Debbie Wasserman Schultz Is Still Here

SUNRISE, Florida — Scattered throughout Democratic Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz’s congressional office are artifacts chronicling her decades in public life: There’s a picture of her with her husband and their infant twins posing with former President Bill Clinton. Huddled up with former President Joe Biden on Air Force One. Deep in conversation with Hillary Clinton. On another wall, there’s a cartoon lauding Wasserman Schultz, a breast cancer survivor, as a “tough character” in the company of Wonder Woman and Rosie the Riveter.

Then there are the Eeyores.

On a shelf next to the couch where she’s sitting are figurines of the woebegone, pessimistic stuffed animal from Winnie the Pooh. One holds his tail in his mouth, one does a handstand, another blows out birthday candles. Lounging across the back of the couch are a bevy of Eeyore plushies — one even sports an Old Glory bandana.

“I’m a Democrat,” Wasserman Schultz offers simply as an explanation, adjusting one of the donkeys behind her.

Indeed, in many ways, Wasserman Schultz, 59, is the Democrat’s Democrat. From the time she arrived in Congress in 2005, she quickly ascended to become one of the the party’s most recognizable players, landing on influential committees from the get-go, popping up regularly on the cable news circuit and acting as a key surrogate for President Barack Obama’s reelection campaign. Her star was ascendant: She was the face of the Democratic Party, buzzed about for House leadership, statewide office or a prime White House appointment.

But then came a rather spectacular fall. A decade ago, Wasserman Schultz became one of the most beleaguered figures in the party, pressured to resign as chair of the Democratic National Committee after internal email leaks suggested DNC officials were plotting against Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) in favor of Hillary Clinton in the presidential primary. The fallout was brutal. (“Good fucking riddance,” snarled one DNC official after she stepped down.) In the years after the DNC drama, Wasserman Schultz took a backseat, and quietly worked on rebuilding her political standing and bolstering her Florida bonafides. “I just came home and did the work, did my job in D.C. and then just gradually built back,” she says. Today, she’s once again seen as a power player on the Hill: She fundraises for other Democrats, leads the Florida Democratic delegation’s anti-Trump messaging and holds prime positions on committees that shape the party's priorities and federal spending.

Now, after working her way back into her party’s good graces, she’s facing blowback all over again.

In May, she launched her run for a 12th term. But instead of running in the district where she lives, she announced that she’s running in the neighboring 20th District — a deep-blue seat where she’s the only white candidate in the primary. This was a tactical move: Florida Republicans splintered the seat she currently represents into five pieces during a rare mid-decade redistricting. But many Black Democrats in Florida felt betrayed by her decision — the district, which has a sizable African American and Caribbean American population, has been represented by Black lawmakers for more than 30 years.

It was a controversial move that came at a particularly fraught time for the Democratic Party. Democrats across the U.S. have spent their primary season consumed by an identity crisis — some argue it’s an intraparty civil war — reminiscent of the one that engulfed the party when Wasserman Schultz was forced out as DNC chair. What’s more, Black political representation faces a new threat, thanks to a Supreme Court ruling that effectively gutted the Voting Rights Act and made it harder to challenge congressional maps on racial discrimination grounds. In the wake of that April ruling, GOP lawmakers in statehouses across the South rushed to redraw maps that nixed or weakened majority-minority districts, diminishing the political power of Black voters who’ve long been the backbone of the Democratic party. The Congressional Black Caucus has warned that 19 representatives out of 61 could lose their seats this election cycle.

“It’s a painful situation,” says Democratic Rep. Yvette Clarke of New York, the Congressional Black Caucus chair. “To have a beloved colleague who made a decision basically to run in a district where historically there's been CBC representation, and I know that the community has been really disrupted by it.”

The contest to fill the seat in Broward, the bluest county in Florida, is crowded. Wasserman Schultz’s rivals, all of whom are Black, include former Rep. Sheila Cherfilus-McCormick, who’s facing a criminal trial in which she has pleaded not guilty, and is trying to make a comeback after resigning earlier this year; former Broward County Mayor Dale Holness, whom Cherfilus-McCormick defeated by just five votes in 2021; Elijah Manley, a progressive activist; and community activist Luther “Uncle Luke” Campbell, the rap legend of 2 Live Crew fame. They tried to persuade Wasserman Schultz to run elsewhere, but she refused. Meanwhile, their efforts to get behind a single challenger to help ensure the election of a Black representative collapsed. No one wanted to step aside. Which means that, given her name recognition and more than $3.3 million in fundraising, Wasserman Schultz is considered the frontrunner.

