Democrats have quickly built a big tent, that’s for sure.

After last week’s stunning primary results, their ticket for November is led by outspoken Democratic Socialist Angie Nixon for Senate and conventionally moderate David Jolly for governor.

To some, it seems contradictory. Modern Florida has never seen a statewide ticket so diverse that actually won. Meanwhile, Florida’s GOP voters — who just nominated the first Black Republican candidate ever for statewide office in Byron Donalds — are giddy. Their ecstasy may be premature.

The question is what will happen under those big tents.

For Republicans, it could devolve into a three-ring circus, as it did for Democrats when they had one-party rule but fractured unity (described as “every man for himself.”) If either party succumbs to that polarization, its chances of winning diminish.

The peril, and the promise

Or will candidates of the two parties focus on pursuit of a better Florida, realizing that they have a lot in common and that the real issues are not about labels?

If either party can make that case to voters — particularly the 3.2 million unaffiliated with any party, who had no voice in the primaries — they can win.

What Democrats can’t afford is for Rep. Jared Moskowitz to continue internecine warfare with the Democratic Socialist wing, as he did election night when his first social media post after winning was to go after the socialist influencer Hasan Piker rather than thank voters or focus on his Republican opponent, Scott Singer.

Some pundits were apoplectic over Alex Vindman’s huge defeat in the Senate primary. To hear their pearls clicking, it’s as if Republican Sen. Ashley Moody has already won. That too is premature. But Republicans can’t simply coast on the assurance that their chokehold on all three branches of Florida government will remain unbreakable.

Angie Nixon’s people power

Nixon won the primary in the most delightfully American way. She took her campaign to the people instead of relying on advertising that she couldn’t afford. She found an issue that usually resonates with voters — her opponent’s unfamiliarity with his recently adopted state — and contrasted it with her years in Florida’s political trenches.

By winning from the left, Nixon expands the Democratic base; she doesn’t shrink it.

She energizes young, Black and progressive voters especially. She gives the ticket a jolt of passion and righteous anger that the mild-mannered Jolly does not.

A ticket led by a progressive Black woman and a moderate white man, versus a conservative Black man and a taciturn white woman? This looks like the real Florida. We are that diverse, yet our common bonds transcend whether people are Democrat or Republican, liberal or conservative.

So do many of the things Floridians worry most about.

A revolution has begun

For example, Florida is in an uproar over data centers. It is about far more than their voracious appetite for electricity and water, or the noise they create. It also speaks to the real fears that artificial intelligence will eliminate millions of jobs, dominate society and become an ungovernable force.

A profound revolution is underway. Like TV anchor Howard Beale in the movie “Network,” the American people are mad as hell and they’re not going to take it anymore.

The data center industry is only one face of an arrogant oligarchy that people believe now runs Congress, the courts, the White House, state legislatures and local governments.

The oligarchy prospers even when the people don’t.

Pay is not keeping pace with inflation. The divide between haves and have-nots is worsening. The top 10% control 60% of the wealth while half of all households own just 2.6%.

Americans are coping with a housing shortage and an affordability crisis whose existence the president of the United States calls a Democratic “con job.” The climate is becoming deadlier, and he ignores that, too.

People see a Congress that can’t stop a wildly unpopular, incompetently managed war, curb its members from stock trading, limit American support for a foreign government that does not currently deserve it or rein in a president drunk with power.

These are natural issues for a leader like Jolly, who left the Republican Party that was ignoring them, and for Nixon, a former single mom with no money whose life is defined by a sense of community responsibility. The more they both address those issues in their own way, the less the opposition’s name-calling and diversions will succeed.

As governor, Jolly would inherit a sold-out state government that has prostituted the courts, given free rein to utility overcharges, neglected a housing crisis, pandered to Christian nationalists, sacrificed higher education to politics, banned books, destroyed home rule for the sake of profit and put a reckless tax-cut proposal on the ballot with no safeguards for public safety and welfare.

Donalds has his own cards to play — including reminding Florida Democrats that they just nominated a centrist former Republican just one election ago in Charlie Crist, and it didn’t work out all that well.

The tax question will likely be a major policy clash between Jolly and Donalds, who’s all in on Amendment 3.

Jolly and Nixon are as willing and able as any nominees ever to take the real issues to the people, to speak truth to power. Both deserve enthusiastic support from the national Democratic Party, as their opponents Donalds and Moody are all but guaranteed to receive from the GOP.

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