On a steamy weekend in June, I went to St. Petersburg to report on the race for Congress in Florida’s 13th Congressional District. In a heavily gerrymandered and polarized country, it’s one of the few congressional races that the nonpartisan Cook Political Report highlighted as even vaguely competitive. They described the race as “likely Republican,” as Republicans typically receive six more points of the vote share than Democrats.
The district, which the first-term congresswoman Anna Paulina Luna represents, includes part of St. Petersburg and Pinellas County, and while the city of St. Pete is quite blue — I was there in the middle of a vibrant Pride Week — the surrounding county is much redder.
I was curious about the race because the front-runner in the Democratic primary at the time, Whitney Fox, is a perfect foil for Representative Luna. They’re both in their 30s, telegenic, married mothers of young children, both raised by single mothers.
Ms. Luna has supported some family-friendly legislation, including proxy voting for new moms in Congress and an I.V.F. bill that would make states ineligible for federal block grant funding if they banned the procedure. When I spoke to Ms. Fox in St. Petersburg ahead of the August primary, she was sharply critical of Ms. Luna’s legislation. “It has no substance and it’s not going to go anywhere,” Ms. Fox said, spicy while still smiling, and mentioning that Ms. Luna took her name off a broader bipartisan I.V.F. bill before presenting her own. “That’s what most of her bills do. She’ll say that she’s for women and for families and for mothers. But when you actually read what policy she’s putting forward or fighting for, it’s not supportive.”
Even though I came away impressed with Ms. Fox’s verve, I thought: She doesn’t have a snowball’s chance in a district with more registered Republicans than Democrats and President Biden at the top of the ticket. While the local Democrats I spoke to were excited about Ms. Fox — one woman boasted of making over 60 phone calls for her — their mood about the larger state of the party was funereal.
That was before Mr. Biden dropped out, and before Ms. Fox went on to win a five-way Democratic primary handily, with nearly 60 percent of the vote.
The Democratic field was so crowded in part because Ms. Luna is a Trump acolyte and Freedom Caucus member, which makes her vulnerable in a district that Mr. Trump lost to Mr. Biden in 2020, where around 29 percent of registered voters in Pinellas County aren’t affiliated with either major party and around 33 percent are Democrats. When only about 38 percent of voters are Republicans, an aggressively MAGA candidate risks losing the majority.
Ms. Luna’s political ascent was very much in the Trump mold — she rose to prominence as a scrappy right-wing influencer — and her bombastic public persona has been fashioned in the former president’s image. She took time out of her busy legislative schedule in May to attend Mr. Trump’s Manhattan criminal trial and appeared in his V.I.P. box at the Republican National Convention in July. In a viral video clip from 2019, she accosted Kamala Harris at an airport over the then-senator’s position on border policy, writing in a Facebook caption that Ms. Harris is a “bad person” with a “sick agenda.” She once compared Hillary Clinton to herpes on Fox News.
Ms. Luna lost when she ran for Congress the first time, in 2020, before a 2022 redistricting cut out part of liberal St. Petersburg and made the district more Republican. After the 2022 redistricting, Florida became so tilted in favor of Republicans that Princeton’s nonpartisan gerrymandering report card gave the state a big fat F for unfairness. But even retaining that built-in advantage, Ms. Luna is so divisive that she “is the type of Republican who could underperform Trump” in Florida, said Erin Covey, who leads the Cook Political Report’s coverage of House races, when I talked to her in June.
Jennifer Griffith, who is the chair of the Pinellas County Democratic Party, told me that she’s seen an outpouring of enthusiasm and voter participation for Ms. Harris that she thinks could affect down-ballot races like Ms. Fox’s. Ms. Griffith estimates that 1,000 new people have signed up to volunteer with the Democratic Party in Pinellas. “It’s unlike anything I’ve ever seen in my life,” she said. “It’s overwhelming.”
Against the odds, Ms. Fox is in the lead in one local poll. Florida Politics described Ms. Fox’s nearly four-point edge over Ms. Luna in the nonpartisan St. Pete Polls’s Aug. 27 survey of 843 likely voters as a “shock.”: “St. Pete Polls found almost 48 percent of likely voters plan to support Fox, while just over 44 percent intend to vote for Luna.” It’s close to the margin of error for this poll, but it’s a positive signal for Ms. Fox’s candidacy. When I followed up with Ms. Covey this week, she told me that while she thinks this particular poll is coming in a little hot for Dems, “I do think that Fox is running a strong campaign, and I’ll be curious if the major Democratic groups (the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, House Majority PAC) end up spending money here this fall — that will be the real signal that this is a really competitive race.”
If (a big if) Ms. Fox can triumph in this race, it could be much bigger than just a win in her district. It may be another sign that the MAGA brand of political theater is on the wane in some quarters, and that an exhausted moderate majority is ready for politics to be competent — and normal — again.
It may also help Ms. Fox that abortion is on the ballot this fall in Florida, which creates another obvious distinction between the two candidates and may increase turnout among young women, who lean Democratic. When Ms. Luna, who is anti-abortion, presents herself as uniquely situated to address the concerns of working parents or women’s health, Ms. Fox, who supports abortion rights, can easily strike back without being pilloried as a childless cat lady.
