Independent voters will decide newly drawn 25th district race
Florida’s Aug. 18 Democratic primary in the newly drawn 25th Congressional District pits Larkin, a 34-year-old democratic socialist, against Moskowitz, the two-term incumbent who calls himself a “DeSantis Democrat.” Establishment Democrats are watching the race warily, and DSA leaders are treating it as their next proof of concept. Whoever wins will shape how both parties read Florida heading into the general election, and how much room the DSA has to expand beyond the areas where it has won so far.
Beyond the two men on the ballot, the race is a proxy fight over what kind of Democrat can win in a Florida remade by Republican redistricting and rightward drift. Larkin’s candidacy tests whether the DSA’s recent primary wins — in New York City, Philadelphia, Colorado and Michigan this year — can power an upset in a state Donald Trump carried in 2024, in a district Republicans specifically redrew to be less competitive. Moskowitz’s candidacy tests whether distancing from the national party is still the surer path to survival here.
The two have run sharply different campaigns. In late July, Larkin stood before a packed room at a contemporary art museum in Dania Beach and fielded questions from voters for two hours. Moskowitz has largely avoided public events with voters and has not agreed to any debates. Larkin’s campaign has seized on the contrast. “Congressman Moskowitz doesn’t want to be accountable to voters in this district,” Larkin said. Moskowitz declined to comment on Larkin’s claim that he does not have a field strategy to reach voters.
Larkin, a self-described “cat dad” and drag show enthusiast who says he wants south Florida to be a safe and welcoming place for everyone, grew up in Fort Lauderdale, the son of a retired army officer. After college, he was working a minimum-wage line-cook job when he became consumed by Bernie Sanders’ 2016 presidential campaign. He quit, drove to New Hampshire and went from unpaid volunteer to running the campaign’s Portsmouth field office, later organizing in Nevada, Kansas, Utah, New York and Rhode Island. He spent the next few years in Washington unionizing his workplace and organizing for progressive campaigns and unions before moving back to south Florida in 2022. He announced his congressional run at a protest against “Alligator Alcatraz,” the now-shuttered Florida immigration detention camp where civil rights groups reported severe human rights violations.
On the trail, Larkin pitches government-funded universal healthcare, free tuition at public universities and the construction of millions of new affordable housing units, along with protecting and expanding temporary protected status and abolishing Immigration and Customs Enforcement. At one door in Fort Lauderdale, a longtime resident named George told him, “You’ve got my vote!” after hearing Larkin’s plan to lower the cost of living with a reduced property insurance rate — flooding had swamped George’s street three years earlier. A few doors down, a resident who immigrated from Haiti 39 years ago said he did not know whom he would vote for, having seen little done for Fort Lauderdale in his time there; after roughly five minutes, according to Larkin’s campaign, the resident told him he would vote for him. Asked why he was wearing a dark suit on a 95-degree day, Larkin replied, “I’m dressed for the job I want!”
The campaign said about 75 volunteers, some traveling from counties on the other side of the state, knocked on thousands of doors across the district in a single weekend — part of the engine, replicated by DSA chapters across the country, that has now knocked on more than 35,000 doors and made more than 170,000 calls to voters since April.
Moskowitz has cast himself as a pragmatist willing to work across the aisle in a state where Republicans control every lever of government. He was chosen by Gov. Ron DeSantis to lead the state’s division of emergency management, and allies say his emergency-management background — including leading the state’s disaster response to numerous hurricanes — has given him a profile distinct from the national Democratic brand. He is widely seen as more socially conservative than most of the House Democratic caucus and has drawn criticism from the left for his unwavering support of Israel and his vote against a resolution to limit U.S. military involvement in the conflict with Iran. Larkin said he is especially divergent with Moskowitz on his decision to become the first congressional Democrat to join Trump’s “department of government efficiency” (Doge) initiative and his vote for the Laken Riley Act, which expanded ICE’s detention authority.
Moskowitz holds a wide fundraising lead: nearly $3 million to Larkin’s more than $1 million, with Larkin’s haul coming from nearly 20,000 unique donors under his pledge to reject corporate donations. Larkin has leaned into his connection to the wider DSA wave, appearing alongside Twitch streamer Hasan Piker at a virtual fundraiser that pulled in roughly $60,000 in one night and citing a nearly $120,000 fundraising surge in the week after the New York City primary wins. Polls show the race tightening. A Beacon Insights poll in June had Moskowitz leading 51% to 19%; a poll last week from the Center for Strategic Politics found Larkin and Moskowitz in a statistical tie. Larkin’s internal polling showed a wide head-to-head deficit that narrowed sharply once voters were given information about both candidates’ records, including Moskowitz’s Doge affiliation and Larkin’s status as a first-time candidate and democratic socialist.
