Four Black candidates split remaining 55% after failed consolidation
On the evening of 1 June, the four Black candidates vying to represent Florida’s 20th Congressional District gathered at the African-American Research Library and Cultural Center in Historic Sistrunk, the oldest Black neighborhood in Fort Lauderdale, in hopes of consolidating behind a single contender. The effort failed. When the August primary votes were counted, Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz — a white, Jewish, 21-year House veteran and former Democratic National Committee chair who did not live in the district — won with 45% of the vote. The four Black candidates divided the remaining 55%.
The four were Dale Holness, the Jamaican-born former mayor of Broward County; Luther “Uncle Luke” Campbell, the former leader of the rap group 2 Live Crew; Sheila Cherfilus-McCormick, the former congresswoman for the district who resigned over a money-laundering indictment and a House ethics investigation; and Elijah Manley, a 27-year-old substitute teacher who described himself as a gay progressive and had publicly discussed periods of homelessness in his youth, including living in cars and couch-surfing. Broward State Attorney Harold F. Pryor, the first Black state attorney in the county, had called them together to seek consolidation behind a single Black candidate.
The seat had been held by a Black legislator since Alcee Hastings claimed it in 1992. Hastings had been Florida’s first Black federal judge in 1979 but was impeached and removed by Congress on bribery charges a decade later. As a political consultant told the Miami Herald at the time, “Among a certain population of Black voters, Alcee Hastings was symbolic of someone who had overcome. He fought the man and won.”
The first meeting ended after about two hours with no resolution. A second meeting was set for a week later, at noon at a building owned by the local chapter of Omega Psi Phi, a historic African American fraternity. Multiple ideas were discussed, including having the candidates run for other offices — seats in the Florida state legislature, a different congressional district, or governor. The meetings had been generally cordial, but as the candidates failed to reach consensus over more than four hours, tempers flared and voices were raised.
Holness, Manley and Campbell eventually agreed to the general parameters of a consolidation plan, but Cherfilus-McCormick refused, believing Manley and Campbell intended to run for the district seat regardless. “No, I’m not gonna sit here and lie to you guys, you guys are lying. I know you’re lying. Elijah already sent in his paperwork,” she recalled telling the group. “I’m running regardless. This is my seat, and I’m running for my seat.” Manley’s candidate form, filed with the Florida Department of State, shows he took his oath of candidacy three days before the second meeting, with the document marked received by the state just 30 minutes before the meeting began. Cherfilus-McCormick described Manley’s behavior to the Guardian as “deceitful, deceptive,” claiming he made up stories and leaked information. Holness said the candidates had agreed “that we would not attack each other throughout the campaign,” but added: “In the end, Elijah did.”
Wasserman Schultz’s path to the 20th ran through Tallahassee. Following the Supreme Court’s Louisiana v. Callais decision, which allowed partisan gerrymandering, the Florida legislature, at the urging of Gov. Ron DeSantis, redrew the state’s congressional map. The new lines splintered Wasserman Schultz’s own district, once a Democratic stronghold that had been 42% Hispanic. A rally against the redrawing took place outside the Florida state capitol in Tallahassee on 28 April.
On 22 May, Wasserman Schultz announced her run for the 20th, saying in a video that she was doing so “because we cannot let Trump destroy Broward county’s power” and touting her “seniority and clout.” She did not live in the district, and her candidacy drew accusations from some local Democrats of carpetbagging. The Broward County Black Democratic caucus asked her not to run in the 20th. Holness told the Guardian that almost three weeks before Wasserman Schultz finalized her decision, he had, after a West Broward Democratic Club meeting where she spoke, personally “handed her a folder with data” which he said demonstrated that “she could win where she lives, in district 22.”
Two of the Black candidates described pre-announcement conversations in which they had asked Wasserman Schultz not to run in the 20th. Manley said he told Wasserman Schultz in a parking lot in Kings Point that he hoped she would not run in the historically Black district; according to Manley, she replied, “I have a lot of options, and we’ll talk more about it. You know how to reach me.” Holness said he tried to raise the issue with her at a Democratic club meeting about a week before her announcement but that she “pretty much blew me off” and said, “Look, I’m running. It’s not personal.” A Wasserman Schultz spokesperson disputed both accounts, telling the Guardian: “These conversations either never took place or did not occur as described.”
Wasserman Schultz, days after her announcement, told a CBS affiliate in Miami that no member of the Congressional Black Caucus had told her not to run. “None of them told me not to run,” she said, adding that House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries and CBC members had told her that “they know I know our community.” Florida Rep. Frederica S. Wilson wrote an op-ed in the Miami Times calling the 20th “the Congressional seat that Black history built,” but prefaced her remarks with a disclaimer: “This is not an endorsement of any candidate. It is a civics lesson.”
