Barbie Harden Hall — U.S. Congress, District 11
If you voted to overturn the 2020 election, that's an automatic Nope in the endorsement department from VoxPopuli. Congressman Daniel Webster was one of the 147 Republicans who voted to overturn the election results after the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol insurrection. We can't think of any more potent example of dereliction of duty. The shame and stain of that act will never fade. It doesn't matter how much appropriation funding Webster brings to his district if he cannot be trusted to safeguard democracy.
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Which brings us to Barbie Harden Hall, the Democratic Christian small-business owner and mom who is running fast and furious to unseat him. If 2024 is the Change Election to bring in the next generation of lawmakers, then this is another opportunity. Unlike Webster who eschews interviews, hob nobs, town halls and candidate forums, Harden Hall has been criss-crossing the 11th Congressional District, letting voters know that as a mom with young children and a lawn-care company she manages with her husband, she feels their pain as she's doing the same kitchen table budgeting as they are doing.
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Apart from Harden Hall's willingness to meet and engage with constituents — constituent services is a key part of the job —and her commitment to working on affordable housing and the property insurance ... we'll, call it a conundrum to be polite ... what we deeply respect about Harden Hall is the 180 she did on abortion rights.
Raised in the Christian faith to believe abortion is wrong, Harden Hall rethought her position after a medical emergency during her first pregnancy. She didn't have to end her pregnancy, but she started thinking about other women faced with needing to end wanted pregnancies to save their own lives. But instead of splitting hairs about medical emergencies being worthy of abortion while poor timing or lack of resources are not, she embraced the idea that reproductive decisions are women's to make — full stop. (It's a little secret of the anti-abortion movement that many leaders of the movement to outlaw abortion have had abortions themselves.)
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Harden Hall's turnaround shows a remarkable ability to examine a complex issue, integrate new information and come out in an unexpected place. If Harden Hall can do with that with a combustible issue like abortion, imagine what she can do with other thorny problems that plague our state.
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It's time to thank Congressman Webster for his service and send a new Representative to Washington. VoxPopuli endorses Barbie Harden Hall.
Alicia Peyton — Ninth Circuit Court Judge,
Group 15
Let’s think about what we expect from judges in the courtroom: First and foremost adherence to the law. Next, impartiality. Finally, some empathy and grace.
Now let’s consider the most recent details that have come to light about incumbent Circuit Court Judge Jeff Ashton who is up for re-election in the Nov. 5 runoff against attorney Alicia Peyton.
Ashton has just been accused by the Judicial Qualifications Commission (JQC) of misconduct that has included bias in his courtroom, shouting at attorneys in his courtroom, signaling annoyance through his body language and facial expressions, refusing to recuse himself from a case after a plaintiff requested a new judge because they believed they were not receiving a fair trial. That case went to the Sixth District Court of Appeals where judges demanded Ashton step aside.
The JQC referenced a “pattern of misconduct” that “raises questions about your fitness for judicial office…" And this was after Ashton had been warned once before by the JQC to control his “intemperate behavior.”
Perhaps it’s Ashton’s more than 30 years as a prosecutor himself, along with one term as state attorney (he lost re-election when it was discovered that he’d visited the married people’s affair site Ashley Madison), that makes him impatient with the attorneys in his courtroom. But if Ashton wants to school attorneys, there are certainly more productive outlets.
The people of Orange and Osceola counties deserve better. And better comes in the way of attorney Alicia Peyton, who told VoxPopuli during our summer interview that when she decided to run for judge, she wanted to see “respect” on this “particular bench.”​ Just a guess, but it sounds like she might have been aware of this "intemperate behavior" the rest of us are now learning about.
“I wanted to see someone that understood the law, that followed the law to the T, but also was respectful of all constituents in the courtroom,” she said in our Zoom interview.
Peyton spent five years representing indigent defendants accused of misdemeanors and felonies as an assistant public defender in the Ninth Judicial Court’s Public Defender’s Office, and for the past 11 years she’s worked as a litigator at King & Markman, representing survivors of wrongful death and victims of catastrophic vehicle accidents, medical malpractice and premises liability.
That means she’s argued both sides of the justice equation. It means balance. It means empathy. It means respect for the law, but also for the people who might stand before her in the courtroom, defendant and plaintiff.
Peyton has focused her campaign on bringing respect to the Group 15 bench, and now those of us who aren’t avid court watchers have a sense of why.
