The votes are in. Florida’s 20th, the seat Black history built, and the night it slipped away.
Part one of two. This is the reckoning. The companion piece, “How the Seat Was Lost,” includes the full numbers, the candidate-by-candidate breakdown, and the mechanics of Debbie Wasserman-Schultz’s win. Fairness note: Sheila Cherfilus-McCormick is indicted, not convicted, and denies the charges.
“There is no stealing in an election when folks basically gave it away.” Something I found myself typing in a comment thread the night the returns came in.
On the night of August 18, 2026, the seat Alcee Hastings had held for 15 terms passed to Debbie Wasserman Schultz, an 11-term white congresswoman, in a district drawn so that Black voters in Broward and Palm Beach could finally elect one of their own. She won with about 45 percent, while four Black candidates, Sheila Cherfilus-McCormick, Dale Holness, Elijah Manley, and Luther Campbell, split the majority of a Black-majority district four ways.
I wrote a piece a month ago that ended on a prayer that the people who said they missed Hastings most would consolidate rather than scatter. They scattered. So I owe you the harder piece now, the one that tells the truth about how a community loses a seat it built, and refuses the comfort of pretending it was only done to us.
First, the man, because you cannot measure the loss without him
Alcee Lamar Hastings came up as a civil rights lawyer, became the first Black federal judge in Florida history under Jimmy Carter in 1979, was acquitted by a jury in 1983 of the bribery conspiracy the government accused him of, and was impeached and removed from the bench by Congress anyway in 1989, which pointedly declined to bar him from future office. Three years after Washington cast him out, his own people sent him to Congress, where he stayed from 1992 until his death in April 2021. Acquitted in court, exiled from the bench, and returned to power by his community. That arc is why people in this district do not say his name lightly.
He arrived in a class that broke the silence. In 1992, the same year Hurricane Andrew tore the roofs off South Dade, Hastings, Carrie Meek and Corrine Brown became the first Black Floridians elected to the House since Josiah Walls was forced from his seat in 1876, a silence of 116 years. They did not keep the seats warm. Meek talked her way onto Appropriations and brought home roughly $100 million for Andrew recovery. Hastings rose to vice chair of the Rules Committee, a hand on the throttle of the whole House, and became the first Black American to chair the Helsinki Commission. Whoever inherits a seat like that inherits a standard, the expectation that the person in the chair delivers for a community that waited a century to have anyone in the room at all.
The two stories the community is telling
Since the returns came in, my people have been arguing about what happened, and the argument has hardened into two stories. I have been in the middle of it, so let me lay both out honestly, because the discipline of this work is that you state the other side at full strength before you answer it.
The first story is theft. In this telling, what happened to the 20th was a hostile takeover, the same forces that have spent years thinning Black political power, taking a Black seat, and there is real evidence behind it. Elijah Manley called it a hostile takeover on television and, after the result, a carpetbagger move “no different than the Republicans that are eviscerating Black representation across the South.” Dale Holness called Wasserman Schultz’s entry “a slap in the face.” Ten of the fifteen elected members of the Florida DNC signed a warning that a white candidate here reinforces the message that Black representation does not matter. And the structural backdrop is real: DeSantis spent this cycle redrawing Florida’s map; Wasserman Schultz is only in the 20th because her own seat was redrawn against her, so she moved into the safe Black district rather than fight a hard one. The ground was made hostile from the outside. That is true, and anyone who denies it is not being honest.
The second story is surrender. In this telling, nobody stole what was handed to them. Four Black candidates, all capable, all warned, refused to get out of each other’s way. Rudy Moise, the Haitian American physician, actually stepped out of the race to keep the field from splitting further, and the others did not follow. The people who spent the summer sounding the alarm about a divided field then went out and divided it.
Which story do the numbers back? Both, but not equally, and the full arithmetic is in the companion breakdown. The story of the theft correctly names the battlefield. But it cannot explain the loss, because the votes that beat the Black field were not stolen from it. They were never gathered into one place. A district that is close to half Black, in a plurality primary with no runoff, does not lose its seat to a newcomer unless its own vote is scattered across four names. The battlefield was rigged, and we still walked onto it in four directions.