David Macdonald, a political scientist at Florida State University, cautioned against reading too much into the surveys, noting that polls way overestimated Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan and Francesca Hong in Wisconsin. “It gets really difficult when you’re trying to poll primary races where it’s much lower turnout, much lower salience and with probably a lot more undecided voters,” Macdonald said.
The seat Larkin and Moskowitz are vying for exists because of a recent U.S. Supreme Court ruling that gutted the Voting Rights Act; shortly after, DeSantis pushed through a new congressional map designed to give Republicans an edge in as many as four Florida seats. The overhaul dismantled the 25th District long held by Democrat Debbie Wasserman Schultz and replaced it with a new coastal seat running from Delray Beach to Miami Beach. Moskowitz, whose old 23rd District had also been redrawn to lean more Republican, opted to run in the new 25th rather than face a tougher Republican-leaning seat elsewhere. The district is majority white (65%), with a sizable Hispanic population (20%) and Black voters making up just 5%, and people ages 50 and older make up more than 60% of voters — demographics similar to the district Moskowitz has represented since 2023.
Even Larkin’s allies describe this as a harder test than Zohran Mamdani’s mayoral race in New York or Melat Kiros’s in the Colorado congressional primary. Steven Schale, a longtime Florida Democratic strategist who has worked on Barack Obama’s campaigns and is a friend of Moskowitz’s, pointed to two other considerations that make the district an uphill battle for Larkin: the 25th has one of the largest Jewish Democratic electorates in the country, and the state has a history of being unfriendly terrain for the party’s most progressive flank, from Hillary Clinton’s 40-point presidential primary win over Sanders in 2016 to Andrew Gillum’s narrow 2018 loss in the governor’s race. “In this particular district, which is a coastal and relatively wealthy area, the economic conditions are not there to bring a critical mass of support for the democratic socialists,” said Sean D Foreman, a political scientist at Barry University. “It’s an area where you have people who have moved in from different parts of the country, and they’re probably more conservative.”
“If Oliver Larkin wins that primary, he will lose the general election, and he will probably lose it pretty badly,” Schale said, arguing that DSA positions on abolishing prisons and curtailing ICE, however popular within the primary electorate, are liabilities in a general election where affordability, not ideology, is the dominant concern. Schale did not view the race as morally simple: the DSA, he said, “provides real opportunities for young people” to lead campaigns in a way the Democratic establishment often does not, and part of the movement’s appeal is a legitimate frustration with incumbents who “should have gone home 15 years ago.”
Those distinctions are not so cut and dried, however: polls show that a majority of Latino voters in Florida oppose ICE. Florida also has a history of voting for progressive ballot measures. In 2018, nearly 65% of Florida voters approved restoring voting rights to most Floridians with prior convictions, and in 2020 a $15 minimum wage amendment passed with roughly 61% of the vote even as Donald Trump carried the state.
“The anti-socialism card has been played for so long that it’s ingrained in our politics here,” said Foreman. “But when you get past the name ‘democratic socialist’, and you start talking about policies like raising the minimum wage and affordable housing, they’re ideas that many voters agree with. It shows that these ideas can break through under the right conditions. But I’m not sure those conditions exist in Florida yet.”
The national DSA’s push behind Larkin comes as the organization tries to expand beyond its traditional base of younger, white, college-educated progressives in large urban centers. Megan Romer, the DSA’s national co-chair, pointed to the group’s growth in rural and Republican-leaning areas — from mobile-home-park tenant unions in Idaho and North Carolina to organizing against new datacenters in her own upstate New York county — as evidence the model can travel beyond deep-blue cities. “The current moment is being framed as ‘economic anxiety’ and that’s such a 2016 term,” Romer said. “It’s not economic anxiety to have to pick between rent and food — it’s economic violence. So we’re fighting against this system that keeps people from living dignified, safe and healthy lives.”
Larkin rejects the idea that his politics are a general-election liability, pointing to his own polling, which shows him running close to a generic Democrat’s advantage in the district and ahead of the leading Republican fundraiser in early general-election matchups. He argues that Democrats’ losses in 2024 — when roughly 7 million fewer voters turned out for Kamala Harris than for Joe Biden four years earlier — reflect a failure to offer working-class voters anything concrete, not an overcorrection to the left. “The label of democratic socialism just frankly is not scary,” he said, “when under capitalism people have barely enough to survive.”
Canvassers who have been knocking on doors for Larkin since April say they have grown more hopeful with each passing week, and Foreman said the campaign has already left a mark regardless of Tuesday’s result. “The democratic socialists have already won this round in Florida, even if none of their candidates win, because they’ve gotten a lot more attention than you would have expected otherwise,” he said. “Even Oliver Larkin, to some extent, realizes he’s planting seeds for the future of the movement.”