First-time candidate Democrat Barbie Harden Hall, 38, of Mount Dora, is running against Republican Rep. Daniel Webster of Clermont in the 11th Congressional District. This district includes Polk, Sumter, Citrus, Hernando, Marion, and portions of Lake and Orange counties. Representatives serve two years and earn $36,986 annually. 

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Harden Hall, a mom of four, told Vox-Populi in a Zoom interview that she was compelled to run after an encounter with Webster last year. Her two-year-old son had died in 2022 from metachromatic leukodystrophy (MLD), a rare genetic disease that causes progressive decline in mental and motor functions.

Harden Hall began advocating for other families with children dealing with MLD and other rare fatal diseases for newborns. She went to Washington, D.C. with Rare Disease Legislative Advocates, part of the Everylife Foundation for Rare Diseases, to meet and work with congressional representatives, including those from Florida. But Webster, who represents her district, and his staff declined to meet with her.

“They never responded, never scheduled the meeting,” she said. “I was basically told he never does that because if you don't serve some kind of benefit for him, then the meetings just won't happen,” she said. “And to me, that just is not how it should be.”

Harden Hall, who worked as a case manager for the law firm, Morgan & Morgan for 12 years and now owns and operates lawn care business Halls Outdoor Services with her husband, was determined to do something about that.

When she saw that Webster had no Democratic challenger, she decided to run for his seat. “Not only am I running for the families whose children have been given a fatal diagnosis, but insurance companies are telling them their children are not sick enough,” she said at a July event hosted by the African American Chamber of Commerce of Central Florida.

She wants to continue her advocacy work through the Rare Disease Congressional Caucus but is also running to safeguard Social Security and Medicare and help “everyday middle-class Americans.”

“We have our government that is basically giving a leg up to insurance companies but ignoring the actual people and the issue that we're having,” Harden Hall said during the interview. “How are we gonna pay our mortgage this month? Or how am I going to pay my student loans as a single person and not being able to afford it? Am I paying my rent? Am I paying my car payment?” she said. “We need those voices like mine who have those experiences.”

Corporations and affordability

Harden Hall said she closely watches her household budget like many of her neighbors in District 11, and she believes inflation has contributed to higher prices for housing, groceries and other consumer goods, but she also blames corporations.

“I think that corporate greed is causing a lot of it. And that's why we're seeing record corporate profits,” said Harden Hall.

Recently, however, NPR examined the underlying causes for high food prices and found that  wage increases for workers in processed food manufacturing, which is more labor intensive to produce, largely drove grocery price increases as costs were passed to consumers.  Companies like Walmart, Kraft, Heinz, Proctor and Gamble, Kroger and Pepsi posted profits of less than 1 percent or declined. NPR noted that the supermarket sector was keeping a larger cut of sales, but was reluctant to tag that "greedflation" since stores could simply be selling more things like store brand foods, which are lower priced than branded items. 

Even so, as a representative, Harden-Hall said she plans to use her voting power to pass bills like the Price Gouging Prevention Act that help Americans struggling with paying for basic necessities.

Healthcare access

According to Harden Hall’s campaign website, one of her top priorities is protecting women’s access to healthcare by codifying Roe v. Wade on a federal level while ensuring that access to contraception and in vitro fertilization, or IVF, remains protected.

This is quite a turnaround for Harden Hall, who until 2016 was an anti-abortion Republican, something she attributed to her Christian upbringing growing up in Mount Dora.

“The way I was raised in a Christian school, in the church, is that abortion only means one thing,” Harden Hall said. “I was irresponsible. I no longer want this child even though it's my own fault that I got in this situation, and now I'm going to make an even worse decision by murdering my child. That's what you were always taught. That's the only perspective that you saw.”

But, in 2016, while pregnant with her first child, she experienced a non-catastrophic uterine rupture — a tear in the layers of the uterine wall — which caused her to rethink her position.

Now, Harden Hall maintains that the decision to end a pregnancy is deeply personal and requires a conversation between a woman, her family and her doctor.

“We can demand that healthcare decisions remain our own choices — and not at the whim of whichever political party happens to be in power,” Harden Hall wrote in a VoxPopuli commentary on the anniversary of the overturning of Roe v. Wade.