As she sees it, running in this district is a validation of her identity: a Democrat, a public servant and a self-described “Broward girl” who does everything to the nth degree. Her supporters agree. Republicans redrew the maps, they contend, specifically to try to oust her from Congress because she’s so effective. Her critics couldn’t disagree more. Her decision to run in the 20th, they argue, is deeply troubling, and smacks of self-preservation at all costs.

Whatever her motivation, Wasserman Schultz is constantly on the move. She holds more press conferences than the rest of her Florida colleagues, even if few reporters show up, speaking out on everything from affordable housing to how Trump’s tax law reduces food assistance. Despite political threats and violence against elected officials and Jews like her, she stands in public alongside constituents who’ve been detained by ICE, or who’ve lost their health insurance or who struggle to keep small businesses afloat against high gas prices.

“I have found throughout my life that hard work will carry you very far,” she tells POLITICO Magazine, adding: “I only know how to be one way.”

But hard work might not be enough to put the latest controversy behind her. Wasserman Schultz has spent her whole career trying to prove she can overcome anything Republicans — and her own party — throw at her. She appears on the verge of surviving this to win reelection. Still, even if she does win, she’s got a much harder task ahead of her: repairing the relationships that frayed along the way.

Any reporter who’s covered Wasserman Schultz over the years has witnessed her formidable drive, notable even in a House that’s chockablock with the ambitiously driven. In many ways, she’s a grown-up Tracy Flick, constantly striving, rarely stopping to rest.

Facing breast cancer at 41, she chose recess to undergo a double mastectomy so she wouldn’t miss votes, concealing the drainage bags from her surgery in her purse. She doesn't just play on the congressional bipartisan women’s softball team, she’s its co-founder and co-captain. And as her district became more Spanish speaking, she started taking immersion language courses in a remote, rural town in Costa Rica every summer so she could chat up constituents and offer soundbites to Spanish-language TV and radio. She adopted an acronym for her team, she explains, called NOWOWU, which stands for “no one will outwork us.”

Wasserman Schultz traces her drive to the Jewish concept of tikkun olam — the responsibility to help repair the world — and how her parents urged her to “shoot for the top of whatever it is you’re pursuing.”

Growing up in Long Island, New York, Wasserman Schultz originally wanted to be a veterinarian, enrolling in an agricultural and technical college as a high schooler, where she was often found arm-deep inside a cow — the better to learn bovine in-vitro fertilization. But at the University of Florida, those dreams were thwarted when she discovered “chemistry and I didn’t get along.” So she pivoted and dove into student government. Public office enticed. Once again, she locked in, ultimately earning a master’s degree in political science with a focus on campaigning.

But getting started in politics wasn’t without some hiccups. Wasserman Schultz’s political career began with a rejection for a staff position from a state House representative who’s now serving in Congress. “When she was like a kid out of college, she interviewed to work for me. I was a new state legislator,” recalls Democratic Rep. Lois Frankel of Florida. “I turned her down because I said, ‘Well, I don't know what I'm doing — and you don't either.’”

But Frankel says that ended up being the best thing that could have happened to her now-colleague, who instead went to work for then-state Rep. Peter Deutsch of Broward. Deutsch, a Democrat, urged her to literally follow in his footsteps when so many others thought she was too young and should wait her turn. And Broward gave her something else: her husband of 35 years, Steve Schultz, a banker who took an active role in raising their three children.

Wasserman Schultz launched her electoral career at 26, knocking on 25,000 doors in Florida’s summer and sweating off 18 pounds in a successful bid for a state House seat replacing Deutsch. Twelve years later, after also being elected to the state Senate, Wasserman Schultz won Deutsch’s House seat, becoming the first Jewish woman to represent Florida in Congress. As a freshman, she landed on the influential Financial Services and Judiciary committees, and after one term moved onto the powerful Appropriations Committee. There, she held regular hearings about the Capitol Visitor Center, whose construction had run behind schedule and over budget.