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It’s time for a change. VoxPopuli backs Alicia Peyton for Group 15 Ninth Circuit Court Judge.
Justice Renatha Francis —Florida Supreme Court
Vote to Retain
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In the Yes-No vote to retain Florida Supreme Court Justice Renatha Francis, who was appointed to the high court in 2022 by Gov. Ron DeSantis, VoxPopuli cannot say no strongly enough.
Francis, a striver who put in an application for the Florida Supreme Court one month after arriving at the 15th Circuit Court in Palm Beach County, may well be the least qualified justice to sit on the state supreme court. There was plenty of head-scratching about her high court appointment given her lack of trial experience and subpar law school — a for-profit school that closed in 2021 and before doing so, had the lowest bar-pass rate (31 percent) of any Florida law school.
We know that DeSantis was unconcerned about Francis’s onion skin-thin legal resume because she was a reliable anti-abortion vote, thanks to the investigative reporting done by Noreen Marcus of the Florida Bulldog. Earlier this year, Francis argued hard to block Amendment 4 (abortion rights) from being put on the ballot for Floridians to decide, writing in her dissent that the language of the ballot amendment was “vague and undefined” even as the majority of the high court found it “clear and unambiguous.”
Marcus also uncovered that Francis lied on her Supreme Court application about not having ethics complaints against her — there are at least three from when she was a circuit court judge in Palm Beach County.
The complaints paint a picture of an imperious judge who wields her authority like a cudgel. The most bonkers complaint that raises questions her fitness for any role on the bench, stems from Francis yelling at a mom at a condo pool with her kids — the family was visiting relatives over a holiday weekend — that she’d have her children taken from her for “abuse and neglect.” And this was after Francis’ own husband had wandered over and removed the mom's baby from its stroller without permission, and the mom demanded he hand over her child. Nonetheless, the mom endured a year of inquiries from the Department of Children and Families and the Polk County Sheriff’s Department before being cleared of any wrongdoing.
When Florida Supreme Court justices are appointed, they serve for a year or so and then come up for a retention vote for the public to decide if we want to keep them on the bench before they go on to serve a full six-year term. Like a test drive before buying. While removing a seated justice is rare, everything in Francis’s behavior and lack of expertise demonstrates she never should have been appointed in the first place.
Vote no on retaining Renatha Francis.
Justice Meredith Sasso — Florida Supreme Court
Vote to Retain
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Justice Meredith Sasso, appointed to the Florida Supreme Court last year, is up for a yes-no retention vote on Nov. 5. Newly appointed justices typically serve for a year or so before a retention vote in the next available general election either removes them or allows them to serve a full six-year term.
VoxPopuli objects to retaining Sasso on philosophical grounds. A member of the Federalist Society, which holds originalist views of the U.S. Constitution, Sasso made clear in her applications to the appellate bench and the state Supreme Court that she believes with the separation of powers that the judicial branch is deferential to the executive and legislative branches and this “appropriate deference” is “essential for the people’s chosen representatives to operate.”
Admittedly, it’s been a while since civics class, but there is a recollection of three equal benches of government, each of which serves as a check on each other. Demoting the judiciary results in overreaching power in both the executive and legislative branches, a loss of trust in the courts and rulings that would rewind the progress that has been made for women, workers, people of color, the LGBTQ+ community, environmental protections, among other things.
In putting Sasso on the high court, Gov. Ron DeSantis has traded one form of judicial activism for another, exchanging judges who may evaluate law to see how it expands to protect more people for an interpretation that narrows and rescinds.
This is the opportunity to say no. No to Sasso, and no to stacking the court with judges who refuse to check our legislators and the executive branch when necessary. ​
Monique Worrell — State Attorney, Ninth Circuit
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VoxPopuli endorses Monique Worrell’s re-election for Ninth Circuit State Attorney. We don’t see her removal from office last year as anything other than politically motivated, and between her and her opponent Andrew Bain, she is the only one in this race who doesn’t stand accused, with county and state GOP members and Gov. Ron DeSantis, of election tampering.
[For those who didn’t follow what became a national story, one of the Republican primary candidates said that he was offered a bribe by DeSantis’ chief of staff and other state GOP members to drop out of the race. He refused and lost the primary to a candidate who immediately dropped out, clearing the field for a head-to-head between Bain and Worrell. The candidate who was asked to drop out filed a lawsuit in September for election interference. There’s a hearing Oct. 28.]
