Palm Beach, Fl – The Palm Beach Post reported on the Florida Democrat Party’s ongoing and unprecedented effort to register and engage voters long before the 2020 election. Yesterday, Florida Democrats held more than 30 voter registration events across the state in honor of Martin Luther King Jr. Day.
Palm Beach Post: Election 2020: How Florida Democrats plan to reach unprecedented number of minorities
Highlights from the article:
- Rather than wait until the months before Election Day to engage voters of color, as some say is the Democrats’ pattern, the party has been connecting with those communities throughout 2019, state party Chairwoman Terrie Rizzo said.
- “We are learning from the past and building for the future to win,” she said.
- After decades of high-profile losses statewide, Florida’s Democratic Party says that this time around, they will win, and a Martin Luther King Jr. Day voter registration drive shows why.
- The state party boasted in a Monday memo that it has raised $5.2 million while organizers and volunteers registered 17,720 voters in 2019 compared to about 9,200 in 2015.
- The party has spent $500,000 on ads in newspapers and other media aimed at blacks, Hispanic and young people.
- To bolster turnout among these voters, Florida Democrats will take part in Organizing Corps 2020, a national program that in Florida aims to recruit 200 young people — mostly nonwhite and non-straight — to help train organizers to register voters in their neighborhoods and make sure they vote.
- Most of those recruits will come from black colleges, state party Executive Director Juan Penalosa said in April.
