Andrew Gillum, who was endorsed by Bernie Sanders, won Florida’s Democratic primary this week as Julia Salazar in Brooklyn challenges an incumbent for state senate

This article is more than 2 years old

This article is more than 2 years old

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A progressive governor for Florida?



Andrew Gillum, the mayor of Tallahassee, won the Democratic primary for governor in Florida on Tuesday, setting up a potentially revealing battle against a Trump-backed Republican.

Gillum, a progressive who was endorsed by Bernie Sanders, made the case on the stump that he was the only candidate in the race who was not a billionaire or millionaire.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Andrew Gillum. Photograph: Joe Skipper/Reuters

The 39-year-old won with 34% of the vote in the primary, beating out Gwen Graham and Philip Levine, both of whom had been seen as favorites earlier in the primary race.

Gillum’s agenda includes supporting calls for a $15-an-hour minimum wage, Medicare for all and opposing Florida’s controversial “stand your ground” self-defense law, which gained international notoriety in 2012 with the killing of an unarmed black teenager, Trayvon Martin, the Guardian’s Erin Durkin wrote.

Julia Salazar interview

In the 48 hours following Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s shock victory in a New York Democratic primary earlier in the summer, another candidate, Julia Salazar in Brooklyn, took in $20,000 in donations, “many of them for $27”, she says, which was the average amount, it turned out, that people donated to Bernie Sanders’s presidential campaign.

Salazar, who is challenging Martin Dilan, a 16-year Democratic incumbent, for a seat in the New York state senate, is a Democratic socialist whose campaign has attracted nationwide interest.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Julia Salazar in her campaign headquarters in Bushwick, New York City. Photograph: Max Burkhalter/The Guardian

She told the Guardian this week that democratic socialism is “becoming more normalized”.

“I am really eager to talk about it if it comes up. But even when it does, I’ve heard from other canvassers who have mentioned it – ‘She’s the democratic socialist running’ – people don’t even blink. It doesn’t faze them.”

Prison strikers facing backlash from officials

Inmates taking part in the nationwide prison strike are now facing reprisals from prison officials as they attempt to draw attention to what strikers describe as “modern slavery” in their often-compulsory work duties for pennies.

The prison strike began on 21 August, in a bid to highlight virtually unpaid prison labor and poor conditions in prisons.

The Guardian’s Jamiles Lartey writes:

The retaliation and repression was instantaneous and constant,” said Brooke Terpstra, spokesperson for the Incarcerated Workers Organizing Committee, one of the groups helping publicize the strike. “Leaders were picked off, one by one, and thrown into solitary in anticipation of the strike that was coming.”

Family members said that was what happened to Ronald Brooks, a Louisiana inmate who has spent the past 20 years at the infamous Angola prison. After appearing in a video supporting the strike, they said, he was transferred hundreds of miles, suddenly. Like some other organizers, Brooks has used a contraband cellphone to relay his grievances to the world.

What we’re reading

Kevin Rashid Johnson is an inmate at Sussex state prison in Waverly, Virginia, who has been taking part in the nationwide prison strike. Johnson, who is serving a life sentence for murder – he says he was misidentified and is innocent – wrote for the Guardian last week about the importance of the strike action.