Meanwhile, Worrell is an educated, accomplished attorney who has long fought for criminal justice reform. A law professor at the University of Florida for 16 years, Worrell built the university's Criminal Justice Center to train law students interested in criminal law. While working in the state attorney’s office, she set up the Conviction Integrity Unit to investigate wrongful convictions. And while she was on hiatus, she was the chief legal officer for Reform Alliance, the nonprofit founded by Jay-Z that works to transform parole and probation.
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This doesn't mean she’s “soft on crime.” It means justice. Because the U.S. has one of the highest incarceration rates in the world; Florida has one of the highest incarceration rates in the U.S.; and Black and Hispanic people are disproportionally incarcerated within Florida's prison system. Black men are also six times more likely to be arrested as whites while Hispanics are three times more likely to be arrested than white men.
Worrell campaigned in 2020 and is campaigning still on reversing the over-incarceration of people of color and addressing issues that have resulted in Florida leading the way in death row exonerations.
Everything Worrell has done throughout her career has been to ensure that dangerous, violent, career offenders are punished appropriately for their crimes — even imposing the death penalty — while the wrongfully convicted, the nonviolent, the “made-a-really-stupid-mistake” offenders aren’t chewed up by the system.
Crime was down when she was in office, according to statistics from Florida Department of Law Enforcement and the Orange County Sheriffs Department, and so were incarcerations.
“What I was doing was working,” she told VoxPopuli during our interview. “We can actually keep our communities safe because we're treating people who are dangerous differently than those people who are not dangerous.”
The other thing that Worrell said during our interview that really stuck was that this re-election campaign is not about getting her job back. Worrell already had a job where she wasn't being harassed by the governor and where she frankly made more money. But as state attorney she can make change that makes a real difference in peoples' lives. This election, she told VoxPopuli, “is a fight for my values. This is a fight for the voters. This is a fight for the 60 percent of Black and Brown people who are incarcerated that could be free. This is a fight for freedom … because justice matters. Because democracy matters.”
In 2020, 497,000 voters elected Monique Worrell, and we back their choice. VoxPopuli endorses Monique Worrell for State Attorney in the Ninth Circuit.
Wes Hodge — Orange County Supervisor of Elections
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This is the most consequential race in the Nov. 5 elections for it's from this office that the trust and validation that every other election in the county is conducted fairly and without interference comes. This office ran smoothly for three decades under former elections supervisor Bill Cowles, and Orange County needs a new leader in this role who will maintain the transparency practices that inspire confidence that our voting systems are secure while implementing new measures to make voting accessible to every Orange County citizen.
That’s why of the four people running in the Democratic primary for Supervisor of Elections — Wes Hodge, Karen Castor Dentel, Dan Helm and Sunshine Linda-Marie Grund — VoxPopuli fully endorses Hodge as the next Supervisor of Elections.
Castor Dentel, with her record of service in the Florida Legislature and on the Orange County School Board, would also make a fine elections supervisor. But Hodge has vision. He comes prepared with actionable plans to encourage broad voter participation. One we're especially enamored of is “appointment voting" — akin to the appointment system for renewing driver’s licenses at the Department of Motor Vehicles — to help curb long lines at polls so that excessive wait times do not become disenfranchising.
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We also support Hodge's ideas to accommodate voters in their native languages — staffing tables at voter registration events with people who speak Spanish, Portuguese, Haitian/Creole and Vietnamese, and updating touch-screen voting machines with these languages so that people can vote more easily in their primary language. Hodge also wants to partner with schools to pre-register 16- and 17-year-olds to vote; open more early voting sites and ensure that poll locations are near Lynx routes, so that not having a car or a driver’s license does not impede one's ability to vote.
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Finally, there’s the election security and integrity piece. Despite statements from the Cybersecurity Infrastructure Security Agency, 61 court cases that found the 2020 election fraud claims lacked merit, former president Donald Trump’s own advisors stating there was no fraud, and Gov. Ron DeSantis’ stating unequivocally, “All those theories that were put out did not prove to be true,” the Big Lie of the stolen 2020 presidential election persists, and the resulting Jan. 6 Capitol insurrection to prevent the peaceful transfer of power still splits the country. As Republicans openly make plans to challenge the results of the 2024 election, the threat of additional violence, especially in the wake of the assassination attempt on Trump, is never far from mind. Just days ago, a commenter on VoxPopuli’s Facebook page, who had been arguing with another page administrator about the District 1 Orange County Commission election, put out a $1,000 bounty for their name.
