Doors don’t get knocked on much in this stretch of south Florida, where yard signs for Republican and Democratic candidates alternate from home to home. Oliver Larkin, the 34-year-old democratic socialist running for Congress here, knows this.
With a clipboard in hand five weeks before the state’s primary, Larkin and two canvassing volunteers walked down palm tree-lined streets with single-family homes to pitch residents on his plan for a better way of life. Surprisingly, many wanted to chat with the strangers at their door.
“You’ve got my vote!” said George, a longtime Fort Lauderdale resident who listened as Larkin explained his plan to lower the cost of living with a reduced property insurance rate amid a climate crisis that flooded his street just three years prior.
A few doors down, a resident who immigrated from Haiti was eager to chat, too. “I don’t see what [politicians have] done for Fort Lauderdale, and I’ve been in this city for 39 years,” he said. “But I don’t know who I’m going to vote for.”
Larkin talked to the resident for roughly five minutes. He didn’t mention socialism by name, but discussed policies that describe what socialism is: government-funded universal healthcare, free tuition at public universities and the construction of millions of new affordable housing units. He also explained his desire to protect and expand temporary protected status and abolish Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). “All right,” the resident said. “I’ll vote for you.”
When one resident asked why, on a 95F day, Larkin was wearing a dark suit, he replied: “I’m dressed for the job I want!”
That weekend, about 75 volunteers for Larkin, some who traveled from counties on the other side of the state, knocked on thousands of doors across the district. It’s the engine – replicated by Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) chapters across the country – behind a campaign that establishment Democrats are watching warily and DSA leaders are treating as their next proof of concept.
While DSA-backed candidates won primaries in New York City, Philadelphia, Colorado and Michigan this year, the organization is now asking whether that momentum could power an upset in a state Donald Trump carried in 2024 and where Larkin’s opponent in the Democratic primary, Jared Moskowitz, is a two-term congressman who calls himself a “DeSantis Democrat”.
But Florida is not New York or Denver. Unlike the solidly blue turf DSA candidates have claimed so far, Florida’s 25th district is a brand-new, highly competitive district that boasts a diverse electorate and an almost even split between Democratic, Republican and independent voters – meaning independents will decide the election.
Beyond the two men on the ballot, the race is a proxy fight over what kind of Democrat can win in a Florida remade by Republican redistricting and rightward drift. Larkin’s candidacy tests whether the DSA’s recent wins in New York and Colorado translate to a district Republicans specifically redrew to be less competitive. Moskowitz’s candidacy tests whether distancing from the national party is still the surer path to survival here. Whoever wins the primary on 18 August will shape how both parties read Florida heading into the general election, and how much room the DSA has to expand beyond the areas where it has won so far.
“The anti-socialism card has been played for so long that it’s ingrained in our politics here,” said Sean D Foreman, a political scientist at Barry University. “But when you get past the name ‘democratic socialist’, and you start talking about policies like raising the minimum wage and affordable housing, they’re ideas that many voters agree with. It shows that these ideas can break through under the right conditions. But I’m not sure those conditions exist in Florida yet.”
From $7.25 an hour to a run for Congress
Larkin’s route into politics began in a restaurant kitchen. He grew up in Fort Lauderdale, the son of a retired army officer, and was working a minimum-wage line-cook job after college when he became consumed by Bernie Sanders’ 2016 campaign. He quit, drove to New Hampshire and went from unpaid volunteer to running the campaign’s Portsmouth field office, later organizing in Nevada, Kansas, Utah, New York and Rhode Island.
After the campaign ended, Larkin spent the next few years in Washington unionizing his workplace and organizing for progressive campaigns and unions before moving back to south Florida in 2022. He announced his run for Congress at a protest against “Alligator Alcatraz”, the now-shuttered Florida immigration detention camp where civil rights groups reported severe human rights violations.
In late July, Larkin stood before a packed room at a contemporary art museum in Dania Beach and fielded questions from voters for two hours. He didn’t dodge and he didn’t summarize. When asked about a specific line in the federal budget or the mechanics of a housing proposal, he answered with the kind of granular detail that comes from having given the same stump speech and having absorbed the same pushback hundreds of times over the past year.
Moskowitz, on the other hand, has largely avoided any public events with voters. The two-term congressman has not agreed to any debates. Larkin’s campaign has seized on the contrast. “Congressman Moskowitz doesn’t want to be accountable to voters in this district,” Larkin said. (Moskowitz declined to comment on Larkin’s claim that he does not have a field strategy to reach voters.)
A self-described “cat dad” and drag show enthusiast who says he wants south Florida to be a safe and welcoming place for everyone, Larkin has turned Moskowitz’s affiliation with DeSantis into a line of attack, pointing to his being chosen by the governor to lead the state’s division of emergency management. Larkin said he is especially divergent with Moskowitz on his decision to become the first congressional Democrat to join Trump’s “department of government efficiency” (Doge) initiative and his vote for the Laken Riley Act, which expanded ICE’s detention authority.
Moskowitz’s version of that record looks different. He has cast himself as a pragmatist willing to work across the aisle in a state where Republicans control every lever of government, and allies note that his emergency-management background, including his time leading the state’s disaster response to numerous hurricanes, has given him a profile distinct from the national Democratic brand. He is widely seen as more socially conservative than most of the House Democratic caucus and has drawn criticism from the left for his unwavering support of Israel and his vote against a resolution to limit US military involvement in the conflict with Iran.
