Florida Democrats got a new candidate for Senate on Wednesday with the entry of Jennifer Jenkins, a former Brevard County school board member best known for her work pushing back against Moms for Liberty, a conservative activist group.
Jenkins is running in the special election scheduled for this November, hoping to replace Sen. Ashley Moody, R-Fla., who was appointed by Gov. Ron DeSantis to replace former Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., after President Donald Trump tapped the latter to serve as secretary of state.
As it stands, Jenkins is entering a relatively open field. Josh Weil, a Jacksonville Democrat who had previously run for a House seat against Rep. Randy Fine, R-Fla., had staked out a position in the race earlier this year but withdrew in late July, citing health issues.
Aside from service on Brevard County’s school board, Jenkins has managed a PAC called Educated We Stand over the past year. The PAC, which aims to counter the influence of conservative activists on public schools, has had significant success in the roughly year-and-a-half it’s been active. In the 17 school board races the PAC was involved in, 13 of its endorsees won. The PAC was also active in blocking a proposed state amendment last year to make school board elections partisan.
Now, Jenkins is hoping to flip Florida’s Senate seat by running an affordability-focused campaign. In an interview with Salon, Jenkins said that the first step for Florida Democrats, who have watched the state become more and more comfortably Republican in recent elections, is to “be honest about some of the deficits that we’ve had.”
“I think Democrats have been talking to people instead of listening to them for way too long. We’ve walked away from entire communities because we feel like it’s too hard to win them back. So we stopped showing up in places where people are hurting and we don’t connect with them anymore,” Jenkins said.
Jenkins cited her success in Brevard County, where she won in 2020 by 9 points (Trump won the county by 16 points that year), as proof of concept for her brand of politics.
That brand, Jenkins said, combines an active opposition to Republican social and economic policies with a dash of the economic populism that has appealed to progressives and independents in recent elections.
“I am not a sit back, watch it burn and laugh at them after it happens kind of person, because while you’re doing that, you’re impacting so many people’s lives negatively. I’m a mom, and I am someone who spent years pushing back against political extremism. I am no stranger to that, and I expect our politicians and our representatives in Washington to do the exact same thing,” Jenkins said. “We need to protect programs that actually help people, and we need to relentlessly — relentlessly — call out corruption and talk about how we have big donors and special interests that are getting tax cuts while we have working families that are seeing programs that they rely on being slashed.”
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On other issues, Jenkins talks in ways more in line with the mainstream of the party. On the United States’ relationship with Israel, for example, Jenkins said that she had not extensively reviewed Sen. Bernie Sanders’s, I-Vt., resolutions to stop sales of weapons to the country but said that she “probably would not have voted for it.”
In July, Sanders forced a vote on two resolutions aimed at blocking the sale of arms to Israel, one focused on bombs and the other on rifles. In both cases, the majority of the Democratic Senate conference voted in favor of the resolutions.
“I believe that our arms sales should be in accordance with humanitarian and international law. I believe, though, that we also need to recognize that Israel lives in a really dangerous neighborhood,” Jenkins said.
On health care, Jenkins said she supports expanding the Affordable Care Act, Medicare and Medicaid, but stopped short of expressing support for a single-payer health care system or a public option.
“I grew up with a mom who was disabled my entire life. I’ve watched her fight the system and struggle for access to the medication that she needed, access to procedures that she needed, and struggled to go through loopholes,” Jenkins said.
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Jenkins also laid some of the blame for Florida’s rollback of all vaccine mandates at the feet of senators who voted to confirm Robert Kennedy Jr. as health secretary.
“I think the dropping of vaccine mandates was one of the dumbest things I have heard in recent times, and that’s a really difficult thing to say. It is irresponsible and it is dangerous. You know, is a political talking point that is just gambling with the lives of our children and the lives of our community,” Jenkins said. “You know, DeSantis and his administration are bragging about being the ‘Free State of Florida,’ but I say that there’s nothing free about burying a child for a very preventable disease.”
In the campaign ahead, Jenkins indicated that she planned to leverage Moody’s support for the state’s unpopular decision to drop school vaccine mandates as a wedge issue. One poll from the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health found that 79% of Americans support routine childhood vaccine requirements.
Jenkins noted that because of GOP policies, many “will not have the choice to be able to vaccinate their children, because it may not be accessible in their local pharmacies, and it may not be accessible to them because of cost.”
“Ashley Moody,” she added, “has planted her flag in the sand that she agrees with this decision.”
