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Yet her opponent, incumbent Republican Sen. Mario Rubio, has repeatedly attacked her record. His first TV ad in July, featured uniformed law enforcement officials saying Demings may have once been a cop but had turned “her back on law enforcement” and had “called abolishing the police ‘thoughtful’.” (PolitiFact found that the ad took Demings “out of context — undermining her background in law enforcement.”)
Most of Florida’s law enforcement organizations, including Demings’s former union, are supporting Rubio in Demings’s uphill battle to take over his Senate seat. Polls show Rubio comfortably ahead of Demings by as much as 10 points even as she attempts to distance herself from national Democratic policies unpopular in the Sunshine State.
To brandish her law enforcement bona fides, her campaign often refers to her as “Chief Demings” and has repeatedly said she does not support efforts to defund the police. The campaign declined to make Demings available for an interview, but communications director Christian Slater said her record of supporting law enforcement was unassailable, including sponsoring legislation in Congress to increase, not decrease, spending on law enforcement.
“When we talk to communities, particularly those in some of the most high crime areas, they will say we don’t want to defund the police, we want to fund the police. We don’t want to see less police, we want to see more police,” Demings said at a news conference earlier this year. “We need to make sure that police departments have the resources that they need to be able to effectively do their job.”
But Demings has been forced to spend millions in television advertising touting her resume.
“In the Senate I’ll protect Florida from bad ideas, like defunding the police. That’s just crazy,” Demings said in her first televised ad. The 30-second spot also highlighted statistics showing that crime had decreased during her tenure as police chief in Orlando and ends with Demings saying that “it’s time to send a cop on the beat to the Senate.”
Florida Democrats say it is Rubio, not Demings, who has a track record of voting against the interests of law enforcement, pointing to his vote against the American Rescue Plan which led to billions of dollars flowing into police departments for bonuses, hiring initiatives and new equipment. Rubio and other Republicans also opposed legislation earlier this year to invest resources in fighting domestic terrorism, they say because of fears conservatives would be unfairly labeled domestic terrorists and investigated for their political beliefs.
The race highlights Republicans’ successful campaign to both hold the advantage on the issue of crime and consolidate the support of law enforcement groups since the racial protests that followed the 2020 police murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis. Across the country, Republican candidates have been tying rising crime rates to policies championed by some Democrats like ending cash bail for low level offenses and increasing accountability for police misconduct — collecting support from many law enforcement groups in the process.
In Wisconsin, where Democrat Mandela Barnes is running to be the state’s first Black senator, Republicans have similarly hammered the candidate as soft on crime. In that race, Barnes supporters derided the attacks as racist “dog whistles” that feed on stereotypes about Black people.
John Kazanjian, president of the Florida Police Benevolent Association, a union that represents over 36,000 officers across the state, said his organization supported many Democrats in the past but that the party had moved too far to the left since the calls for police reform that followed the police killing of Floyd and the subsequent racial justice protests.
“It was after the 2020 riots, when the special interest groups painted the police with a broad brush,” Kazanjian said. “I think the congresswoman just got caught up in it.”
He said his organization would have considered supporting Demings, before her vote for the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act, a police reform bill that targeted misconduct, racial profiling among other frequent complaints about police from communities of color. Included in the bill, which was never voted on in the Senate, was a provision to limit qualified immunity, a legal doctrine that makes it harder to sue police officers in civil court. Last year, Demings told the news website, the 19th, that she didn’t support “totally” eliminating qualified immunity, but that new ways of holding rogue police officers accountable needed to be explored.
“That was her time to shine, she could have came out on behalf of the police and got both sides together and work things out to do some police reform, but she didn’t,” said Kazanjian. “2020 was really hard for us to take. When that happened I met with several Democrats to say, ‘Hey, listen, we’ve supported you in the past, let’s stand together.’ All I heard was crickets. But now they’re breaking down my door trying to get my endorsements.”
More than 50 of the state’s 67 sheriffs have endorsed Rubio, including two Democrats. Sheriffs like Grady Judd of Polk County, who says he still considers Demings a friend, and Sheriff Gordon Smith of Bradford County, who called Demings, “an awesome lady, wife and mother,” say their decision to endorse Rubio came down to what Demings has done in Washington and not her time as an officer in Orlando.
“She definitely forgot where she came from,” said Smith. “Instead of being a leader in her party, she has become a loyal follower, puppet and supporter of the anti-police and anti-American way of life Democratic Party.”
Smith was elected as sheriff of Bradford County as a Democrat in 2008 and 2012 before changing his party registration to run as a Republican ahead of the 2016 election.
“I was once elected as a Democrat, however the party left me and everything the party once stood for behind,” said Smith.
Demings’s struggle is not unique, said Aubrey Jewett, a professor of political science at the University of Central Florida, adding that no mainstream Democrat enjoys much law enforcement support in this political moment.
“She was a rank-in-file police officer who rose through the ranks and became chief, and definitely was considered someone who had the officers’ backs,” Jewett said. “She fought for police her whole career, but party labels and ideology just trump all of that in today’s environment.”
Stanley Jean-Poix says that when he started working as a beat cop with the Miami Police Department in the late 1990s, officers were discouraged from talking politics on the job and expected to stay neutral.
That began to change as the country itself became more polarized after the rise of the tea party and then the ascendancy of Donald Trump to the presidency, says Jean-Poix, who is a sergeant with the Miami police department and the president of the Miami Community Police Benevolent Association, the city’s Black police officer’s organization. He says increasingly his colleagues, particularly White and Latino officers, are vocal about their political beliefs.
“The union always endorsed candidates but now it’s on a different level,” Jean-Poix said. “People weren’t blasting you for supporting this or that candidate.”
Some colleagues even say that they think Rubio understands more about being a cop than Demings, he said.
“So you’re going to tell me this woman, who has been a cop for almost 30 years, a police chief for almost four, her husband was a sheriff for almost 30 years, but they don’t know police work,” said Jean-Poix. “You can’t get more pro-law enforcement than that.”
