“Service is the rent we pay for the space we occupy. It is incumbent upon me to serve.”

State Rep. LaVon Bracy Davis, 45, was speaking in July at the Pine Hills Hob Nob — an opportunity for voters to meet and mix with candidates or their surrogates ahead of elections. The Ocoee Democrat is hoping House District 40 residents will return her to Tallahassee for a second two-year term because, as she told VoxPopuli, “there’s more work for me to do.” 

She’s facing first-time candidate Republican Belinda Ford of Pine Hills, the founder of a pair of crisis pregnancy centers in Pine Hills and Winter Garden. Representatives serve two-year terms and earn $29,697 annually. The election is Nov. 5. 

District 40 includes Pine Hills, Lockhart, Rosemont, Clarcona, College Park, Riverside Acres, parts of Fairview Shores and Ocoee.

Early voting takes place daily Oct. 21-Nov. 3, 8 a.m.- 8 p.m. Check our list for locations. The deadline to request a mail-in ballot is Oct. 24. Mail-in ballots can be returned to any early voting location but must be received by the Supervisor of Elections office by 7 p.m. on Nov. 5.

The top issue in District 40 is affordability, Bracy Davis told VoxPopuli in a Zoom interview, pointing to inflation, prices at the grocery store and gas pump and housing and property insurance. The median rent across all rental types in the state is $2,500. That is $400 higher than the national average, according to Zillow.

This is what she wants legislators to focus on. There’s no time, she told VoxPopuli, “for conversations about book banning” and other culture war distraction issues.

“Almost all of my constituents, from Pine Hills to College Park — and we know those are two very different demographics — they are all talking about how it’s difficult to afford to be a Floridian right now…Things have gone up, but paycheck and earnings and income have not.”

She said that she feels the pinch right along with her constituents.

“I am not rich. I don't have a huge trust fund. I'm not worth millions of dollars. Some of my colleagues on the other side are millionaires. I'm barely a ‘thousandaire,’ and that's that's okay with me because I'm reflective of the people that I serve. When I argue on things like the property insurance bailout that we did in that special session — my first session — I wasn't just arguing on behalf of my constituents. I was arguing on behalf of myself. You know, I come home to my husband, who is also a constituent, and he's like, What are y'all doing up there?”

Until legislators figure that out, Bracy Davis wants to establish a grant or subsidy program for homeowners whose property insurance rates have doubled. “Like the government did stimulus during Covid,” she explained. “I admit it’s a Band-Aid, but sometimes Band-Aids stop bleeding, and we need to stop the bleeding before we can even figure out what the problem is.”

Positions and plans

A moderate-to-progressive Democrat, Bracy Davis supports reproductive healthcare decisions without government interference (including a Yes on Amendment 4), sensible gun safety reforms and fully funding public schools.

“The Florida Constitution very clearly says our responsibility as legislators is to fully fund public education,” she said. “It doesn't say anything about private education. And until our public schools are fully funded, until our teachers get paid what they deserve, until our facilities are first-rate, until every school is an A school, until every child is reading on grade level, I don't think we need to be focused on private education. I’m not saying private education is not great. I just don’t believe we should pay for it.”

Bracy Davis logged two key wins in her first term, notably the Tyre Sampson Act, which she worked on with her frequent legislative partner State Sen. Geraldine Thompson. The law seeks to makes amusement park rides safer following the fatality of a teen at Icon Park because he was not securely buckled into a ride. Bracy Davis also expanded access to the Randolph Bracy Ocoee Massacre Scholarship, which awards 50 scholarships of up to $6,100 annually to descendants of survivors of the 1920 Election Day violence and Black high school graduates in Ocoee pursuing secondary education. Bracy Davis expanded the list of participating schools to include Florida’s three private historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs): Bethune-Cookman, Florida Memorial and Edward Waters. Increasing access to the scholarship money was something she worked on from her first day in the legislature, filing and refiling new versions of the bill each year.

