Long-shot candidates blast Florida Democrats for absence on primary ballot

Democratic presidential candidates Marianne Williamson and Cenk Uygur blasted the Florida Democratic Party after they were left off the primary presidential ballot. 

The candidates held a joint press conference on Zoom Friday where they addressed their displeasure with the Florida Democratic Party, which has effectively canceled the primary and awarded all delegates to President Joe Biden. 

“This is about all three of us being excluded in a way that was absurd, ridiculous, counterproductive, done, obviously in secret, obviously, to help the incumbent Joe Biden,” Uygur said. “The number one problem with what the Florida Democratic Party is doing is not how it affects me Marianne and Dean [Phillips]. It’s how it affects the Florida Democratic voters. They are robbing them of their voice. They’re saying the democracy is not important, that you should not participate in the process.” 

The public address by the two progressive candidates comes after another candidate in the Democratic primary, Rep. Dean Phillips (D-Minn.), clashed with the state party Thursday. Phillips’ campaign asserted that the Florida Democratic Party’s executive committee voted on Oct. 29 to only include President Biden on the Sunshine State primary presidential ballot. 

“The Florida Democratic Party has stripped the right of every Florida Democrat to vote for the candidate of their choice since the state will not issue a ballot for a party primary with only one candidate,” Phillips’ campaign wrote in a statement. 

His campaign also alleged that the state party delegate selection did not abide by the rules put forward by the Democratic National Committee (DNC). 

Like Phillips and Uygur, Williamson also called out both the state party and the DNC during the Friday conference, saying that “this is the chipping away of our democracy.” 

“What an irony that the party called the Democratic Party, the party that claims to be the champion of democracy, has basically decided that Joe Biden will be the candidate,” Williamson said. “Now this is authoritarianism, just as Cenk said. When I was a child, we were told that in the Soviet Union people could vote, but then were told who their options were. And that’s exactly what’s happening here.” 

The self-help bestselling author also said that the Democratic Party has “no right” to “manipulate” the circumstances and that the Florida statute is “unconstitutional.” 

“I think that the Florida statute itself is unconstitutional giving that kind of power to the party. The party itself as a political committee, it’s not a government agency, but it’s playing a quasi governmental function here, and it has no right to block democracy this way,” Williamson said. “It has a responsibility to the public good.” 

When The Hill reached out to the Florida Democratic Party for comment, the spokesperson pointed to the comment they gave Thursday about Phillips’s outrage with the process. 

“The process to be on the Florida ballot has been publicly available on our website,” the state Democratic Party spokesperson wrote Thursday. “It clearly states that the Florida Democratic Party’s primary ballot is submitted to the Secretary of State by November 30, 2023. This is the standard process.” 

“The State Executive Committee meets to vote to place candidates on the presidential primary ballot at the Florida Democratic Party’s State Convention every four years.” 

Williamson and Uygur will file an “implementation challenge” by December 5 to the DNC, saying, “we will challenge that with whatever injunction that we can legally file.” 

When asked how she got on the Florida ballot in 2020, when she was a presidential candidate for the first time, Williamson said that she participated in the debates, therefore it was hard to argue that she “wasn’t a candidate.” 

“Well, in 2020, I was on the debates on, two Democratic debates,” Williamson said. “So it was very difficult to claim that I wasn’t a candidate in 2020. And to be honest, it’s very difficult to claim that the rest of us aren’t candidates this time. However, they are doing it because they can. And we’re here because we want to make clear that they can’t.”

No Labels, a political organization working on having a third-party presidential candidate by mid-March next year, also reacted, posting on X regarding the news of Phillips being off the ballot.

The group, which is still assessing whether to move forward with the uni-party ticket and how to select it, characterized the development as “undemocratic and unAmerican,” calling out the DNC for “rigging the primary system.”

“It is undemocratic and unAmerican for the Florida Democratic Party to cancel its Democratic primary and keep Democrat Dean Phillips off the ballot,” NoLabels wrote on X. “The DNC party establishment is rigging the primary system to eliminate competition — and this is why a No Labels Unity ticket could be the only way to give American voters the choice they want.”