week of March, Moskowitz had lined up 50 endorsements from local Democrats and Republicans, and would soon secure a quarter-million dollars from Sam Bankman-Fried’s “pandemic preparedness” campaign. At a campaign event at the North Broward Democratic Club, a former club president voiced dismay and incredulity over Moskowitz’s chumminess with the locally reviled governor. “I want to hear you say something [about] how horrible this man is,” she said, referencing DeSantis; she told a reporter she was “not satisfied” by Moskowitz’s word salad answer.
But that was just Jared, as the fired COVID whistleblower Rebekah Jones told Politico of the DeSantis official who had secretly cultivated a strange rapport with her during the pandemic for reasons she could not surmise, but she had “come to see that Jared is a person who likes to play both sides so as to come out on top no matter what.”
True to form, Moskowitz spent the weeks after the 2024 loss congratulating old friends Trump had named to key roles in his administration, taking to X for a Thursday-after post praising the strategic genius of Susie Wiles and appearing repeatedly on cable news to promote Matt Gaetz, who had been nominated for the post of attorney general, as “not only [someone] who’s fiercely loyal, but fiercely competent” who would likely be “the most powerful attorney general in American history.” Appearing on NewsNation, he was unsentimental about the coming clampdown: “Elections have consequences,” he said matter-of-factly. The following month, he became the first Democrat to join the House DOGE caucus, which was ostensibly designed to coordinate with Elon Musk’s wrecking crew to tackle government “waste.”
AS THE FULL HORROR OF TRUMP II began to unfold, Larkin was almost awestruck that Moskowitz seemed to double down on his both-sides positioning, trolling Trump on Twitter over his acceptance of a 787 from Qatar and plot to dismantle the Federal Emergency Management Agency on the eve of hurricane season, but staying silent about the ruthless implosion of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and USAID, to say nothing of Stephen Miller’s increasingly depraved and quota-driven immigration crackdown.
Larkin was hardly the only one wondering why his congressman had gone AWOL: The local NPR affiliate published a story in late April on how his failure to show up for town halls or anti-Musk protests had begun to enrage local Democrats like the organizer of a 450-person town hall: “We organized this whole thing. We paid for it out of our own pockets. We told him he could come virtually on Zoom and we would make it happen and no. So we’re very disappointed.”
Then last June, the world learned the DeSantis administration had been quietly building a massive immigration prison for the “worst of the worst” in an abandoned parcel of the Everglades wildlife preserve with no sewer lines or any other basic infrastructure, 50 miles west of Larkin’s district. The Trump administration was calling it “Alligator Alcatraz” and seemed to be positioning the facility as a South Florida version of CECOT, a hysterically squalid El Salvador hellhole with a single toilet per hundred inmates, rotten food, and virtually no mechanisms for communicating with the outside world. Everyone from BLM activists to Indivisible organizers to priests and nuns quickly began gathering outside to protest Alligator Alcatraz, which had only been made possible through an extraordinary amount of lawbreaking, code violating, and emergency-power invoking. It was now or never, Larkin decided. He drove out to the Everglades the first week of July to announce his primary challenge of Moskowitz to the sort of people who might care.
“We need to call it what it is: This is evil. This is not right, and it is not American,” he told a reporter for the YouTube channel Status Coup News. (An NBC analysis of inmate data later found his assessment broadly correct: Just 7 percent of the men incarcerated there had been convicted of a violent crime and just 22 percent had been convicted of a crime more serious than a non-DUI, non-hit-and-run traffic infraction. Many of those convicted had been imprisoned and released more than a decade earlier.)
Larkin went on to explain that he placed much of the blame for much of Trump’s gratuitously cruel immigration crackdown on the decision by Moskowitz and 45 other Democrats to vote for the Laken Riley Act, a law that had authorized immigration enforcement to detain and deport any illegal immigrant of any age who had been charged with any crime, due process be damned. Immigrant advocates had warned that the law’s fuzzy language could open up the possibility that it might be used to deport noncitizens over noncriminal offenses, and indeed the Trump administration’s interpretation of the law had been expansive.
When Moskowitz was shamed into taking a formal tour of the facility with a handful of fellow legislators a few days after Larkin’s interview, he seemed weirdly defensive. “Listen, it is as bad as it can be, but it is not a concentration camp,” he told reporters following the tour, to Larkin’s amazement. “And people should not use Holocaust references to describe what’s going on behind us.” There was a nonideological reason Moskowitz had to defend the project: the project’s builders. While well-heeled AIPAC-affiliated donors in New York, Los Angeles, and Florida are the foundation of the Moskowitz donor base, his campaign coffers have long been supplemented by emergency and disaster management firms across the country.