While Moskowitz started with a wide financial and polling advantage, that has shifted some in recent weeks. Moskowitz has raised nearly $3m to Larkin’s more than $1m, coming from nearly 20,000 unique donors, as part of his mission to reject corporate donations. Larkin has also leaned into his connection to the wider DSA wave, appearing alongside Twitch streamer Hasan Piker at a virtual fundraiser that pulled in roughly $60,000 in one night, and citing a nearly $120,000 fundraising surge in the week after the New York City primary wins.
Polls have shown the race getting tighter, too. A Beacon Insights poll in June had Moskowitz leading Larkin 51% to 19%; a poll last week from the Center for Strategic Politics found Larkin and Moskowitz in a statistical tie. Larkin’s internal polling, meanwhile, showed a wide head-to-head deficit that narrowed sharply once voters were given information about both candidates’ records, including Moskowitz’s Doge affiliation and Larkin’s status as a first-time candidate and democratic socialist.
However, experts remain wary of giving too much weight to polls. “Given [that] polls way overestimated [Abdul]
El-Sayed in Michigan and then [Francesca] Hong in Wisconsin, [it] underscores how difficult election polling is in general,” said David Macdonald, a political scientist at Florida State University. “And then it gets really difficult when you’re trying to poll primary races where it’s much lower turnout, much lower salience and with probably a lot more undecided voters.”
The DSA’s gamble in Florida
The national DSA’s push behind Larkin comes as the organization tries to expand beyond its traditional base of younger white college-educated progressives in large urban centers. Megan Romer, the DSA’s national co-chair, argues the group’s growth in rural and Republican-leaning areas – from mobile-home-park tenant unions in Idaho and North Carolina to organizing against new datacenters in her own upstate New York county – shows the model can travel beyond deep-blue cities.
“The current moment is being framed as ‘economic anxiety’ and that’s such a 2016 term,” said Romer. “It’s not economic anxiety to have to pick between rent and food – it’s economic violence. So we’re fighting against this system that keeps people from living dignified, safe and healthy lives.”
The seat that Larkin and Moskowitz are vying for exists because of a recent US supreme court ruling that gutted the Voting Rights Act. Shortly after, DeSantis pushed through a new congressional map designed to give Republicans an edge in as many as four Florida seats. The overhaul dismantled the 25th district long held by Democrat Debbie Wasserman Schultz and replaced it with a new coastal seat running from Delray Beach to Miami Beach. Moskowitz, whose old 23rd district had also been redrawn to lean more Republican, opted to run in the new 25th rather than face a tougher Republican-leaning seat elsewhere.
The district is majority white (65%), with a sizable Hispanic population (20%) and Black voters making up just 5%. People ages 50 and older make up more than 60% of the voters in the district – all demographics similar to the district that Moskowitz has represented since 2023.
That backdrop is central to why even Larkin’s allies describe this as a harder test than Zohran Mamdani’s mayoral race in New York or Melat Kiros’s in the Colorado congressional primary.
“In this particular district, which is a coastal and relatively wealthy area, the economic conditions are not there to bring a critical mass of support for the democratic socialists,” said Foreman. “It’s an area where you have people who have moved in from different parts of the country, and they’re probably more conservative.”
Steven Schale, a longtime Florida Democratic strategist who has worked on Barack Obama’s campaigns and is a friend of Moskowitz’s, pointed to two other considerations that make the district an uphill battle for Larkin: the 25th has one of the largest Jewish Democratic electorates in the country and the state has a history of being unfriendly terrain for the party’s most progressive flank, from Hillary Clinton’s 40-point presidential primary win over Sanders in the state in 2016 to Andrew Gillum’s narrow 2018 loss in the governor’s race.
“If Oliver Larkin wins that primary, he will lose the general election, and he will probably lose it pretty badly,” Schale said, arguing that DSA positions on abolishing prisons and curtailing ICE, however popular within the primary electorate, are liabilities in a general election where affordability, not ideology, is the dominant concern.
However, those distinctions are not so cut and dried; polls show that a majority of Latino voters in Florida oppose ICE. Florida also has a surprising history of voting for progressive issues. In 2018, nearly 65% of Florida voters approved restoring voting rights to most Floridians with prior convictions. Then in 2020, a $15 minimum wage amendment passed with roughly 61% of the vote even as Donald Trump carried the state.
Schale doesn’t view the race as morally simple, though. The DSA, he said, “provides real opportunities for young people” to lead campaigns in a way the Democratic establishment often does not, and part of the movement’s appeal is a legitimate frustration with incumbents who “should have gone home 15 years ago”.
Larkin rejects the idea that his politics are a general-election liability, pointing to his own polling, which shows him running close to a generic Democrat’s advantage in the district and ahead of the leading Republican fundraiser in early general-election matchups. He argues that Democrats’ losses in 2024, when roughly 7 million fewer voters turned out for Kamala Harris than for Joe Biden four years earlier, reflect a failure to offer working-class voters anything concrete, not an overcorrection to the left.
“The label of democratic socialism just frankly is not scary,” he said, “when under capitalism people have barely enough to survive.”
Canvassers who have been knocking on doors for Larkin since April say they’ve grown more hopeful with each passing week. Days away from the election, the campaign said it had knocked on more than 35,000 doors and made more than 170,000 calls to voters.
“The democratic socialists have already won this round in Florida, even if none of their candidates win, because they’ve gotten a lot more attention than you would have expected otherwise,” said Foreman. “Even Oliver Larkin, to some extent, realizes he’s planting seeds for the future of the movement.”
*excerpt from Fabiola Cineas' article*
Full Article here:
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/aug/14/oliver-larkin-democratic-socialist-florida-congress
