I recently joined the 30 percent of Florida voters who declare themselves independents. I did it for the same reasons as most ex-partisan voters: I had reached my limit. I was sick and tired of inter-party political hypocrisy and deceptive leadership. Unlike many independents, though, I witnessed the partisan rot from the inside. For over a decade, I was a Democratic Party activist.
Last year, I was the party’s nominee for an open seat in the Florida Legislature in a historically Republican district. My party wrote my race off and didn’t invest a dime in my election. No Democrat had come close to winning the seat in a generation. I lost by just 290 votes, less than half of 1 percent of the total votes cast.
I challenged the political “wisdom” of my party by focusing my outreach on homes with an independent non-party voter. Open primaries were at the top of my platform. I saw them as a way of being more inclusive and reducing the horrific partisan divide in our state.