Florida: How Adam Christensen Will Make History By Beating Judson Sapp In November

Adam Christensen is a 26 year old progressive Democrat running for north central Florida’s 3rd congressional district-- safely blue Alachua County (Gainesville) plus 5 blood red ones-- Clay, Marion, Putnam, Bradford and Union. The district's PVI is R+9 and Trump beat Hillary there 56.2% to 40.2%. The 2018 anti-red wave help Democrat Yvonne Hinson win 42.9% of the vote, but however you slice it FL-03 is a tough district for a Democrat. That isn't stopping Christensen, who grew up in a conservative household in Indiana and was a three-sport athlete in college, graduating from Hampden-Sydney College in 2016. After graduating from college, he started his first company with $3,000 in his pocket that he had saved from summer jobs and moved to Gainesville. The company focused on catching fraud in the essential oil industry. In 2018, he started a second company focused on catching fraud in the Hemp and CBD industries and doing safety testing like pesticide testing. When the pandemic hit, he was forced to sell this company because of the lockdowns. Christensen also coaches college and high school soccer in his free time and won a state championship coaching the Rock High School in 2019.

Christensen is running on popular progressive ideas such as Medicare-For-All, a Green New Deal and Universal Childcare, which he refers to as Middle Class and Small Business Tax Cuts (take a look at his campaign video below to see how he frames these issues). He also believes that the internet should be a public utility and that a federal jobs guarantee would help to revitalize North Central Florida. The current representative is Ted Yoho, a Tea Partier about to retire, who believes that the Civil Rights Act is unconstitutional and that lynching should not be a federal crime. Christensen doesn't care what the Cook PVI is and he explained why in a guest post for us below. If you like what he has to say and would like to help him make a dent in Florida's unwarranted Republican majority, please consider tapping on the 2020 ActBlue congressional thermometer on the right and contributing what you can.


How We Win In North Central Florida
-by Adam Christensen

Two years ago, Yvonne Hayes-Hinson ran against an incumbent in Florida’s 3rd congressional district, raised roughly $25,000, had minimal campaign staff, and received 43% of the vote. In the last two years, Ted Yoho announced he was retiring, Amendment 4 was passed to end felony disenfranchisement (23.3% of black voters in Florida were previously unable to vote), and a global pandemic occurred in which Florida’s unemployment rate skyrocketed while Florida was shown to be the worst in the country for the unemployed to receive benefits. In fact, no race-wide polling has been done in this area since 2018.

So, how do we win? Simple. We revolutionize the game and we run against an extremely unpopular opponent who has a lot of baggage.

1.   Run against an unpopular opponent with severe baggage. Having an open race with no incumbent is around a 2.5% swing. Currently, there are 11 Republicans running in this race in their primary. The leading contender is a man named Judson Sapp. Sapp was famously endorsed and paid for help from his good friend Roger Stone, the convicted felon who threatened a federal judge. He has also racked up the endorsements of Dana Loesch and Charlie Kirk as well as other far-right personalities. Scrolling through his Facebook there are plenty of pictures of him spending weekends down at Mar-a-Lago. He is mostly self-funding using family money being funneled from his daddy’s company. He will probably get around 15-20% of the vote from the extreme right of the primary and in this crowded primary, it will probably put him over the edge. In 2018, Sapp ran against Ted Yoho and only received 30% of the vote while burning bridges with everyone left and right, including organized labor. Current internal polls show Judson Sapp leading the field of Republicans. His unpopularity and extremist views should help sway around 2% of independents to vote for us instead of him.

2.   We change the game and increase the Democratic turnout.

a.       Before this year, the Florida Democratic Party had never run candidates in every state House and Senate district in Florida. This means plenty of Republicans were re-elected to their seats without having to spend any money or spend any effort campaigning or competing. It also allowed them to double or triple team resources and organizing on contested seats. We decided to help change that. Multiple groups including 90 For 90 and the DECF got involved to try and contest every acre of land here in Florida, by putting up candidates for every race. In our congressional district, only three out of five state house districts had contenders which meant that democratic votes would be depressed. Our campaign announced we would be helping and partnering with all of the state House district candidates in our congressional district because we understood that if we can share organizing power, data, and volunteer bases we can effectively get out the vote in places that had never turned out before. We also realized that if the house races got more Democrats and independents to vote, that we could benefit from a 1-2% point swing from each location for our congressional race. We currently have four out of five house district candidates on board. Florida is up for redistricting this year, so it is more important than ever that we do this now. We hope this will provide a 1% boost in each house district as we are able to turn out more Democratic voters with a potential increase of 4-5% total to our overall race.

b.       We are building a digital infrastructure-- Because of the Pandemic and lockdown, all campaigns had to transition to completely digital platforms. Our campaign is built and run by 33 people all under the age of 26. We were able to quickly overtake all other candidates on social media platforms, build a recording studio for digital content, create a digital town hall series and Livestream platform. This allows us to effectively share our message until the time comes that we are able to door knock and canvas in person. We know this organization coupled with efficient canvassing will provide a 1-2% boost to our efforts.

c.       Promote efforts to register formally disenfranchised voters. There are multiple organizations focused on registering former felons who will be able to vote in the upcoming election. Our positions on prison reform and policing are extremely popular, especially with those who have gone through the system and know that things need a drastic change. We are hoping that this will provide a 1-2% boost.

d.       Phonebank and text bank with Latinx voters. Our district has about a 10% Hispanic population. We are planning phone banking efforts with dual English and Spanish speaking volunteers. We are hoping this will boost our efforts by .5% points.

Most of these efforts have never been implemented in this area of Florida. We think they could be game-changers that will result in us winning this election.

If our math is correct, these factors have allowed us to be able to pull even with our Republican opponents despite their advantage when it comes to fundraising. Judson Sapp will most likely spend the majority of his war chest trying to get out of the primary. Which puts us in a perfect position to outraise him in the final quarter.

To do this, we need EVERYONE. We need every single donor, volunteer, intern, you name it. If there was ever a year to flip North Central Florida, this is the year.