Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz defeated a former congresswoman facing federal fraud charges and a progressive challenger backed by Rep. Rashida Tlaib in a racially charged Florida primary that tested the Squad's power in a deep-blue district.
Wasserman Schultz, a 21-year veteran of the House, won the Democratic nomination in Florida's redrawn 20th Congressional District with 50.5% of the vote, Just The News reported. The Associated Press called the race at 7:24 p.m. Eastern with 67% of ballots counted. She beat former Rep. Sheila Cherfilus-McCormick, 27-year-old activist and teacher Elijah Manley, former Broward County Mayor Dale Holness, and longtime community activist Luther "Uncle Luke" Campbell.
The result is a stinging loss for the Democratic Party's progressive wing, which poured energy into unseating an establishment incumbent in a majority-Black district, and came up short, in part because the opposition fractured across four Black candidates who never consolidated behind a single challenger.
Cherfilus-McCormick was not just a political rival. She was a candidate under federal indictment. Federal prosecutors say she and unnamed co-defendants stole a $5 million overpayment from a FEMA-funded COVID-19 vaccination contract, laundered the money through multiple accounts, and funneled part of it into illegal contributions to finance her 2021 congressional campaign. She has pleaded not guilty.
Before the primary, Cherfilus-McCormick resigned from Congress in April, ahead of a scheduled expulsion vote. That she mounted a comeback campaign at all, running for the same seat while facing federal charges, speaks to the state of accountability inside a party that talks constantly about "defending democracy."
On the trail, Cherfilus-McCormick accused Wasserman Schultz of "district forum shopping" and framed her candidacy as an erasure of Black political power. AP News reported that Cherfilus-McCormick put it bluntly:
"For her to come in like this is just another Broward seat, it's a complete erasure of our history, our fight for Black access."
Voters weighed that argument, and chose the incumbent anyway. In a district where racial representation carried real weight, a candidate under federal indictment for stealing pandemic relief money could not close the sale.
Manley, the 27-year-old progressive aligned with the Squad, made race the centerpiece of his campaign. At a candidate debate, he drew a sharp line against Wasserman Schultz.
"While the Republicans are trying their hardest to silence Black voices, I don't expect somebody in our own party, a White Democrat, to do the same. We are not going back to a time where there were no Black people in Congress."
Rep. Rashida Tlaib traveled to Fort Lauderdale on August 14, just days before the primary, to appear at a "Chomp the Oligarchy" rally supporting the effort to oust Wasserman Schultz. It was a direct Squad intervention, the kind of high-profile primary challenge that has defined Tlaib's brand in recent years.
But the rally did not deliver. Manley himself acknowledged the fundamental problem with the progressive strategy. As the Washington Examiner reported, he admitted the crowded field undercut his chances:
"I do wish we had consolidated behind one person. But that's very hard to do when you have a lot of candidates running."
Four Black candidates split the anti-Wasserman Schultz vote. The progressive wing knew this was a problem and failed to solve it. That organizational failure, not some hidden strength of the establishment, handed Wasserman Schultz a majority in a district where she was the only white candidate on the ballot.
Florida's 20th Congressional District was not Wasserman Schultz's home turf. Mid-decade redistricting, driven by Republican-led map changes that Breitbart noted reduced five Democratic seats to three statewide, pushed her into FL-20 because it carried a stronger Democratic lean than her original constituency. The Congressional Black Caucus warned it could lose more than a quarter of its 60-plus members nationally due to redistricting.
The district has long been represented by a Black member of Congress, and Wasserman Schultz's decision to run there drew immediate backlash when it became public in May. Opponents framed it as a white establishment Democrat muscling into a seat that belonged to the Black community.
Wasserman Schultz defended her candidacy at a debate by pointing to her 21 years in the House and her experience representing Black and Caribbean communities in her former district. She also described herself as a "staunch supporter" of Israel and voted against measures to cut off military aid, a position that put her squarely at odds with the Squad's ideological wing of the party.
Rep. Randy Fine, a Florida Republican, offered a different read on the opposition. Fine claimed the effort to oust Wasserman Schultz stemmed from the fact that she is Jewish, an accusation that added another volatile layer to an already combustible race.
One of the more revealing details: House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries declined to back Wasserman Schultz during the district dispute. The party's top leader in the House would not publicly support a 21-year incumbent facing a candidate under federal indictment and a 27-year-old activist with Squad backing.
That silence says more about the state of the Democratic caucus than any rally or debate exchange. Jeffries has repeatedly avoided taking clear positions on the ideological battles splitting his party. In this case, he let a veteran member twist in a racially charged primary without a word of support, and she won anyway, without him.
Florida has moved sharply to the right since 2016. Democrats have not sent a senator from the state since 2012. The redrawn maps squeezed the party's already shrinking footprint, and rather than unify behind their strongest general-election candidate, Democrats in FL-20 spent months tearing each other apart over race, representation, and ideology.
Wasserman Schultz survived all of it. She outpolled a fractured field that included a fraud-charged former congresswoman, a Squad-backed progressive, a former county mayor, and a community activist. She did it in a majority-Black district where she was the only white candidate, without the backing of her own party leader, and with Tlaib campaigning against her days before the vote.
The Squad has built a brand on high-profile confrontations and primary challenges. In FL-20, the confrontation arrived, and the voters said no.
When a party cannot beat a candidate it openly tried to remove, the problem is not the candidate. It is the party.