Getting that kind of position so early in Congress “just never happened,” says Shalanda Young, a former longtime appropriations staffer who later became acting director of the Office of Management and Budget under Biden. “The world was her oyster,” she continues, “and she just went for it, and she always went for it.”

Adds Broward County Commissioner Steve Geller, a former legislator who views Wasserman Schultz as family but says they have also been “frenemies” at times: “She always wanted to run for Congress. That’s always what she wanted to be.”

By 2011, her place in the political firmament was secured when Obama selected her to lead the DNC, a choice that recognized just how good she was on TV and at fundraising. She was 44 — a relative baby in politics at the time — and widely viewed as a new-generation leader.

But her tenure at the DNC was contentious and spilled out publicly in 2014, with critics accusing her of being focused on her own ambitions at the expense of the party. Things intensified during the 2016 presidential election, when Sanders supporters accused her of tipping the scales for Hillary Clinton — accusations that grew louder when WikiLeaks published thousands of DNC emails. Wasserman Schultz resigned as chair, saying she didn’t want to be a distraction. Sanders supporters heckled her at the convention. But the Democratic establishment also made a point of showing they had her back. Obama “strongly” endorsed her reelection bid; Hillary Clinton and Biden traveled to Florida to rally alongside her for reelection against Tim Canova, a progressive, Sanders-backed candidate who challenged her in the primary. She won by 14 points.

Back then, Wasserman Schultz was considered the face of an establishment Sanders supporters insisted was fixated on protecting its power — and some critics view her current race similarly. Canova, the once-progressive candidate who unsuccessfully challenged Wasserman Schultz after her DNC downfall, and again in 2018 as an independent, argues Democrats have been “stuck in that 2016 moment for 10 years” and have failed to do any soul searching. (Canova’s now a registered Republican who has drawn support from some MAGA circles because of his questions about election integrity in Florida.)

Billionaire trial attorney John Morgan, who made it clear he still holds a grudge against Wasserman Schultz because she didn’t support a medical marijuana amendment he successfully spearheaded, brought up the DNC fiasco unprompted during a recent text exchange when asked to comment on the Democratic Party’s latest fundraising woes and infighting.

“Debbie Wasserman Schultz did a real number on the DNC when she screwed Bernie Sanders,” he says. “The Bernie people have not forgotten.”

Wasserman Schultz stepped into her latest race deeply unwelcome by her new rivals. Even by Florida standards — a state known for juicy storylines and larger-than-life personalities — the primary was already messy. To start, the seat has been empty for months, ever since Cherfilus-McCormick resigned amid a House ethics verdict finding her guilty of stealing federal disaster funds and using them to campaign.

Cherfilus-McCormick, who was the first Haitian American from Florida to be elected to Congress, maintains the accusations are false. But her downfall invited a crowded field: Holness, whose campaign signs across several stretches of the district seem to outnumber those of others running; Manley, who flew to Washington to sit behind Cherfilus-McCormick during her ethics trial; and Campbell, who’s embracing his outsider status as “the Donald Trump of this shit.”

The contest is unfolding against a backdrop of shrinking political opportunities for Black Democrats in Florida. Republicans in Tallahassee chipped away at voting rights and banned diversity, equity and inclusion policies in schools, workplaces and local governments. In 2018, Florida came within about 32,000 votes of electing Democrat Andrew Gillum as its first Black governor. Today, the person who appears poised to hold that title — Trump-endorsed Rep. Byron Donalds — is a Republican.

Backlash ensued even before Wasserman Schultz announced her decision, given she didn’t deny in interviews that she was mulling a switch. Campbell warned he’d “drag her” and said her decision would decimate Black and Jewish relations. (Wasserman Schultz was a founding member of the Congressional Caucus on Black-Jewish Relations.) “Alcee Hastings would be rolling over in his fucking grave,” Campbell said of the seat’s former longtime officeholder, who died in 2021 and whom Wasserman Schultz called a mentor.

