Former Vice President Joe Biden, center, meets Florida Democratic gubernatorial candidate Andrew Gillum, left, and U.S. Sen. Bill Nelson, D-Fla., during a campaign rally for Gillum and Nelson. Monday, Oct. 22, 2018, at the University of South Florida in Tampa, Fla. (AP Photo/Chris O’Meara)
Despite polling’s idiot savant Nate Silver declaring that Andrew Gillum had a “7 in 9” chance of winning and that it wouldn’t be close
screen grab from https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/2018-midterm-election-forecast/governor/#deluxe
in the end, Ron DeSantis withstood a maelstrom of media assault on him to eek out a narrow win last night.
Democrat Andrew Gillum has conceded the Florida gubernatorial race to Republican Ron DeSantis.
Gillum announced his concession in a speech from his campaign headquarters in Tallahassee, telling the crowd, “Even though I won’t be the next governor of Florida, I still plan to be on the front lines.”
“We still have to be willing to show up every single day and demand our seat at the table. I still believe and I still trust in the voters. I still believe that there is more of us that believe in what is common and what is decent,” Gillum said.
Shortly after Gillum began making his concession speech, NBC News declared DeSantis the apparent winner in the race.
With 99 percent of the state’s vote tallied, DeSantis, a former Republican member of Congress from Florida, had 49.9 percent, while Gillum had 48.9 percent.
No matter DeSantis’s virtues or flaws, Florida dodged a bullet last night. Andrew Gillum is a deeply unprincipled and corrupt individual who, according to media reports, seems to be at the center of an FBI public corruption investigation. We know he accepted expensive tickets and sumptuous meals from an FBI agent who was posing as a corrupt developer. We know he dipped into government funds to fund a political trip for Gillum. Not only was Gillum ethically malleable, he seemed intent of stoking racial grievances as a way of gathering votes. In short, Gillum represented the worst of machine and partisan politics his one saving grace may have been his decision to concede rather than go to a recount. To paraphrase Malcolm’s verdict on the execution of the treasonous Cawdor (MacBeth, Act 1, Scene 4), nothing so became him in this campaign as the leaving of it.
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