Debbie Mucarsel-Powell. (Photo: Author)
April 7, 2024 by David Silverberg
Debbie Mucarsel-Powell is on a roll.
The 53-year old Democratic candidate for the US Senate seat now held by Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.), 71, had a compelling case to make when she announced her candidacy last August. A former representative from the Miami area, she was a credible candidate but faced a long, difficult path ahead.
However, when the Florida state Supreme Court issued its decisions on April 1 to both permit a six-week abortion ban to go into effect on May 1 and at the same time allow a constitutional amendment guaranteeing women’s right to choose to appear on the ballot in November it was, as Mucarsel-Powell put it, “a game changer.”
With the abortion issue front and center, Florida is now in play, in the view of President Joe Biden’s presidential campaign.
But that doesn’t surprise Mucarsel-Powell at all.
In her campaign travels she says she discovered a secret.
“I’ve learned that Florida is not a red state,” she said. “It remains a purple state, a diverse state, an independent state, a state where there are more things that bring us together than not.”
And by bringing people together she just may become Florida’s next senator.
An immigrant success story
In late March, Mucarsel-Powell (or DMP, as her staff refers to her) sat down with The Paradise Progressive for an extensive interview. It took place at Acopio Coffee, a newly-opened shop in Naples specializing in Columbian coffee.
Mucarsel-Powel was relaxed and right at home there, switching easily between English and Spanish as she spoke to the Columbian owners. A pleasant, accomplished and articulate woman, she grows intense and emphatic when discussing issues close to her heart—and there are many.
Debbie (her birth name) was born in Guayaquil, Ecuador, and immigrated to the United States at the age of 14 with her mother and three older sisters. At first they lived in a one-room apartment. She attended Pomona Catholic High School in Pomona, Calif., where she graduated in 1988 and then earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in political science from Pitzer College in 1992 and a Master of Arts in international political economy from Claremont Graduate University, both in Claremont, California, in 1996.
She started working in a doughnut shop to help support the family when she arrived in the United States. She continued working throughout her education.
She pursued an academic career, rising to associate dean of Florida International University (FIU), a Miami-based school founded in 1965 that serves a heavily immigrant and professional student body. From 2003 to 2007 she served as its director of development and beginning in 2007 as vice president for advancement at its college of medicine.
She married lawyer Robert Powell and had three children; Willow, Jude and Siena.
She was also very active in numerous non-profit institutions and causes. Among them, she volunteered in the presidential campaigns of John Kerry in 2004 and Barack Obama in 2008.
Political awakening
It was an encounter with pure, petty partisan politics that propelled her into electoral politics, she recalled.
Part of her job at FIU was raising funds for scholarships and healthcare programs. In 2016 the university had a program to send doctors and health providers into underserved communities to provide care.
But funding for the program was blocked both in Tallahassee and Washington, DC for reasons that had nothing to do with the program or its goals—or the people it helped.
“It just made no sense,” she recalled. “I was so upset. You follow certain policies but when you start understanding the situation and who is blocking it and why, that’s what prompted me to get involved. They were showing me all these reasons [for the obstruction] and I was like, ‘wait!’”
To make a difference, that year she ran against Republican Anitere Flores for a Florida Senate seat and lost.
However, in 2018 she ran against Rep. Carlos Curbelo in what was then the 26th Congressional District covering Homestead and the Florida Keys (which has since been redrawn to include much of eastern Collier County). She defeated him and served a term in Congress, during which she wrote a bill to expand Medicare Advantage coverage, worked to support families and small businesses and secured $200 million for Everglades restoration. She also voted to impeach President Donald Trump in his first trial in 2019.
In 2020 she faced Miami-Dade County Mayor Carlos Giménez and lost in a close election, 51 percent to 48 percent.
During her time in Congress, she said, “the most frustrating thing was always trying to make things better for the people living here.” Most of the reason for the difficulty in doing that is “that you have extremists like Rick Scott who are blocking any sort of progress and making it much harder for people to get ahead.”
