Not long ago, it seemed like 2026 might be an epic comeback year for the Florida Democratic Party. Barely two months into President Trump’s second term, they gained ten points on their 2024 numbers in two North Florida special elections. Then Miami voted in a Democratic mayor for the first time in 30 years. And this March, the state House seat containing Mar-a-Lago and Jeffrey Epstein’s pedo palace down the street flipped blue, after Republicans had previously won the seat by nearly 20 points.
Trump’s approval ratings in the state hover in the low to mid-40s, as the DeSantis brand has gone into wind-down mode alongside the massive torture cage known as Alligator Alcatraz, into which the Trump and DeSantis administrations jointly disappeared thousands of migrants before authorities quietly decided $1.2 million a day was too costly, even for President Ballroom. A state that hasn’t elected a Democratic governor since Lawton Chiles won his fifth statewide race in 1994 has a gubernatorial candidate in former Republican congressman David Jolly, who has explicitly modeled his campaign after the publicity stunt that put Chiles on the map, in which the U.S. Senate candidate walked 1,000 miles from Pensacola to Key West in 1970, shaking hands and giving speeches about the problems and aspirations of the people he met along the way.
But then Debbie Wasserman Schultz announced she would be running for Congress to represent Florida’s 20th Congressional District, a dense parcel of central Broward County directly north of the district she currently represents. Gov. DeSantis’s last-minute gerrymandering gambit had divided her current district, the 25th, into the far corners of four new districts, none of which were the 20th, but the appeal to a political insider was obvious: The 20th contains the largest concentration of Democratic voters in the state.
The disincentive to run was equally obvious: The district was explicitly drawn back in 1991 to be a majority-Black district, in accordance with a provision of the Voting Rights Act that was just largely scrapped by the Supreme Court in a decision met with the universal condemnation of Democrats, mostly because it represented the latest gambit in a long campaign to gut the VRA and suppress the votes of low-income minorities. Ironically but predictably, the 20th survived the gerrymander demographically intact; as currently constructed, roughly half of its population is Black, a quarter is white, and about 65 percent are registered Democrats.
What on earth would possess lily-white Wasserman Schultz, who was warning about the Supreme Court plot to gut the VRA long before it was cool, to parachute into a race alongside four viable Black candidates, less than four months before the primary?
When every seat is critical to stitching together a congressional majority, how could Wasserman Schulz take the path of least resistance?
In an interview with a local CBS affiliate, Wasserman Schultz claimed the Congressional Black Caucus had encouraged her to jump in the race. CBC chair Rep. Yvette Clarke (D-NY) disputed this characterization: “We had a conversation. Encouragement was not part of that conversation,” she told CNN.
Wasserman Schultz had specifically name-dropped House Democratic Leader Rep. Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) as someone who had expressed support for the move because she was a member of his leadership team. “Leader Jeffries trusts Democrats to be able to know our communities well enough to have reached out and done the important outreach necessary to be able to make the decisions,” Wasserman Schultz went on. But this week, Jeffries said he hadn’t “made a decision as it relates to that particular race,” adding that “I think we all recognize the sensitivities of the moment in terms of an unprecedented Jim Crow–like assault on Black political representation.”
Dale Holness, the former mayor of Broward and an ultra-connected Democratic Party operative in South Florida, says the only “outreach” he experienced was the spread of a rumor, shortly after the new map was unveiled, that Wasserman Schultz was eyeing the district. At first he dismissed it, but when the whispers persisted he began barraging her staffers with electoral and demographic data, hoping to talk her out of it.
Of course, Holness is biased: The 69-year-old real estate broker is running for the seat himself—and not for the first time. But that’s not what bothers him about the notion of the former DNC chair carpetbagging into his district, he insists. He also says he doesn’t personally care that Wasserman Schultz is white, though he worries the move, especially coming on the heels of so many other efforts to gut the VRA, will depress Black turnout.
The real mystery, Holness claims, is why Wasserman Schultz would choose not to run in the district in which she actually lives, the new 22nd District, which voted for Trump by about nine points in 2024 but by even higher margins in favor of a ballot initiative enshrining the right to an abortion, and swung to Biden by three points in 2020.
The answer is likely tied to how longtime Democratic incumbents get hives at the thought of having to work hard to win re-election, and would rather opt for a comfortable laziness, even if it means carpetbagging into a historically Black district just as Black representation is under dire threat. But when every seat is critical to stitching together a congressional majority, how could Wasserman Schulz—and the party apparatus she represents—take the path of least resistance? Is personal power really more important than the opportunity to stop Donald Trump’s torchlight parade through democracy?
“The district in which she lives is a winnable district,” Holness told the Prospect. “Are we trying to win back the House or what?”
BOLSTERING HOLNESS’S CLAIM THAT Wasserman Schultz should run where she lives is the Republican competition in the 22nd, specifically a man named Michael Carbonara, who has raised the most money of anyone currently running. A self-described “entrepreneur”—and sometimes “billionaire entrepreneur”—who has founded multiple businesses “spanning banking and payments, cryptocurrency, data centers, genetics, and fertility services,” Carbonara (like Wasserman Schultz) hails from Long Island and has amassed a half-dozen highish-profile endorsements on the apparent strength of his war chest alone. “Republican Candidate Michael Carbonara Reports $2.5+ Million Raised to Beat Entrenched Incumbent,” reads the headline of a typical campaign press release.