One of his non-AIPAC max-out donors this election cycle is William Sullivan, the Galveston-based founder of SLSCO, which was awarded a $19.7 million no-bid contract to work on Alligator Alcatraz despite a checkered history of cutting corners on such contracts. One whistleblower lawsuit filed by a staffer on the company’s Texas border wall project claimed in a lawsuit the company illegally smuggled Mexicans across the border through a hidden door in the wall to work as security guards on the project because management didn’t want to pay American guards to do the job. Sullivan donated a combined $24,000 in December to three separate Moskowitz vehicles—his campaign, his victory fund, and something called “Mpire Strikes PAC”—as did Matthew Michelsen, whose emergency contractor Gothams LLC obtained a $33 million “inmate management services” contract at Alligator Alcatraz and submitted a draft proposal last year to Trump’s Gaza Board of Peace that would have required the entity to guarantee the company a total return of no less than three times its invested capital, 175 percent for the first year. And Moskowitz has long had a cozy relationship with executives of the GEO Group, the private prison behemoth that is one of FL-23’s biggest employers, even formally recommending one of them for the presidency of Florida Atlantic University last year.
From then on, Larkin went to every town hall, community luncheon, protest, picket line, and DSA meeting he could find, building a network of volunteers who mercifully took over the job of paying constant attention to Moskowitz’s social media feeds. “The further I get from the last time I canvassed a neighborhood the dumber I actually feel,” he told the Prospect. The surging cost of homeowner’s insurance came up again and again throughout hurricane season last fall, which led him to beef up his prioritization of a proper Green New Deal that would incorporate a national disaster insurance program.
Constituents marveled at the institutional cruelty and barbarism Trump had unleashed, from the Renee Good and Alex Pretti murders to the massacre of schoolchildren that launched the new Iran war. “I was canvassing in Margate in Broward County and I spoke to this mom, and her kid was playing in the doorway right behind her and she said, ‘I don’t know how our politicians can have concentration camps like Dilley Detention Center locking up kids like my daughter, I don’t know how I’m supposed to open TikTok or Instagram reels and see a father carrying the corpse of their mangled son and daughter, like how am I supposed to divorce my humanity from those people?’”
Insurgent left-wing campaigns have risen and fallen before in South Florida. Wasserman Schultz had been repeatedly challenged by the persistent left-wing podcaster Jen Perelman, who raised an impressive half-million dollars in 2024 from small-dollar donors drawn in by affecting videos about deprogramming herself from the Zionist indoctrination she’d undergone as a child—only to get crushed by Wasserman Schultz’s dominance over the local political machinery. (When I asked Perelman during a livestream earlier this year whether she had any advice for Larkin, she advised that he relocate to a region of the country that didn’t see itself as “Little Israel.”)
But this cycle is different. Support for Israel has plunged among all voters but especially Democrats and Democrat-leaning independents. Even in northern New Jersey they have shown up to vote for pro-Palestine candidates. So when a progressive anti-Israel county commissioner lost a North Carolina congressional primary to the AIPAC-endorsed incumbent by just 1,200 votes of about 122,000 cast in March, left-wing streamers Hasan Piker and Michael Beyer, who posts under the monikers “Central_Committee” and “MikefromPA”, resolved to boost progressive primary challengers, and Larkin was first on the list.
For Piker, Larkin’s team produced a sizzle reel of Moskowitz cable news and podcast appearances, starting with a clip from the podcast of Patrick Bet-David, an Iranian-born bodyguard-turned-multilevel marketing mogul with whom Piker had been nursing a mild obsession, in which Moskowitz had proudly introduced himself as “a twice-appointed, Ron DeSantis Democrat.”
Piker cheered appreciatively: “OH. OH. On the Patrick Bet-David podcast, no fuckin’ way!” Then came a CNN spot on the then-looming war with Iran. “I’m to the right of this issue to the JD Vance/Witkoff approach, and I agree quite frankly more with Sen. Lindsey Graham and probably Sen. Tom Cotton,” Moskowitz told the host. Piker marveled that Moskowitz was “like leaning further and further into” reviled neocon ideology, then was rendered near-speechless by a clip featuring Moskowitz’s response to a South Florida podcaster’s question about advice he’d give his 16-year-old self: “Go to Wall Street, be a finance bro and do cocaine for a couple of years, get that out of your system. Whatever you do, don’t go into politics …”
Larkin explained that Moskowitz was one of the most active stock traders in Congress: In fact, at the time the “finance bro” clip was posted, he’d spent much of the previous month engaged in a frenzied post–“Liberation Day” stock buying spree, of which his most successful trade was Caterpillar, which opened at around $275 on the day of his purchase and would triple in price over the year that followed, buoyed by the data center arms race but also a Trump administration policy to jump-start shipments Biden had quietly paused of the armored D9 bulldozers the IDF had used to raze Gaza.
