Philip Levine: Miami-Dade Democrats are rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic | Opinion

The Miami-Dade County Democratic Party hit an iceberg in 2022. Such was the scale of the calamity.

The once-unsinkable Democratic stronghold delivered comfortable wins for Republicans Gov. Ron DeSantis and Sen. Marco Rubio, and all three of its congressional seats stayed red. This happened despite a weaker-than-expected showing for Republicans nationally.

State and county Democrats should be scrambling to patch up the hull of their ship ahead of this year’s elections. Instead, they are rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic.

Last month, the Florida Democratic Party State Central Committee held a seven-hour hearing during which it decided to permanently suspend the Miami-Dade party chair.

Regardless of whether this was necessary or not, it doesn’t solve the core problem facing Miami-Dade Democrats, which is that voters aren’t buying what they’re selling.

To fix this, they need to set aside the power struggles and focus on the three Ms: message, messenger and money, in that order.

Politics is a business driven by simple market dynamics. The voter is the customer, the parties and politicians are salespeople, and the message is the product. As in any business, if customers don’t like your product, you have two choices: ignore market signals and go bust, or switch up the product.

Voters simply aren’t buying local Democrats’ soft-on-crime, anti-capitalism, anti-parental involvement, and open-borders message.

Why else would Gov. DeSantis—the antithesis of those positions—win Miami-Dade by the largest margin of any Republican in 40 years?

Many Florida Democrats are hoping that the abortion issue will change their fortunes. But why rely on that exclusively? Voters should not be forced to give up border security and the safety of their streets in exchange for a woman’s right to choose.

Local Democrats need to remember who their customer is. Miami is not Brooklyn or Portland.

It is made up of people who fled countries that are selling what people don’t want—socialism, dangerous streets, and top-down government control. Democrats can’t sell Diet Castro or Maduro Lite here and expect it to work. They need to wake up rather than “woke up” to the issues voters are prioritizing.

Changing the message is the first of the Ms. The second is finding a new messenger—a new salesman. This includes finding a new party chair that understands the challenges ahead. Controversial filmmaker and activist Billy Corben wants to be that leader for Miami-Dade. He is running against State Sen. Shevrin Jones (D-Miami Gardens).

Corben has taken many fair and unfair shots at elected leaders from outside the arena, but now he wants to enter the arena himself. He is bringing with him a message that Dade Democrats must do “the essential soul searching that any functional, rational organization would do in light of the realities on the ground.”

The final of the three Ms is money. Too often, parties and politicians try to prioritize this. They think money will compensate for a lack of appeal with voters, but money isn’t what it used to be.

Thanks to social media and the internet, candidates with better messages but less cash now reach voters for free and defeat far deeper-pocketed rivals.

Here again, market dynamics are at play. Any private equity investor will tell you that all the money in the world can’t prop up a business with a bad product.

First you must fix the product, then you install the right team to sell it. After that, the money takes care of itself.

The internal bickering over the chairmanship is proof that Democrats haven’t learned this lesson.

Following the ouster last month, state party chair Nikki Fried said, “We need our local parties to register voters, recruit candidates and raise money to ensure that we’re competitive in 2024 and beyond.”

That won’t be enough unless they fix their message first. Otherwise, the ship is going down, and the band plays on.

Philip Levine, a cruise industry entrepreneur, is a former two-term mayor of Miami Beach and a one-time Florida Democratic gubernatorial candidate.