Holness tried to persuade Wasserman Schultz to run in the district where she lived given her name ID and campaign war chest. He provided her with data demonstrating Biden won the reconfigured district narrowly in 2020. He also found that, while Trump won it by double digits in 2024, a ballot measure on abortion rights performed well among voters there. Given that, he argued, she could help Democrats get one step closer to flipping the House if she stayed put, especially considering her record on reproductive rights. But on the third try, he says, she told him she’d made her decision: “It’s not personal.”

“The biggest disappointment for me, and what makes me most upset, is she was positioned to win that seat better than anyone else in South Florida,” Holness says in an interview, “and she gave up that fight for expediency to take something away from a community that has been most loyal to the Democratic Party.”

The rest of the world found out Wasserman Schultz’s decision through her video announcementon social media. Posing against the backdrop of an Obama poster and an American flag, Wasserman Schultz made her pitch all about her ability to deliver, and how important it was to maintain Broward’s clout as Democrats’ epicenter in Florida.

“Some people do a lot of talking. I work hard to deliver results,” she said, putting her hand on her chest. “We can do this together.”

The announcement featured numerous influential Broward County voices of all races backing her, with community activist Dr. Sajan Kurian making the closing argument: “I’m telling you folks, get her elected. We do not want to lose Debbie Wasserman Schultz.”

But her critics felt like she was missing the point. While Florida’s 20th District has been redrawn and renumbered several times, it traces its roots to a majority-Black district created under the Voting Rights Act, to help ensure Black voters could elect a candidate of their choice.

“As a Black person who knows: We are not usually the first one hired, and we usually have to have twice as much experience to get the job,” Holness says. Of Wasserman Schultz’s focus on experience, he adds, “When you hear that it’s like saying, ‘You will never be good enough because I was here first.’” Manley, for his part, says he doesn’t buy the experience argument because it could apply just as easily to the district where she lives, where people are now “going to be forced to live under a Republican.”

On the day she announced her decision, Wasserman Schultz defended her move in an interview with POLITICO, saying she sought input from more than 100 community and faith leaders in Broward County, many of them “African American or Caribbean American.” She said they told her they wanted someone with seniority, clout and experience to go up against an “out of control” president.

“It’s clear that people know how important it is to not start over with a beginner,” Wasserman Schultz said at the time. “We have to make sure we’re putting the strongest fighter on the field.” She also stressed how connected she felt to Broward, which is where her hometown of Weston is, and how she has already represented most cities in the district throughout her career in elected office.

Wasserman Schultz’s rivals for the seat were far from the only ones to disagree with her choice. Democratic Party Chair Nikki Fried told Miami Herald reporters she was “disappointed” in what she called Wasserman Schultz’s unwillingness to engage in “meaningful dialogue.” Armando Grundy-Gomes, president of the Florida Democratic Black Caucus, points to a press release from its Broward chapter that “made it crystal clear we're not interested in ceding any more Black political representation.”

“We plan to support anybody and everybody but her,” he says. “So we want to keep this a Black seat. … We want to proverbially kick her ass in this race.”

Outgoing Democratic Rep. Frederica Wilson, who shared a townhouse with Wasserman Schultz when they were in the Legislature, published a letter to the Miami Times laying out the racial history of the district and saying it was “paid for by generations of Black sacrifice.”

“If Black lives matter,” she wrote, “then the history of Black representation matters too.”

At a June candidate forum, the resentment Wasserman Schultz’s Black rivals feel is hard to miss. At one point, Manley rolls his eyes when she responds to a policy question by saying — not for the first time — “I can tell you what I have already done.”

“We need someone who will dig their heels in and fight and not run to an easier district,” Cherfilus-McCormick says, without naming names. “Because you know what … ain't nothing easy here. We fight every single day.”

Adds Manley, “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.”

Wasserman Schultz holds her ground, at one point leaping to her feet to clap back at the accusation from Manley that she accepted “hundreds of thousands of dollars” from the fossil fuel industry, a claim unsupported by campaign finance reports.

“I have not taken fossil fuel funding,” she says. “That is incorrect.”

Her supporters applaud.

On the Hill, there’s hardly consensus about Wasserman Schultz’s decision to switch districts. Those who defend it blame Republicans, saying their goal was to divide the party to do everything they could to retain the House majority. Rep. Steny Hoyer of Maryland, the former No. 2 House Democrat, acknowledged the race was “controversial” but wants Wasserman Schultz reelected, calling her “Florida's probably most valuable member” who’s been a “fighter for civil rights.”