The clip cut back to the Bet-David podcast, in which Moskowitz was advising Trump not to “fall for” the warnings of advisers pleading with him not to attack Iran. “I think Marco is leading him in the right direction,” he said. “Vance concerns me because he’s an isolationist …”
“BRO, YOU’RE A DEMOCRAT!!” Piker cried. “This clip compilation was designed to give me a fuckin’ aneurysm, I swear to God.”
Larkin launched into an hour-long chat about the urgency of ending the genocide, reining in American empire, curbing environmental degradation, re-regulating the economy, building Medicare for All and public transit, and prosecuting Trump’s corruption. Piker’s fans contributed just under $70,000 to Larkin’s campaign during and directly after the broadcast. The comments were universally glowing. The momentum was real.
BUT THEN LAST WEEK, FLORIDA UNVEILED its new electoral map, the product of months of frenzied cartography on the part of DeSantis and the GOP gerrymandering complex. Moskowitz’s district had been blown to smithereens, split into three different districts with completely different constituencies.
Larkin’s own house in Boca Raton and the eastern chunk of the district was in the newly drawn 25th, an affluent vertical swath stretching from Palm Beach to North Miami along the coast, ideal terrain for either Moskowitz or Debbie Wasserman Schultz, if either had lived within its borders. The most populous central portion of the district from west Boca to Margate, where Larkin’s campaign had done the bulk of its canvassing, had been absorbed into the western portion of the 20th District to create a compact deep-blue western Broward district not too ideologically distinct from the current 20th, whose representative Sheila Cherfilus-McCormick resigned in April after being indicted last year for laundering millions of dollars in accidental Federal Emergency Management Agency overpayments into her campaigns. And Moskowitz’s own home, along with that of Wasserman Schultz, had been appended to the state’s new 22nd District, a massive swath of land stretching all the way to the outskirts of tony Naples on Florida’s southwest coast. The new 23rd District was another compact parcel directly north of the old one, comprising southeast Palm Beach County and most of the territory currently represented by ineffectual Lois Frankel.
The 22nd and 25th were designed for Republicans to win, although they relied heavily on Republicans maintaining Trump voters and particularly Latino voters from 2024. Biden won both districts in 2020, though Trump won both in 2024 by nine points.
Each of the new/old districts exemplified a slightly different species of Democrat dysfunction. Directly beneath Moskowitz’s district was a majority-Hispanic swath of southern Broward represented by Wasserman Schultz, who as DNC chair blocked the entire Bernie campaign’s access to the party’s VoteBuilder database in 2015 after a single campaign staffer was detected—“inadvertently,” the campaign claimed—accessing proprietary Clinton campaign data during a 45-minute period when he was accidentally permitted to access it. But she had since been eclipsed as a Rotating Villain by more hard-line Israel Firsters like Moskowitz and Gottheimer, and as an 11-term representative Larkin sensed she would be hard to knock off, especially if she decided to run in the much whiter, more affluent new version of the 25th—though there were rumors she might also be eyeing the new 20th.
District 20, meanwhile, had been a Black district since 1992, the first election following “Project Ratfuck,” an RNC initiative to exploit a 1986 Supreme Court ruling that had instituted a process by which civil rights groups could appeal to legislatures under the Voting Rights Act to create new “majority minority” congressional districts. Under Ratfuck, the RNC provided state NAACP chapters with mapping software they could use to “pack” Black voters into districts with fewer white voters, thus increasing GOP chances at flipping seats in outlying areas. Alcee Hastings ran for one of 19 new majority-minority districts created following the 1990 census and held it for 29 years, even as the Democratic Party share of the state’s congressional delegation dwindled from 12 of 19 in 1990 to 11 of 27 in 2021, when he died of pancreatic cancer at age 84, three months after being sworn in to his 15th term.
Cherfilus-McCormick, the CEO of a home health care company founded by her father, had two distinct advantages over the rest: a bold proposal to send every American making less than $75,000 a year monthly $1,000 checks for life, and an extra $5 million that Florida’s emergency management department (the one Moskowitz once ran) had accidentally wired to the home health care company for a vaccination contract that she would use to promote the scheme. Cherfilus-McCormick ultimately won the primary by just five votes out of fewer than 50,000 cast, and she was about to enter her fourth year representing one of the poorest districts in America when the Justice Department finally indicted her over the scheme in December. She quit Congress a couple of weeks ago, leaving a motley crew of interesting but iffy candidates in the race; technically, Cherfilus-McCormick is also still running.