The national party response drew limited public pushback. Ten of the 15 elected members of the Florida Democratic National Committee released a statement saying: “Our party cannot credibly denounce the dismantling of Black political power by Republicans while treating one of Florida’s few remaining majority-Black districts as a political opportunity for an incumbent seeking a safer seat.” Florida Democratic Party chair Nikki Fried offered a softer public response weeks later, telling the Miami Herald: “I am disappointed by the congresswoman’s refusal to engage in meaningful dialogue about her decision.” The Congressional Black Caucus, which has predicted the loss of a third of its members in the current round of redistricting, declined to formally oppose Wasserman Schultz. CBC chair Yvette Clarke said on CNN that there were “valid reasons” that Black voters in the district had raised concerns about Wasserman Schultz’s decision, adding: “I’m not there to invalidate that.” Clarke also described Wasserman Schultz’s pre-announcement approach on the House floor as “more information than it was a conversation. Conversation is discourse, right? It was informational.” As the primaries approached, Clarke described the race as “a painful situation” that “the community has been really disrupted by.”
Wasserman Schultz campaigned actively for Black support. She flooded voters’ mailboxes with mailers featuring Black faces endorsing her, attended a “Brotherhood Brunch” with Black men at a Black-owned restaurant, and received the endorsement of “Blessed Broward,” a clergy collective in the county. Broward Democratic state councilman Percy Johnson told the Guardian: “You know that Black folk sell Black folk out. And they sell the representation out. We had a lot of that.”
Former CBC chair Emanuel Cleaver of Missouri came to the district to campaign for Wasserman Schultz, as Politico reported at the time. Cleaver called the situation “tough” because of a two-decade working relationship with Wasserman Schultz. At a local gathering, he said: “Wouldn’t it be ugly if I’m driving down the street with Debbie Wasserman Schultz in my red convertible, and I see an African American standing on the road without a ride, and they ask me to stop, put Debbie out of the car? Let them get in because they are African American? I don’t roll like that.”
The Florida 20th race echoes, in form, a contest from two decades earlier. In 2006, Steve Cohen, a white Jewish state senator with 24 years in the Tennessee legislature, entered the Memphis-based 9th Congressional District, which was majority Black and had been represented by a Black member for three decades. Like Wasserman Schultz, Cohen filed late in the cycle — three days before the deadline — and ran on a message of experience. He won the Democratic primary with 31% of the vote as the Black vote split. The Commercial Appeal of Memphis, endorsing Cohen, dismissed concerns about his race as having “no place” in the race. Black Memphis columnist Wendi C Thomas argued that if voters in Memphis wanted Barack Obama in the White House, they had “to be willing to have Steve Cohen in the US House.” Cohen himself played up his connection to the district’s Black electorate, quipping in one debate that judging by his voting record people would think that he was a Black woman — a comment for which he was harshly criticized.
Three differences separate the two contests, according to the Guardian: Cohen lived in the district he sought to represent; he was not the top fundraiser in his primary; and he ran during a period when the number of Black members of Congress was still increasing — a trend the CBC says has since reversed.
OpenSecrets, a nonpartisan research group tracking money in U.S. politics, performed an analysis for the Guardian showing that incumbent Democrats in southern majority-Black districts seeking re-election in 2026 raised, on average, little more than a third of what incumbents raised in districts where Black residents were not the majority. Wasserman Schultz entered the 20th with what the Guardian described as a “massive war chest” drawn from her 21 years in Congress and her tenure as DNC chair; none of the four Black candidates could match it. Multiple people interviewed by the Guardian said Wasserman Schultz had targeted the Black district as the easier one to win and hold, exploiting a fracturing vote and “bigfooting with a checkbook.” As Manley put it, the analysis of this race has orbited around a central fact: “A white woman took advantage of that to essentially run and take a Black opportunity district for herself.”
When the votes were cast, Wasserman Schultz won the primary with 45%, with the four Black candidates combining for the remaining 55%. Catherine Charles, a 44-year-old Black mother of two, told the Guardian that she would have preferred “one of the other candidates to win” but added: “It’s time for a change, and I’m not necessarily stuck on the color of the person who’s going to bring the change.” Cohen, for his part, was re-elected nine times after his 2006 win in Memphis before the current redistricting wave drove him from the seat — the same wave that delivered Wasserman Schultz to Florida’s 20th.