“After negotiating with my Republican colleagues, we found a better way to get that into law,” she said. “It wasn’t passed as a bill, but I got it in the budget. Sen. Thompson always says when you go to Tallahassee, you have to figure out do you want the credit or do you want to get the work done? So I don’t get the credit of the bill, but I absolutely got this piece of legislation in the budget.”

It often takes a few attempts before a bill passes. Bracy Davis plans to re-introduce three from the last session:

Youth conflict resolution. While Bracy Davis doesn’t buy into the narrative about Pine Hills being an “under-resourced African American neighborhood,” she told VoxPopuli that she filed this bill with the neighborhood in mind. Modeled on the popular D.A.R.E. program (Drug Abuse Resistance Education), Bracy Davis’ bill provides for a two- to three-year pilot program to help reduce gun violence by teaching de-escalation and conflict resolution techniques to high schoolers in community schools such as Evans High School and Jones High School.

“You have students that bicker on social media, and then when they see each other in person, the first thing they go to is violence,” she said. “They go to I want to hurt somebody, maim somebody, I even want to bring a gun to school. Students need to learn how to respond … how to de-escalate, how to calm situations down.” Bracy Davis said this will be a top priority for the next legislative session, which starts in March.

SNAP benefits for former female drug traffickers. Florida does not allow people who have been convicted of drug trafficking to access Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits, and that can be a hardship for women who are trying to regain custody of their children, Bracy Davis explained. A former attorney for the Department of Children and Family Services, she said that she would not return children to homes that weren’t clean, stable and had a refrigerator with food. “SNAP benefits usually just help the woman or family get groceries in the house.”

Harry T. and Harriette V. Moore Florida Voting Rights Act. Named for the first civil rights activists to be murdered for the cause, the Florida Voting Rights Act would roll back the voter suppression laws that the state has enacted since 2021, establishing Election Day as a paid holiday, allowing for standing mail-in ballot requests, same-day voter registration, the creation of a database for former felons to verify if they are eligible to vote, and the elimination of the Office of Election Crimes and Security.

Last year, when Republicans refused to hear the bill, Bracy Davis and Thompson, the bill’s co-sponsor in the Senate, along with a number of civil rights organizations, including the NAACP, Equal Ground, Florida Rising, All Voting Is Local, Southern Poverty Law Center Action Fund and ACLU of Florida, held a rally at the Capitol, which drew about a thousand people.

The legacy bearer

Bracy Davis’ tag line is “A name you know. A name you trust.”

And the Bracy name has been synonymous with politics and civil rights for decades. Her mother, Dr. LaVon Wright Bracy, a three-time elected delegate to the Democratic National Convention, is a civil rights trailblazer. She integrated Gainesville High School in 1964 — an experience she documented in the children’s book A Brave Little Cookie. Her late father, the Rev. Dr. Randolph Bracy, Jr., was president of the Orange County NAACP, dean of Bethune-Cookman’s School of Religion and founder of the New Covenant Baptist Church of Orlando. Her brother, Randolph Bracy III, served as a state representative and senator for a decade in the Florida Legislature. In August, he lost his bid to return to the chamber in a contentious race with Thompson.

Bracy Davis attended Dr. Phillips High School in the Visual and Performing Arts Magnet Program and received her B.F.A. from Howard University in theatre arts and her law degree from Florida A&M University College of Law, graduating from its inaugural class. She’s worked as an attorney for the Department of Children and Families and served as a legislative appointee on the Florida Council on Arts and Culture. She disagreed with Gov. Ron DeSantis’ veto of arts funding from the state budget. She said supporting the arts is good business.

“When people go to shows, they oftentimes stay in hotels, they go to dinner. All of that helps with economics. There’s a return on investment. It’s not just a bunch of artists and tutus and glitter. There’s money in arts and culture,” she said.

Prior to being elected to the Florida House, Bracy Davis worked as senior director of community programming at the Dr. Phillips Center for the Performing Arts. She is married to Adrian R. Davis, pastor at Bethel IFM Church in Mount Dora.