Neither the 20th District nor the 24th, a similar majority-minority district just south of it in Miami-Dade represented by 83-year-old Frederica Wilson, is changing profoundly under the new map, which is one reason the various legal challenges to the redistricting plan, whose legality under Florida law is premised entirely on the recent Supreme Court decision curtailing racial gerrymandering, may succeed in spite of DeSantis’s own judicial sycophant-packing efforts. After DeSantis signed the legislation enacting the new map on Monday, the Black Caucus of the Broward Democratic Party issued a statement urging Wasserman Schultz not to run in the 20th given its historical Blackness. But Larkin figured he couldn’t run in the 20th District if he couldn’t run against Wasserman Schultz.
There was one other option: Larkin could run in the district directly north of the one he’d been canvassing for the past nine months. The new 23rd contained Mar-a-Lago, the mansion where Jeffrey Epstein had molested hundreds of local high schoolers, and the homes of at least 65 billionaires with a combined net worth of $649 billion: private equity mega-moguls Steve Schwarzman and Henry Kravis, the late David Koch’s widow and twin brother Bill; Citadel’s Ken Griffin and Tom Frist, the $30 billion co-founder of the for-profit hospital chain that had made headlines in recent years for systematically defrauding Medicare, using algorithms that referred healthy middle-aged patients to hospice care to save money, blackballing a senior neurosurgeon who reported finding cockroaches in his surgical tools, and having veteran anesthesiologists replaced by drastically undertrained assistants who jeopardized the lives of his patients.
These luminaries were currently represented by Lois Frankel, a 77-year-old career politician so charisma-deprived that the state GOP once schemed to rig a gubernatorial primary in her favor by passing a law they nicknamed “the Lois Frankel Act.” Larkin had introduced himself to Frankel at a local party luncheon in Boca Raton back in September:
“What seat are you running in?”
“I’m running in Florida Congressional District 23.”
“Where?”
“I’m running for the seat currently represented by Jared Moskowitz.”
“Oh, I can’t support you!”
Larkin smiled and gave one of the polite but plucky rebuttals he had rehearsed for establishmentarian party elders: “I understand. I just thought the voters of CD 23 deserved a choice this year given that their congressman was the first Democrat to join the DOGE caucus.”
“What’s DOGE?”
Frankel’s was an archetypal boomer narrative arc: raised in affluent Great Neck, Long Island; a campus radical, worked as a public defender in the 1970s, transitioned into private practice and by her first foray into politics was touting her business-friendly credentials. Mike Moskowitz had been scheming to send her to Congress alongside his friend Peter Deutsch in 1993, but a last-minute surprise Bush administration ruling absolved Alcee Hastings of a bribery solicitation charge and he ended up soaring to victory.
The new 23rd may be Larkin’s best shot: Democrat Emily Gregory had won Mar-a-Lago’s state House district in April with the help of more than $200,000 in last-minute small-dollar donations, and the symbolism of a socialist running in Jeffrey Epstein’s district would be too powerful for the media to ignore. So did Peter Sholy, a Palm Beach County property manager who’d become one of Larkin’s most devoted canvassers after meeting his campaign manager Zack Bofshever at the DSA meetings he began attending largely for “spiritual” reasons. “I used to feel like ‘liberal’ and liberal-leaning people were always more enlightened and morally upright, and conservatives were just always more backward and ignorant, but things have gotten so dark and demonic I don’t believe that anymore. But Gaza shattered everything I thought I knew,” he told the Prospect. “Oliver trying to bring goodness and human dignity and labor rights back into politics, he gave me hope again, and I know there are lots of people out there who need that kind of hope but are terrified to talk about it.”
This week, Moskowitz announced he was leaning toward running in the coastal 25th, the affluent toss-up district on the coastline from which the two dense blue dots representing the 20th and 24th had been carved out. This leaves Wasserman Schultz to try her luck either in the sprawling 22nd or the dense, majority-minority 20th the party’s Black establishment had warned her against.
Larkin’s whole campaign was a bet that there were enough disenfranchised Democrats in Moskowitz’s district to oust the party’s second-biggest congressional warmonger. But Moskowitz’s old 23rd had been the wealthiest district in Florida, and the 25th was substantially richer still.
Larkin remembered a tip he had gotten from one of his supporters about how Moskowitz had been spotted in December at Mar-a-Lago, and that word in Tallahassee was that he’d gotten some kind of heads-up on what lay ahead. In that context, his refusal to show up for rallies or town halls, his stubborn tripling down on the Iran war, and even the “finance bro” stuff seemed canny, maybe even deliberate. Like Moskowitz himself, too many residents of the new 25th probably saw themselves as Masters of Disasters, ideally positioned to weather and capitalize on whatever happened next, even if it turned out disastrously for most.
Larkin, meanwhile, remains undecided. “It’s not lost on us that this map is uniquely designed to disenfranchise our entire campaign,” he joked, then remembered to be grateful that he hadn’t taken the job for which a recruiter had approached him last spring. “It turned out to be Jared Moskowitz’s email consultant. I could be writing Jared Moskowitz’s campaign emails right now.”
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