As the 2024 election approached, Mucarsel-Powell saw an opportunity to address that problem again. As senator, Scott not only stood in the way of progress for working people and families, he had also failed on a variety of political fronts and pursued extreme policies.
“So I was in Congress and while I was writing a bill that would expand Medicare coverage, Rick Scott was writing a plan to sunset Medicare, Social Security, and raise taxes on middle class families,” she recalled.
But the problem with Scott was not just in the past. “He supports repealing the Affordable Care Act. Living in a state like Florida you understand how critical our environment is, but Rick Scott has denied that climate change exists. When he was governor, he voted against any sort of green energy here in our state. I’ve done work with fishermen in the Florida Keys who understand that if we don’t have a healthy environment, it’s not just about clean water in our own lives but it’s also about our economy.”
The situation was enough to make her get back in electoral politics and run for Scott’s Senate seat.
Given the Scott record, “I think people across the state understand” why she’s running, she said. “I’ve been having those conversations. I have them every day.”
Protecting seniors
Mucarsel-Powell’s positions on most issues are largely centrist and oriented toward working families and everyday Floridians: bringing down the cost of living and insurance; reducing healthcare and medication costs; keeping people safe and protecting water purity and the environment.
But some issues stand out, and in these Mucarsel-Powell draws a sharp contrast between herself and Scott.
Extremely relevant to Southwest Florida with its large senior population is her absolute commitment to protecting Social Security and Medicare, programs that Scott has specifically targeted for elimination.
Mucarsel-Powell’s mother, Imelda, lives with her in Miami and the candidate knows how critical Medicare is for her mother’s health and Social Security for her livelihood.
“And it’s not just about my mother,” she points out. “We have the largest population of seniors who rely on these benefits to make sure they have access to healthcare. These are benefits that they they’ve paid into their entire lives.”
Knowing gun violence
Another issue that has a personal connection to Mucarsel-Powell is gun violence.
In 1995 her father, Guido, was shot and killed on the steps of the family home in Ecuador. To this day the circumstances are murky. It may have been a case of random violence. There has never been an arrest or prosecution.
“I was in the States. It was violence,” she recalled, referring to the situation in Ecuador. “It was someone on a motorcycle. I don’t have a lot of information. They were killing people for a lot of different reasons. It was devastating.”
She was 24 years old at the time.
Having experienced this kind of loss, Mucarsel-Powell is now a forceful advocate of background checks and closing gun purchasing loopholes—and she sees an international dimension to the problem.
“The reality is that if you have a violent criminal background you should not be able to purchase a weapon,” she said emphatically. “The universal background check is the simplest, most common-sense piece of legislation that we passed when I was in Congress. We should pass it again. I want to lead on that and there are a couple of senators who want to work on that and I think the majority of people agree, not just here in Florida but across the country.”
She especially dismisses the assertion that background checks are made at gun shows, an argument of pro-gun activists.
“I know for a fact that people can go into a gun show and walk out with a firearm. And then they trade them and sell them in the parking lot, by the way. And then what happens? Then we have gangs, drug-trafficking gangs that come to Florida because we have such relaxed gun laws. They purchase these weapons, get these weapons and then they take them to Haiti, they take them to Venezuela, they take them to Mexico. So if we want to talk about crime, let’s lead with that. Why are we allowing criminals to get weapons so easily in this country?”
This ties in with the need reform the immigration system and secure the border, an issue Republicans are using to hammer Democrats.
“Of course we have to secure our border,” she says. “That’s common sense. I voted for border security when I was in Congress but it’s going to get worse if we don’t do something to support the fight for democracy in these countries.”
Mucarsel-Powell was an advisor for the 2022 Summit of the Americas, a periodic gathering of North and South American leaders to discuss common concerns.
“We need to provide the support that we can so that we somehow make Latin America, Central America, the Caribbean places where people can remain,” she argues. “No family leaves on their own will. They have to. Many of them are desperate; they don’t have food for their children.”
That was one of the topics at the Summit of the Americas and she saw progress. “There was a migration agreement for Panama and other countries to help and to retain the migrants that are going through other countries. That is a possible solution for that problem. Mexico, the same thing.”
