Once regarded as the nation’s most important swing state, Florida has moved sharply to the right under Republican control. Donald Trump has carried the state three times. Gov. Ron DeSantis has used it as a testing ground for attacks on public education, immigrants, LGBTQ communities, reproductive freedom and organized labor. Meanwhile, Florida Democrats have repeatedly responded to Republican victories by moving toward the political center—or further right—in hopes of winning back conservative voters.

Oliver Larkin believes that strategy has failed.

Larkin, a union organizer, activist and member of the Democratic Socialists of America, is challenging incumbent Rep. Jared Moskowitz in the Democratic primary for Florida’s newly configured 25th Congressional District.

He is running on Medicare for All, a $25 federal minimum wage, universal childcare, paid family and medical leave, stronger labor protections and an end to private prisons. He supports abolishing qualified immunity and the federal death penalty. He also calls for ending U.S. support for Israel’s assault on Gaza and redirecting military spending toward the needs of working people at home.

For Larkin, these positions are not a political liability. They are the basis of a Democratic revival.

“We’ve gone from being a purple state—a swing state—to nominating these very conservative Democrats that adopt the Republican Party’s positions,” Larkin told LA Progressive. “And we’ve seen our state go further and further to the right.”

His argument is straightforward: Democrats will not defeat Republicans by becoming less distinguishable from them.

Larkin describes himself as a first-time candidate but a longtime organizer.

After college, he was working as a line cook for $7.25 an hour while carrying student-loan debt and watching the healthcare system fail members of his family. Inspired by Bernie Sanders’ 2016 presidential campaign, he left his job and traveled to New Hampshire as a volunteer.

That campaign gave him a political vocabulary for frustrations he had already experienced personally.

He later helped unionize his workplace with the NewsGuild-Communications Workers of America and continued organizing in South Florida, including with the Broward County chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America.

His campaign platform reflects that background. Larkin speaks less about expanding narrowly targeted assistance than about establishing universal economic rights.

“The things that we need to live the American dream” include healthcare, childcare, education, paid leave and wages sufficient to live on, he said.

Paying for those programs, he argues, requires confronting the enormous sums the United States spends on war, military contractors and support for foreign governments.

“We have to end our addiction to these endless wars overseas,” Larkin said, “so that we can reduce the cost of living here locally and return our democracy back to the power of the working class and away from the billionaires and oligarchs.”

Larkin’s campaign is not simply an ideological challenge to the Republican Party. It is also an indictment of Democrats who cooperate with the Trump administration or adopt conservative positions in the name of bipartisanship.

His target is Moskowitz, who has represented South Florida in Congress since 2023 and previously served in DeSantis’ administration as Florida’s director of emergency management.

Larkin repeatedly describes Moskowitz as a “DeSantis Democrat.”

Among his principal criticisms are Moskowitz’s participation in the congressional DOGE Caucus and his vote for the Laken Riley Act, legislation that expanded mandatory immigration detention and gave state officials greater power to challenge federal immigration decisions.

Moskowitz was among 46 House Democrats who supported the measure.

To Larkin, votes such as these reveal the danger of Democrats accommodating Trump’s agenda rather than confronting it.

“We’re seeing the direct harm that these Democrats who are working with the Trump administration are causing,” he said, pointing to federal layoffs, attacks on collective bargaining agreements and the expansion of immigration detention and deportation.

Larkin also criticizes Moskowitz for trading stocks while serving on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, including investments involving defense contractors. Moskowitz has faced scrutiny over stock-reporting violations, although he has said the trades were made by a financial adviser without his direct involvement.

The broader issue, Larkin argues, is a political system in which lawmakers may personally profit from companies affected by the policies they oversee.

“When there is this level of private profit motive in our foreign-policy apparatus,” he said, “it is going to keep happening until we have a majority in Congress that is able to stand up and draw a line in the sand.”

Florida’s congressional map has again been redrawn by Republicans, and the revised 25th District is more favorable to the GOP than the district Moskowitz previously represented.

Larkin acknowledges that Trump carried the territory encompassed by the new district in 2024. But he rejects the conclusion that Democrats must therefore nominate a centrist.

He sees the new district’s geography as an organizing opportunity.

The district now connects communities across Palm Beach, Broward and Miami-Dade counties, bringing together a multiracial electorate that includes significant Caribbean, Central American, South American and Jewish populations.

It also brings together progressive organizations and Democratic Socialists of America chapters that had previously operated in separate congressional districts.

“We have a really robust field-organizing apparatus that we’re using to contact voters,” Larkin said.

His campaign is relying on door-to-door conversations, volunteer canvassing and direct challenges to the incumbent’s voting record. Larkin says he personally knocks on doors, often campaigning in a tie and short sleeves beneath the South Florida sun.

He believes many voters—including independents—are alarmed by immigration raids, federal job cuts and the growing reach of the Trump administration.

The campaign’s task, as he sees it, is to convince those voters that the answer is not a more cautious Democratic Party.

“We need to stand up to both political-party establishments,” Larkin said, “because the Republicans have not served us and the Democrats have failed to stop them.”

Larkin’s candidacy raises a question confronting much of the American left: Can the Democratic Party be transformed, or must it eventually be replaced?

His answer is pragmatic rather than sentimental.

He recalls former Rep. Keith Ellison’s description of political parties as vehicles—useful only to the extent that they move people toward a desired destination.

For Larkin, that destination includes universal healthcare, living wages, union rights, tuition-free public education, childcare and paid leave.

“The Democratic Party can be that vehicle,” he said, “but not with the current political leadership within it.”

Larkin is not presently calling for abandoning the party. He points to the success of democratic socialists and working-class progressives who have defeated establishment-backed candidates in Democratic primaries.

But he does not believe elections or internal party reform will be sufficient by themselves.

The New Deal, he notes, was driven by organized labor. Civil-rights legislation was forced onto the national agenda by a mass movement. Women’s rights, LGBTQ rights and other democratic advances likewise required pressure generated outside formal party institutions.

“We have always needed outside pressure to bend this party,” Larkin said.

That is the role he believes unions, community organizations, social movements and the Democratic Socialists of America must continue to play.

“I’m not quite ready to break away from the Democratic Party when progressives are seeing such amazing success running within it,” he said. “But we need to be clear-eyed.”

Larkin’s campaign website originally offered detailed positions on healthcare, housing, immigration and agriculture but lacked a similarly developed criminal-justice platform.

When asked about that omission, he said the campaign planned to add one.

His stated positions are considerably more expansive than those of most Democratic congressional candidates.

Larkin supports abolishing private prisons, ending qualified immunity, passing the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act and eliminating the federal death penalty. He favors removing cannabis from the federal controlled-substances schedules and easing restrictions that impede research into the therapeutic use of psilocybin.