Published on December 2, 2024 at 12:53 pm
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The election is a month behind us now, and the landscape in Tallahassee and Washington is less forgiving for the Jacksonville mayor than her supporters might have hoped.
Democrats were wiped out statewide, with Donald Trump and Rick Scott scoring massive victories. And Trump’s victory means that Donna Deegan doesn’t have access to the White House after January 20, 2025, in the same way she does when Joe Biden and Kamala Harris are running the show.
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Deegan didn’t do much for the Harris campaign, which is a measure of the dysfunction at the heart of that billion dollar effort. As Florida Politics reported after the election, a campaign leadership void in the state emerged amid what turned out to be a bad decision to focus exclusively on the seven swing states that Harris ended up losing.
Whatever the reasons for Harris’ loss, the ink has long since dried on the scorecard. And Jacksonville stands to be a big loser after the election.
That is, unless Deegan can recalibrate from being a Democratic partisan for the next election cycle and find ways to build bridges to Republican leaders that she hasn’t prioritized since she took office 16 months ago.
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There are things she likely won’t do, of course.
You’ll never see her at press conferences with Gov. Ron DeSantis the way former Mayor Alvin Brown (also a Democrat) was alongside then-Gov. Rick Scott, a Republican. That was a different time in our political discourse, and Scott kept his remarks on topic, only deviating from official business during gaggles at the end. In contrast, DeSantis routinely tries to land commentary about national news during his formal remarks, which would create awkward optics for Deegan if she were on stage with him.
But beyond the performance art of press conferences, there are back channel relationships she should cultivate, particularly with Republicans who are well-positioned in the Senate and House.
In the House, there’s Speaker Pro Tempore Wyman Duggan, who chairs the Ways & Means Committee. And there’s Speaker-designate Sam Garrison.
And in the Senate, Jennifer Bradley of Clay County and Clay Yarborough of Jacksonville are both committee chairs.
Yarborough is especially keen on bringing infrastructure money back to Jacksonville, he told me last month.
“I would hate for yet another year to go by, if there’s a neighborhood being flooded, for example, and they could benefit from a drainage rehabilitation project or, you know, something in another part of the city, if it’s a road project that is really needed as part of a state road improvement or something like that, then we need to focus on that,” Yarborough said.
It would be advisable for Deegan to hold well-publicized meetings with key legislators in the hopes of programming help from Tallahassee if at all possible. These would help fulfill the promise that this mayor made to be a chief executive for the entire city and would also come off as a good-faith recognition of a tougher political reality than some might have wanted in City Hall.
While state Sen. Randy Fine vowed that Jacksonville wouldn’t get Tallahassee’s support after Deegan compared President-elect Trump’s deportation plans to “concentration camps,” one positive for the mayor is that the Brevard County firebrand is Trump’s pick to succeed Rep. Mike Waltz in Congressional District 6. This will divide his focus, creating a window for detente.
It may be tougher for Deegan to credibly build a bridge to the incoming administration in Washington. But the effort should be made nonetheless, whether directly or through elected leaders like U.S. Sen. Rick Scott, Reps. Aaron Bean and John Rutherford, and whoever Gov. DeSantis picks to replace Marco Rubio in the Senate.
There are ways for even committed partisans to build bridges. Even former Florida Republican Chairman Lenny Curry hosted Vice President Harris in the first days of the Biden administration, spotlighting his local pandemic response.
Deegan could take a page from this book, pledging to work with people for the greater good despite philosophical disagreements on other issues. Only the most diehard Democrats would say that was a bad idea. And there aren’t enough of those to win reelection for this mayor.
Campaign rhetoric is properly understood as a literary device, and its expiration date has already passed. December offers a chance to build relationships that the mayor might not have wanted but that the city needs.
