Hundreds of supporters of presidential candidate Kamala Harris turned out this weekend to rally for Harris’s campaign at the Villages retirement community in central Florida – a traditionally conservative stronghold.
In videos posted online, hundreds of golf carts, decorated with “Harris for President” posters and American flags, can be seen flooding a parking lot in the retirement community and driving around the area.
The event, organized primarily by the Sumter county Democratic party, garnered more than 500 decorated golf carts, the Villages’ Democratic Club wrote on its website. The video of the event, posted on YouTube by the Villages Democratic Club, has garnered almost 400,000 views since the weekend.
“Let’s give it all we’ve got for the next 100 days,” the Villages’ Democratic Club wrote on the website.
The Villages – which is a 55-plus community that had a population of about 79,000 in 2020, of which 97.4% were white according to census data – has not voted for a Democratic candidate since 2000, according to Vanity Fair.
State voting records show that in 2020, Sumter county, one of the three counties that incorporates the Villages, voted 67.7% in favor of Donald Trump. And in 2016, Trump carried the three counties that the Villages incorporate by more than 115,000 votes. In 2020, registered Republicans outnumbered Democrats by a margin of more than two to one.
Dennis Foley, the vice-president of the Villages Democratic Club, told the Washington Post that Saturday’s rally for Harris likely marked the largest golf caravan in the district for a Democratic candidate in nearly a decade.
Foley added that there was a mix of enthusiasm for Harris as well as a “sense of significance to this election and that there’s a lot at stake” among the supporters on Saturday.
“The combination,” he said, “has boosted everyone that was a little bit depressed.”
The Florida Democratic party announced on Sunday that nearly 10,000 new Florida volunteers had signed up to help the Harris campaign last week, with many from “traditionally conservative places like the Villages”.
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“We’re going to get out the vote from Pensacola to Key West and prove to the critics and the trolls that Democrats are alive and well in Florida – and our state is worth fighting for,” said Nikki Fried, the chair of the Florida Democratic party, in a statement.
In response to the rally on Saturday, Ron DeSantis, Florida’s Republican governor, minimized the turnout and enthusiasm, saying on X that the several hundred golf carts were just a “small fraction of the golf carts that descend on the various Villages courses for ‘dew sweeper’ tee times every morning”.
Since Saturday’s parade for Harris, the Villages Maga Club has organized its own golf cart rally scheduled for 3 August in support of the Trump-Vance campaign, according to its Facebook page.
Source: US Politics - theguardian.com