As my newsroom colleague Ruth Igielnik explained, “For women younger than 45, abortion has overtaken the economy as the single most important issue to their vote.” Florida currently has a six-week abortion ban. If Amendment 4 passes in November, Floridians would have the right to abortion up until the point of viability, which is around 24 weeks.
Ms. Fox supports Amendment 4, while Ms. Luna has previously referred to herself as a “pro-life extremist,” and she explained to EWTN Pro-Life Weekly in 2023 that she does not believe in exceptions for “terrible circumstances” because of her husband’s experience as the product of rape. When asked for comment, a representative for Ms. Luna sent the following statement: “Florida 13 will handily re-elect Rep. Luna. As for Amendment 4, Rep. Luna believes it is a policy decision that should be left to the voters in the state to decide, whether through the constitutional amendment or the State Legislature. Unlike extreme big government liberals, Rep. Luna trusts voters to make their own decisions. This isn’t China.”
A poll from late July shows that 69 percent of voters support Amendment 4, which needs 60 percent of the vote to pass.
Ms. Fox told me that Ms. Luna’s previous opposition to abortion rights was part of what motivated her to get into the race. Ms. Fox doesn’t want her daughters growing up in a state where they have fewer rights than women of her generation have had. “We are two young women running against each other and we both have young children and we have completely different ideas of family policies and reproductive rights ” she said of Ms. Luna. “I think we’re going to be able to really go head-to-head on those issues from personal places.”
Moms for Civility
But Ms. Fox doesn’t just appeal to pro-choice constituents. She is a talented politician who understands her district. She told me about home insurance costs that are out of control and increasingly exorbitant for Florida seniors on a fixed income, and the danger of red tide algae bloom on the local tourism industry. She also spoke movingly about the medical costs of childbirth, and how the fact that neither she nor her husband had paid parental leave lit the initial spark for her going into politics. “I have this very vivid memory of holding my newborn and my husband opening the medical bills,” she said. It made her want to do something to change the system.
I heard from several people who are not yellow dog democrats that Ms. Fox has gone out of her way to forge relationships with them, and to show that she’s ready for the unglamorous day-to-day work of legislating.
Casey Cane, a Palm Harbor fire commissioner who describes himself as a pro-life, lifelong Republican, told me that he’s been impressed by Ms. Fox’s outreach to community members regardless of their political background. “I have had productive discussions with Whitney on some key local issues like inflation, housing, the beach preservation issue on Clearwater Beach and south into the Treasure Island areas,” he said. While Mr. Cane isn’t ready to endorse anyone and disagrees with Ms. Fox about a lot of social issues, he has been disappointed with Ms. Luna’s lack of local presence. “I’d really like to get her perspective on some of this stuff and not so much just watch her in the limelight. I see her end up on the TV more often than maybe she’s in the community,” he said.
Mr. Cane’s wife, Lisa, is on the Pinellas County school board and has been troubled by the behavior of Moms for Liberty, a right-wing educational advocacy group that Ms. Luna has supported. “All they want to do is divide people,” Mr. Cane told me. “If I was going to endorse specifically on how you carry yourself within the community, there’s no doubt about who I would at least right now endorse, and that wouldn’t be Anna.”
There are other signals that while most Republicans will love Trump no matter what, Trumpism without him has lost its luster. Trump’s handpicked candidates had a “historically” bad time in the Republican primaries this year, with losses in South Carolina, Utah and Colorado. In Pinellas County, Moms for Liberty’s candidates for school board were trounced by the more moderate incumbents this year.
“I consider Whitney to be someone who reaches across the aisle,” said John Alfe, a Republican business owner who plans to vote for Ms. Fox this fall. He volunteers for a local food pantry and told me food insecurity and border control are two of the most important issues for him. “I really like to vote on policy,” he said, and a candidate’s “zeal to make changes that would improve the quality of life for the people that they represent.”
Despite the praise from some Republicans, it’s going to be a tough race for Ms. Fox. As Mr. Alfe put it to me, outside of St. Petersburg the county is deep red, and he doesn’t think those folks are looking for a big change — “It’s kind of like status quo, right?” Pinellas remains purple for now, but Florida as a whole is still the beating heart of the MAGA movement. A recent poll from the conservative Club for Growth shows Luna with the edge, but with ten percent of voters still undecided.
Even if she loses, I don’t think we’ve seen the last of Whitney Fox. She’s got a slew of endorsements from national PACs, and she has that spark in her. It took years to turn Florida from purple to red, and nothing is permanent in politics.
Ms. Fox told me she drew particular inspiration from Pat Schroeder, the 12-term congresswoman from Colorado who was a force behind feminist legislation on pregnancy discrimination and family leave. Her takeaway from Ms. Schroeder’s decades of service was that “freedom is not something that’s wrapped up with a bow on top handed down from generation to generation. We have to consistently be fighting for it,” she said. “I have to do this.”
The post Two Florida Moms, One Congressional Seat and the Future of MAGA appeared first on New York Times.