What the triumphal announcement leaves out: No less than $2.45 million of Carbonara’s war chest was wired directly from Carbonara himself, with another $12,500 pitched in by his wife, $8,500 from employees of Carbonara’s companies, and $7,000 from lawyers who represent said companies. All of ten donors listed in Carbonara’s FEC filings are not immediately recognizable as family members, employees, or attorneys of Carbonara.
Of course, plenty of candidates jump-start their campaigns with substantial personal loans. (A separate Republican candidate in the 22nd, an 87-year-old billionaire eyeglass company magnate named Herbert Wertheim who registered his candidacy nine weeks ago, has loaned himself $2.5 million and otherwise raised $0.) But then there’s the matter of what Carbonara’s campaign has been doing with its war chest: plowing more than $1.1 million of it into crypto, via his payment facilitation firm Ibanera, which has also collected nearly $10,000 in investment banking services fees from his campaign on the transactions. The campaign has spent another quarter-million dollars paying the recently incorporated Delaware LLC Provident Strategies, which has no apparent online footprint or track record, for “media management services.”
Carbonara’s treasurer is the prolific Atlanta-based MAGA operative Jason Boles, who has also worked for George Santos, Marjorie Taylor Greene, and (notably) Georgia Democratic gubernatorial nominee Keisha Lance Bottoms; and who founded dark-money groups to attack Zohran Mamdani and boost RFK Jr. In 2020, NC Newsline reported that Boles was funding an elaborate Project Veritas–style entrapment scheme to trick left-leaning voter education nonprofits into violating election laws. But Boles himself has a track record of playing fast and loose with election laws: Marjorie Taylor Greene was fined $12,000 for illegally routing donations to one of his super PACs in 2024, and Boles was fined about $12,000 in 2022 after an FEC investigation into the campaign of a failed congressional candidate named Bo Hines turned up a litany of irregularities.
More explosively, a Bahamian bank last year sued Carbonara and his “fintech enablement platform” company Ibanera for allegedly stealing more than $20 million in funds it had deposited with the company’s Singapore subsidiary, after the Singaporean government shut down the subsidiary over a series of unrelated regulatory violations. According to the bank, Deltec Bank and Trust, Carbonara first claimed the funds had been frozen for various bureaucratic reasons out of its control, then changed his story and accused Deltec of violating an anti–money laundering provision of their contract.
An amended complaint filed earlier this year claims that Carbonara made the decision to simply refuse to return the funds during the last week of January 2025. When Deltec finally sued five weeks later, Carbonara allegedly converted the funds into stablecoins held in a high-yield Binance account and began carrying out an elaborate campaign to smear Deltec with help from an Arizona crypto CEO with a reputation for being “the king of fighting fire with fire.” The complaint implies that Carbonara’s congressional campaign is largely a ploy to build enough Trumpworld clout to, in the words of the Arizona crypto CEO, “leverage your political connections to ensure [Deltec CEO] Jean [Chalopin] gets arrested at the right time.” Ibanera has not produced a response to Deltec’s amended complaint, and the Carbonara campaign did not respond to a message left on a campaign voicemail.
But there’s more: A Michigan Montessori school late last year filed a lawsuit claiming a Bitcoin mine owned by two of Carbonara’s Florida LLCs is generating a deafening din that has rendered classroom operations somewhere between unbearable and impossible, and an anonymous former Ibanera contractor filed a federal lawsuit claiming that Carbonara stopped paying her salary, then promised to restore her payments and recommence work on an application she was jointly developing with Ibanera if she agreed to travel to Singapore for a crypto conference, whereupon she was drugged and brutally raped multiple times by Ibanera’s co-owner Bjorn Snorrason.
That case was dismissed last week on the somewhat incredible premise that Florida was an improper jurisdiction for litigating the dispute, with the judge even claiming the plaintiff had “not alleged that any of the individual Defendants is a Florida citizen.” Apparently Judge David Leibowitz, a Biden appointee, had not heard about Carbonara, a named defendant in the case, and his fundraising juggernaut of a Florida congressional campaign.
THERE IS ONE VIABLE DEMOCRAT RUNNING for Congress in Wasserman Schultz’s home district: Pia Dandiya, an education reform activist and former Apple executive who was a registered Republican until 2020. Dandiya originally hoped to unseat Brian Mast, best known as the non-Jewish guy who volunteered for the Israel Defense Forces and often dons his IDF uniform on Capitol Hill. But in an equally befuddling announcement, Dandiya announced she would be shifting to the new 22nd on the same day Wasserman Schultz announced she was running in the 20th—despite the fact that the redistricting effort barely touched the 21st District in which she was running, and Dandiya’s home in Palm Beach Gardens is an hour outside the border of the new 22nd.
