I Wish It Was More Shocking That Florida Democratic Primary Voters Picked Conservatives Over Democrats

Last night, for a post I was working on, I was trying to figure out what major party presidential candidate has done as badly as Trump's latest polling indicates he will. I looked at the results of campaigns I remember tanking badly-- Goldwater, McGovern and George H.W. Bush's failed reelection campaign. But all of them ended up better than the 35% Señor Trumpanzee is polling today. I had to go all the way back to the 3-way race in 1924 to find a candidate who did worse than Trump is doing. It was the conservative Democrat from West Virginia, John Davis, in a three-way race with Republican incumbent Calvin Coolidge and Progressive Bob LaFollette. Davis, won less than 30% of the vote, the only Democratic presidential candidate to have ever done so.

Davis did some good things and some bad things and he's not easy to pigeon-hole from a century on. It would be hard not to call him a racist pig, although his denunciation of the KKK had a lot to do with his losses in the South, even though he was against anti-lynching laws. He was against women getting the right to vote, opposed child labor laws, fought against civil rights and backed state's rights when southern states used a poll tax to prevent poor people, especially poor black people, from voting. He was the U.S. Solicitor General from 1913 to 1918 and he successfully argued a guess for Oklahoma's racist literacy law, which exempted voters who were descended from anyone voting in 1866 (i.e., white people), a law that disenfranchised blacks in the state. Later in was implicated in the Smedley Butler or Business Plot, an aborted coup d'état against FDR. On the other hand, he was an anti-trust guy and a co-author of the Clayton Anti-Trust Act when he was in Congress. His very last case in front of the Supreme Court was to defend for South Carolina-- unsuccessfully-- "separate but equal" in part of the Brown v Board of Education case that led to forced school desegregation.

He was an unpopular compromise candidate at the Democratic Convention in 1924, when progressive California Senator William McAdoo was favored, getting more primary votes than all 11 other candidates combined. Davis took the nomination on the 103rd ballot, ironically, in part, because McAdoo neglected to reject the endorsement of the KKK.

Today in Florida, Democratic primary voters-- pushed by their thoroughly corrupt leaders, from Chuck Schumer and Joe Biden to Barack "Gimme money for my presidential library" Obama-- chose a supposedly "ex" Republican, an incompetent, corrupt and steadfast conservative who was backed by Wall Street, Patrick Murphy, over, arguably the most progressive and brilliant member of Congress, Alan Grayson. I shudder at the thought that I ever considered myself a Democrat.

Among the other especially heinous choices the Florida primary voters made was Murphy's replacement on the Treasure Coast (FL-18). As I mentioned several times before, there's nothing remotely Democratic about Randy Perkins, who basically bought the DCCC endorsement and then the primary election by transferring $3,017,688 from his personal bank account to his campaign. As I feared, progressives Den Grayson and Susannah Randolph split the progressive vote in FL-09, allowing conservative state Sen. Darren Soto to win the nomination. And, worst of all, #DebtTrapDebbie Wasserman Schultz was reelected over Tim Canova. What a mess! Let standing to represent progressives: Alina Valdes, who will face Mario Diaz-Balart in November. Want to lend her a hand?