FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. — Sheila Cherfilus-McCormick was elected Tuesday as South Florida’s — and the nation’s — newest member of Congress.
Cherfilus-McCormick held an insurmountable lead Tuesday evening over the other four candidates in the special election in the Broward-Palm Beach County 20th Congressional District. She’ll fill the vacancy created by the April 6 death of U.S. Rep. Alcee Hastings.
As soon as results from mail ballots and in person early voting were posted just after polls closed at 7 p.m., Cherfilus-McCormick had a commanding lead. The Associated Press declared her the winner at 7:09 p.m.
She declared soon after. “I am so excited and humbled,” she said, later smiling and telling reporters that the margin — 78% at 8 p.m. — was gratifying. “The people have spoken and the people have spoken very loudly.”
Cherfilus-McCormick is flying to Washington, D.C, on Wednesday. She hopes to be sworn in at 9 a.m. Thursday, something she said depends on the Florida secretary of state quickly validating the results
Cherfilus-McCormick’s election wasn’t in doubt — at least since November, when she won a fiercely competitive special Democratic primary election, besting a field that included six current or former elected officials who collectively had had been elected to office 26 times.
With her victory in Tuesday’s special general election, Cherfilus-McCormick makes history. She becomes the first Haitian-American Democrat elected to Congress. The 20th District, which stretches from Miramar in southwest Broward to Riviera Beach in northeastern Palm Beach County, includes most of the African-American and Caribbean-American communities in the two counties.
The other candidates — Republican Jason Mariner, Libertarian Mike ter Maat and two no party affiliation/independent candidates, Jim Flynn and Leonard Serratore — are all white men.
During the campaign Mariner and ter Maat rejected the suggestion that they couldn’t adequately represent residents of the district, in which 53% of the residents are Black and 27% Hispanic.
All four were running significantly behind Cherfilus-McCormick on Tuesday night.
Barry Roeder, 78, a retired federal law enforcement officer who lives in Tamarac, voted for Cherfilus-McCormick. “She represented the same things Alcee Hastings represented and I thought that she would continue with his policies,” he said.
The special election attracted relatively little public interest. Many polling places were devoid of voters for much of the day. Most people who participated did so via mail ballots.
At 6:30 p.m. Tuesday, county supervisor of elections offices reported turnout of 11.4% in Broward and 11.9% in Palm Beach County. More than seven out of 10 votes cast by that time were mail ballots. About three-quarters of the rest were votes cast on Tuesday and about a quarter were cast during nine days of in-person early voting.
Progressive
Cherfilus-McCormick heads to a largely politically polarized Washington, D.C., ready to vote for President Joe Biden’s Build Back Better plan, which is stalled.
She is a champion of progressive priorities, including Medicare for All and a Green New Deal and supports increasing the minimum wage, federal action to protect voting rights, comprehensive immigration reform, and an end to what many see as discriminatory treatment by the U.S. government toward Haitian immigrants.
Her signature issue, the “People’s Prosperity Plan” calls for $1,000 a month federal grants for all adults earning less than $75,000 a year.
The other candidates skewered the proposal as unaffordable and said it would never become law. Mariner said it was an attempt to bribe voters, and if it somehow were enacted would “decimate and kill the job market.”
Nicholas Marchand, a self-employed landscaper who lives in Fort Lauderdale, agreed, and voted for Mariner.
“I was actually voting against Sheila because I don’t agree with that $1,000 business,” he said. “I just thought that was completely irresponsible for her to put that out in the public. It just makes people not want to work. I mean, why bother?”
Roeder, the Tamarac resident who voted for Cherfilus-McCormick, said he didn’t support Cherfilus-McCormick’s plan. “People become dependent upon that; it makes people probably reluctant to work as necessary,” he said, adding it would prove “very inflationary and it is just not a really good idea.”
During the campaign, Cherfilus-McCormick countered critics, arguing it was “very much possible.” She pointed to similar universal basic income initiatives some cities have implemented and the federal child tax credit as steps in that direction.
Mariner described himself as an “America First” conservative. He is also a supporter of former President Donald Trump who espoused some of Trump’s false claims that fraud was the reason he lost the 2020 presidential race.
That didn’t prove a winning formula in a district in which only about one in eight registered voters is a Republican. Trump received just 22% of the vote in the 2020 election.
New congresswoman
Cherfilus-McCormick, 41, has never before held elected office. She is a lawyer and chief executive of her family’s Trinity Healthcare Services, a home health care company.
She set her sights on the congressional seat years ago, challenging Hastings in the 2018 and 2020 Democratic primaries. Though she didn’t win, the experience running and connections she established helped her win the Democratic nomination.
Cherfilus-McCormick also spent heavily, allowing her to introduce herself and her policies in TV ads during the primary and enabled to her to create a large field operation with offices and staffers knocking on doors throughout the district.
As of Dec. 22, she had spent $2.7 million, 95% of which came through loans the candidate made to her campaign. She reported raising about $135,000 in contributions. Most of her spending was during the primary campaign.
By contrast, Mariner reported raising about $105,000 and spending about $81,000 for the primary and the general election through Dec. 22.
Cherfilus-McCormick describes herself as a “daughter of the district.” Born in New York City, she spent her pre-teen years in Brooklyn, then Queens, before moving to Miramar. “To me it was like a different world,” she said in a November interview. “When I came to Florida, it was peace.”
In a written questionnaire, Cherfilus-McCormick said that before her marriage she was a single parent for 12 years, raising a daughter with a learning disability.
“The medical debt coupled with my student loan debt made me feel like I was being cemented into poverty. I suffered in silence for years, while I watched my daughter’s self-esteem plummet,” she wrote. When a friend had difficulty affording the care her daughter needed, Cherfilus-McCormick said she “turned from a voter into an advocate.”
Long vacancy
By the time Cherfilus-McCormick starts work, the district will have gone without representation for more than nine months.
Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis, who has the authority to set the dates of special elections, delayed the special election far longer than any other governor in the last two decades.
As a result, one less Democratic vote in the House has made it harder for House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to pass her party’s agenda.
Another campaign looms
Now that she’s won, Cherfilus-McCormick must begin her next campaign right away.
Former Broward County Commissioner Dale Holness, who lost the Nov. 2 special Democratic primary to McCormick by five votes, has already filed paperwork to run in the August 2022 primary for the Democratic nomination for a full term.
The third-place finisher in the special primary, former Broward Commissioner Barbara Sharief, may also run again.
There’s one other significant factor: No one knows the configuration of the district for the next election.
During the annual state legislative session that started Tuesday, lawmakers are redrawing boundaries of all congressional districts to reflect population shifts uncovered in the 2020 Census. The new district could look far different from the one Cherfilus-McCormick will represent for until January 2023.
Voting glitch
A voting glitch affected a relatively small number of ballots at two Broward precincts.
Two types of elections were taking place Tuesday. The congressional election and a state House of Representatives contest were open to all voters. A state Senate primary was held only for Democrats.
At Martin Luther King Elementary and Delevoe Park, a total of 31 voters didn’t get ballots with all the contests they should have, Supervisor of Elections Joe Scott said. He said workers at both precincts didn’t open both boxes and didn’t realize they didn’t have both correct styles of ballots.
---------
(Sun Sentinel staff reporter Angie DiMichele contributed to this report.)
---------
