We haven’t written about the ghost candidate State Senate scandal on these pages as of yet because we have wanted to get all of the information and process it before moving forward with analysis. Unfortunately that took a year, but thanks to The Orlando Sentinel’s outstanding reporting, all the pieces are now there for us to move forward. In the coming days we will have analysis of this rather distasteful chapter in recent Florida electoral history.

In particular, we will focus on how this impacted the Democrats in the state and use the insight we’ve learned from the reporting and our own information gathering to discuss how it may have undermined the Democrats in the past.

We’re not much for making excuses at TFS for the Democrats poor electoral performance in Florida, but this episode demonstrates sometimes forces far beyond the control of the party work to undermine it in this increasingly dark, corrupt and authoritarian state.