I am from this community, and I know this history because I have done the work in it, so let me say the thing plainly, with no coded language. I am not all-black-everything to the point that I cannot see my own hand in this. They did not take something Black. Black candidates gave it up because not one of the four would opt out for the good of the whole. You do not get to spend a summer warning about a divided field and then be the division. I love my people too much to lie to them about this. The maps made the room hostile. We are the ones who walked in scattered. And a people that cannot name its own missteps forfeits the standing to name anybody else’s.
What Wasserman Schultz actually has, in fairness
I am not going to pretend her case is empty, because it is not, and a piece that tells only half the story has not earned your trust for the other half. She is the most senior Democrat in the Florida delegation, a senior appropriator, and she can credibly say she will sit near the leadership if Democrats take the House. She calls Hastings a mentor, and that bond was real; they co-sponsored legislation, and there is a cancer-screening program with both their fingerprints on it. She did not create her own predicament. Her seat was redrawn against her, and she made the coldly rational move any incumbent makes, toward the safest available ground. That the safest available ground happened to be the last stronghold of Black political power in her region is the tragedy, and it is not one she invented. She played the game exactly as it was designed. The game is the problem, and so is a Black field that made her path this easy.
What it locks in
If Wasserman Schultz wins the general, which in the most Democratic district in Florida is close to a formality, then the Hastings seat, one of only two majority-Black congressional districts left in this state, will be represented by someone from outside the community it was drawn to empower. Florida’s Black congressional representation drops toward a modern low. Not because a general electorate rejected a Black candidate. Because a primary electorate in a Black-majority district divided its own vote four ways in a contest with no runoff. The full mechanics of that, precinct by precinct and candidate by candidate, are in the companion piece.
And here is the part nobody in the winner’s circle wants to sit with. This is not permanent. The seat is up again in two years, and 2028 comes fast. If this loss teaches consolidation, then next time the community picks a candidate before the ballot rather than after the autopsy, the seat comes home. If it does not, we will be right back here, writing this same piece with a different name at the top of the returns.
I miss Al Hastings. I miss the certainty of him, the sense that the seat was ours and the man in it answered to us and not to them. But the hard truth he would have told us himself is that the certainty was never automatic. It was built, brick by brick, out of a hundred and sixteen years of silence and the fight to break it, and anything that is built can be lost, and it can be lost from the inside. We did not lose this seat because our enemies were strong, though they were. We lost it because we wouldn’t stand still. So I will not end on grief, because grief without a lesson is just self-pity. I will end on the only question that decides whether 2028 is a redemption or a rerun. The maps we cannot fully control. The money we cannot match. But the discipline to close ranks behind one of our own before the polls open, that has always been ours to give or to squander. So which will it be? Because the throne is not gone. It is on loan.
Read the companion piece, “How the Seat Was Lost,” for the full vote breakdown, the candidate-by-candidate numbers, how Wasserman Schultz won a majority-Black seat, and the CD-24 contrast.
Sources:
- Debbie Wasserman Schultz wins CD 20 as Black vote splits, Florida Politics: https://floridapolitics.com/archives/815386-debbie-wasserman-schultz-wins-cd-20-democratic-primary-as-black-vote-splits/
- Wasserman Schultz wins amid outcry over Black representation, WLRN: https://www.wlrn.org/government-politics/2026-08-18/wasserman-schultz-wins-fla-s-20th-district-amid-outcry-over-black-representation-in-south-florida.
- Debbie Wasserman Schultz wins Democratic primary for FL Congressional District 20, CBS Miami: https://www.cbsnews.com/miami/news/2026-florida-primary-district-20-democratic-debbie-wasserman-schultz/
- Florida’s 20th Congressional District election, 2026, Ballotpedia: https://ballotpedia.org/Florida’s_20th_Congressional_District_election,_2026
Denzel D. Burnside III is a Miami-Dade native, a minister, and a former organizer and campaign manager. He is the founder and executive director of the North Carolina Housing Table, a statewide housing coalition, where he works on housing and transportation policy.
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