The battle in Florida between Ron DeSantis, a Trumpist Republican congressman, and Andrew Gillum, a black progressive mayor, is one of the tightest and most high-profile gubernatorial races of 2018. It’s also the ugliest.

The gloves came off in late August, when DeSantis said on Fox News that Florida should not “monkey this up” by electing Gillum, which many interpreted as a racist dog whistle. Since then, the candidates have engaged in a repetitive tit-for-tat: Gillum calls out DeSantis for using racially charged language and palling around with racists, and DeSantis accuses Gillum of bringing up race to distract from corruption allegations that have orbited his mayorship.

The election of Gillum, who is leading by a small margin in polling averages, would be historic. He’d be Florida’s first black governor and its first Democratic governor of the twenty-first century. But the race between Gillum and DeSantis will resonate outside of Florida, and not just because a Gillum victory will be interpreted as a rebuke to President Donald Trump in a state he won by a single point in 2016.

While racism has played a major role in the 2018 midterms, thanks largely to Trump’s desperate attempt to make the migrant caravan a defining issue, the Florida contest is unique in that it’s explicitly a referendum on racism—from Gillum’s perspective, anyway. But such contests may soon become the norm, especially in the South, as Democrats nominate more diverse candidates and Republicans increasingly run campaigns aimed at turning out aggrieved older white voters. Florida’s gubernatorial race may be a harbinger of an even uglier politics in 2020.

DeSantis’s bid for the Republican nomination for governor was bolstered by his perceived closeness to Trump, who endorsed his campaign as far back as December of 2017. Three months earlier, the Jacksonville congressman had added a rider to a spending bill that would end funding for special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election. Trump’s support, The New York Times’ Jonathan Martin wrote earlier this year, showed “the broader nationalization of conservative politics, in which a willingness to hurl rhetorical lightning bolts at the left, the media and special counsel Robert S. Mueller can override local credentials, local endorsements and preparedness for a state-based job.”