He isn’t wrong about her record. Wasserman Schultz was among few Congress members outside the Congressional Black Caucus to have a longtime Black chief of staff. Democratic Rep. Marilyn Strickland of Washington said she’d always joined her in fighting for voting rights, addressing Black maternal mortality, funding Historically Black Colleges and Universities and speaking out against the Trump administration’s anti-DEI efforts. Strickland also says Wasserman Schultz reached out to her during her first campaign in 2020, the year of the pandemic, to get to know her better. She then helped her fundraise and showed her the ropes when she got to the Hill.

Democratic Rep. Emanuel Cleaver of Missouri, a past chair of the Congressional Black Caucus who has been friends with Wasserman Schultz for 20 years, campaigned with her in the district. “She's in a little tough situation,” he says. “I want to be there. She's been there for me when things were uncomfortable.” Cleaver also pointed to her record fighting for issues that matter to Black voters: “She doesn't have to go out and work on it. That's who she is.”

“The prospect of us turning our backs on a friend is extremely distasteful,” Cleaver adds. “Wouldn't it be ugly if I'm driving down the street with Debbie Wasserman Schultz in my red convertible, and I see an African American standing on the road without a ride, and they ask me to stop, put Debbie out of the car? Let them get in because they are African American? I don't roll like that.”

Regardless of the mixed reception, Wasserman Schultz has thrown herself into an aggressive campaign. When she asks voters for their support at community events — including a police officer “night out” in Plantation and backpack giveaways in Deerfield Beach or Margate — they recognize her. Some ask to take pictures with her or want to speak to her alone to ask for help. “Us curly girls have to stick together!” Wasserman Schultz tells a little girl whose ringlets are like hers. Over the years, so many advisers have pressured Wasserman Schultz to straighten her own curls to look “more professional.”

“With all the tension and all the poo that people will pile on you, and the stress of this environment with the MAGA extremists and the very left wing of our party, people always sort of say, ‘How do you do it?’” she says later. “I do it by coming home and plugging back into this community, this blue dot of people who share the same values, and I recharge my batteries and I go back out and I fight for them.”

At one backpack giveaway, Deerfield Beach Middle School assistant principal Carlton Jackson tells Wasserman Schultz he wants yard signs — “as many as you can get.” Jackson says all the controversy hasn’t swayed his support of her.

“We don’t need new people,” Jackson says. “We need her.”

On a steamy day in August, Wasserman Schultz is standing outside an ICE facility in Pompano Beach, demanding the release of Claudia Rodriguez, a Venezuelan with a pending asylum application who was arrested at the airport on her way to watch the World Cup with friends. Like many other residents of Florida’s 20th District, Rodriguez was previously shielded from deportation through Temporary Protected Status that allowed her to work in the U.S. But the Trump administration moved to terminate many of those protections.

A few days later at the Sunrise office, Rodriguez, who’d been released on bond, cries as she stands next to Wasserman Schultz, recounting her experiences being detained and how she felt as though she was an "animal in a zoo.” Rodriguez’s story, Wasserman Schultz adds, is yet another “heartbreaking” example of the Trump administration targeting immigrants without a criminal record. Constituents with detained family members, she says, “call our office all the time” not knowing where their loved ones are.

Later, Wasserman Schultz brings up Rodriguez again. Her release, she says, demonstrates how her decades of experience in Congress can have a tangible effect on people’s lives. And that, ultimately, will be how Wasserman Schultz says she will try to mend bridges should she be elected: to show up. That means being in the community “all the time,” taking local officials to lunch, building seniority and helping others get elected — things she said she has always done, things she says she is not done doing.

As she reflects on her career, she says, “You know how many people have predicted my demise over all the years — from D.C.?”

A reporter observes, “You survived a lot.”

“Thrived,” Wasserman Schultz corrects. “I’ve been lifted up by the people in this community because I'm committed to them, and I know them.

“And they know me.”

— Riley Rogerson contributed from Washington and Gary Fineout contributed from Tallahassee.