The timing suggested Dandiya had coordinated her move with Wasserman Schultz, another head-scratcher given her lack of political experience and the 11-term congresswoman’s apparent failure to coordinate her decision with anyone else affected by it. But a staffer for another Democratic congressional campaign in the area says Dandiya quickly ingratiated herself to national party bosses on the strength of her hundreds of max-out donors, and in April she picked up an endorsement from EMILYs List. But her fundraising prowess is matched only by the insipidity of her professed political convictions, and her milquetoast Instagram reels do not inspire confidence. Hoping a neophyte candidate can pull one out in a Republican-leaning district instead of the incumbent Democrat who lives there is a sucker’s bet. Dandiya’s campaign did not respond to a request for comment.
By contrast, most of the Democrats running to represent the 20th District at least have political experience. Holness is a longtime veteran of Broward County politics who was a close friend and protégé of the late Alcee Hastings, who represented the district for nearly three decades before dying of pancreatic cancer in 2021. Elijah Manley, a 27-year-old substitute teacher who spent most of his early childhood post–financial crisis living on couches and sometimes in storage facilities, where the family bathed on the beach, experienced a political awakening in high school at the hands of the 2016 Bernie Sanders campaign; he has unsuccessfully run for office twice before, but his current campaign has raised nearly $800,000.
Former Rep. Sheila Cherfilus-McCormick is mounting a comeback bid after being forced to resign just two months ago due to a fraud and money laundering indictment she insists is bogus lawfare; in her defense, not even the DOJ accuses Cherfilus-McCormick of deliberately setting out to commit fraud, but merely failing to repay $5.7 million in accidental overpayments her family home health business received from the Florida Division of Emergency Management for administering vaccines. And there is precedent: Before he was elected to Congress in 1992, Hastings was indicted on charges of soliciting bribes from the Mafia in 1981, acquitted by a jury, then convicted and removed from his federal judgeship in 1989 by the Senate following a yearslong congressional investigation. His candidacy was helped by a judge’s decision to overturn the Senate conviction in 1992, a ruling that itself was later overturned by the Supreme Court—but by then he was a Broward institution. There’s also Luther Campbell, former lead rapper for 2 Live Crew, who fought the music obscenity wars in the 1990s and is now a local football coach and community activist.
All four candidates reportedly held a meeting earlier this week aimed at whittling down to just one Black candidate to take on Wasserman Schultz, but they haven’t decided who that candidate would be. The deadline for making the ballot is June 12, and the primary is August 18.
Manley’s staff says Broward party elders are now pressuring him to drop out and endorse Holness, a former mentor with whom he has a friendly personal relationship, and the first to blow the whistle on Cherfilus-McCormick’s inexplicable multimillion-dollar windfall during the 2021 primary to replace Hastings. But Holness has his own baggage: His daughter pled guilty to defrauding the Paycheck Protection Program in 2021; a cousin has been under scrutiny for receiving a bullshit post from Broward’s scandal-plagued sheriff; and another cousin is the polarizing prime minister of Jamaica, currently under fire for the snail’s pace at which the island has repaired hurricane damage and various alleged self-enrichment schemes.
Manley says Democrats in Broward, like Democrats across the country, have crime fatigue, and Hastings’s daughter Maisha Williams would seem to agree; she dropped out of the race last week and endorsed the 27-year-old upstart. Manley says he was personally inspired to jump into the race early last year after reading the jaw-dropping state lawsuit that preceded Cherfilus-McCormick’s indictment. He began posting videos to TikTok and Instagram to educate voters about the scandal under the tagline “You can’t fight corruption with more corruption.” (In classic Trumpian fashion, Cherfilus-McCormick responded by suing him for a million dollars; the suit was recently dismissed.)
Manley says he never felt tension between being Black and embracing Bernie populism: “I think that [tension] mostly exists on the internet.” As a kid who’d spent much of Obama’s first term with no fixed address, it seemed obvious to him that fighting for higher wages, affordable housing, Medicare for All, and whatever political revolution it took to get there was the only way forward. “And then Debbie put her finger on the scale against Bernie Sanders when she was chairing the DNC and threw a wrench in the whole movement,” he remembers.
Conscious of the penchant of establishment fixers and dark-money groups for intervening in majority-minority district primaries like his own, Manley made the deliberate decision to prioritize messaging on his domestic agenda over his views on Gaza or Iran, thinking maybe, just maybe, he could keep AIPAC and its multitude of big-money cutouts out of the race. (Manley actually converted to Judaism as a gay, bookish high school kid who never connected with his family’s conservative Southern Baptist faith, but feels no more conflicted about being a Jewish anti-genocide pacifist than a Black Bernie Bro.) For more than a year, the Israel lobby stayed on the sidelines.
Then he woke up on Memorial Day weekend to learn that he was up against an AIPAC stalwart who once told colleagues who voted “nay” on a resolution expressing support for the IDF that they had “no soul,” and the same person who was in power when Hillary Clinton was anointed a presidential candidate.
Said Manley: “It’s like she’s addicted to destroying the Democratic Party.”