The right to choose
But looming over all other issues is the question of a woman’s right to choose. This issue and the question of whether to pass an abortion amendment to the state constitution is likely to propel the political debate all the way to November—and Mucarsel-Powell has a unique perspective.
“A woman’s right to choose is on the line right now and as a Latin American woman—I was born in Ecuador, I was raised Catholic—but the majority of women regardless of religion, regardless of background, understand that government should not interfere in that private decision between a mother or a woman, her doctor, her family, her faith and so this is going to be a critical issue in November.”
She continued: “They’re trying to suppress women by taking away their most fundamental right and that is privacy and the right for them to make their own decision about when and how to start a family. It’s also a safety issue for the mother and young women. What message are we sending to our daughters? So I think that’s going to be a critical issue in November and something that as a woman I will make sure to protect that right.”
Mucarsel-Powell welcomed the state Supreme Court’s decision to allow Amendment 4 on the November ballot. But it also provided her the opportunity to highlight Scott’s extreme positions on abortion and his support for a total abortion ban.
When the Supreme Court announced that in addition to allowing the amendment it would also uphold the state’s current six-week abortion ban, Mucarsel-Powell called it “outrageous and dangerous.” She pointed out that “Rick Scott proudly stated he would have signed this ban – a ban with hardly any exceptions – into law if he were governor.” She thinks that this kind of extremism will turn Floridians against Scott and in her favor.
Against extremism
Indeed, Mucarsel-Powell thinks that Floridians are tired of all the political extremism that has dominated the state.
“Unfortunately, because of the extremists who are trying to take over and have all the power in the state, people have felt targeted and intimidated,” she explained. “When a company, when a municipality, when an elected official has spoken against the extremists in Tallahassee there’s been forceful retaliation. What I’ve realized is that a lot of the people in this state have been living in fear and I think so many, regardless of political affiliation, are done with that. And they are organizing, they’re mobilizing, they’re energized.”
She continued: “Every event I go to, there is one Republican at the very least that comes and says, ‘I wanted to come, I wanted to hear you speak, I can’t stand what’s going on, I want to support you, would you speak to more of us?’
“As I travel the state I’m prouder and prouder and prouder of being a Floridian,” she said. “I’ve never been prouder because it’s been tough; for universities, for students, for teachers, for municipalities, for businesses, for the LGBTQ community, for immigrants—you name the group. For seniors, for parents, it doesn’t matter who you are, you’ve somehow been affected by the horrible policies that have been coming out in Tallahassee that Scott has proudly announced that he supports and he’s doing the same thing in DC.
“And so I think we have a really unique opportunity to make sure that we get our state back on track.”
Democracy on the line
It’s a fight, not only about issues and fundamental rights but about the future of democracy and she knows that some hard times lie ahead.
Rick Scott and the rest of her opposition “want to control and take power. They want to take over government to make money from government, so they’re going to do and say whatever they need to say, they’re going to delegitimize the opposition, target the opposition, silence the opposition and intimidate the opposition.
“As a Latin American I know it’s exactly what they do under dictatorships. It’s exactly what Russia does. You can see it. They’re doing everything in their power to target, to intimidate, to harass, to attack—it’s the same tactics.”
But Mucarsel-Powell is undeterred and sees a path to victory in November.
“This is a top pick up opportunity. If we don’t win Florida it’ll be very difficult to keep a Senate majority and we also know that Scott is eyeing leadership. He has expressed that. So it’s more critical than ever. The man will push a national abortion ban. He will sunset Medicare and Social Security. If anyone has any doubt they don’t know who this guy is.”
Her strategy, she says, is simple: “I think the most important strategy is making sure that voters across the state know who I am and what I stand for when they come out to vote. That’s the key to making sure that I win in November.”
Debbie Mucarsel-Powell and her extended family. Her husband, Robert, is third from left. She, her mother Imelda, and children are at center. (Photo: Campaign)
Liberty lives in light
© 2024 by David Silverberg