In interviews for our voting guide, Hodge is the only candidate who demonstrated an appreciation of the potential for election-related violence and is prepared to handle any future allegations of election fraud and the turbulence that could result.​
Nicole Wilson — District 1, Orange County Commission
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It is a powerful thing when a woman stands her ground and says No. Throughout her first term Nicole Wilson showed again and again that she is willing to vote her conscience and take unpopular positions to do what is right for the people of District 1 and Orange County versus what is expected or expedient. Scott Maxwell of the Orlando Sentinel called her a “feather-ruffler.” Game recognizes game, and so VoxPopuli endorses Wilson for re-election.
Wilson was the single No vote on the county commission against the 1,400-unit Disney affordable housing project at Hartzog Road and 429 — passed as Hurricane Milton bore down on Florida — even as she recognizes that our region desperately needs more affordable housing. She has said it’s not that Horizon West residents don’t want affordable housing “in their backyard,” but because any new housing project of that size would exacerbate existing traffic problems and create more overcrowding in schools. Still, before the project vote, Wilson, working together with county commissioners and Planning & Zoning Commission members, was able to wrest concessions from the developer that include trimming 41 units from the project, adding a public park and putting in a left turn lane from Seidel Road onto Avalon Road and a traffic signal and crosswalk at the community entrance. She continues to push for setbacks of 100 feet, rather than 25, to protect additional wetlands, which help prevent flooding during massive storms.
Wilson voted to boost impact fees for the first time in 15 years to the maximum allowable by law. This means that if developers want to build in Orange County, they now have to kick in to pay for the infrastructure — like roads — to support the neighborhoods they’re building. That’s something developers got a pass on from the last two county commissioners, including Scott Boyd, a major Austin Arthur supporter. Wilson doesn’t accept donations from developers so she has no real or perceived obligations while in office.
Wilson worked to get the controversial county rural boundary amendment, written by the independent charter review commission, on this year’s ballot. Supporters claim it will prevent suburban sprawl; opponents say it tramples property owners’ rights. She also fought hard to protect Split Oak Forest from having a toll road run through it — though it seems as if that roadway may yet be built. For animal lovers, she voted to prohibit pet store sales of puppies, kittens and bunnies. Now there is no place in Orange County — save for a single store in Ocoee since the city did not adopt the ordinance — that sells these animals, often sick, often sourced through mills, often using predatory lending practices.
This was a difficult year for Wilson. Her father was dying. She landed in hot water in Winter Garden with disability rights advocates after canceling a community meeting about Special Hearts Farm, which serves adults with disabilities. The farm is seeking a zoning variance to relocate in the Avalon Rural Settlement. She pushed a commission vote on a zoning variance for the farm until after the Aug. 20 election. She arrived at the highly anticipated debate between herself and Arthur, sponsored by the West Orange Observer at OCOM, Orlando College of Osteopathic Medicine, fresh off of burying her father and with her mother in the hospital with Covid. Arthur was widely perceived to have won the debate with his quick, TikTok-ready comebacks that played well in the room. But it was Wilson’s weightier, wonkier responses to questions that demonstrated a thorough understanding of what it means to really govern a county.
To be fair, we don’t know how Arthur might govern if elected since he's never held public office before. But even as he campaigns on the slogan, “slow the growth,” the number of developers who have backed him give us pause. They haven’t shoveled cash into his campaign war chest because he’s a charming guy. Money typically comes with expectations. And we are wondering about the expectations behind the $50,000 contribution from The American Promise, a dark money Tallahassee outfit that does not have to disclose its donors.
The biggest contributor to Arthur’s PAC, Citizens for Common Sense Solutions, The American Promise, as Jason Garcia of Seeking Rents reported, is the same organization (operating under a new name) that ran the 2020 ghost candidate scheme that got three Republican state senators elected, including Frank Artiles, convicted earlier this month during his election conspiracy trial in Miami, and Jason Brodeur, responsible for the new financial disclosure requirements that sparked a mass exodus from city governments across the state. For the candidate who said he wanted to keep the race local, this contribution opens the door to Tallahassee politics and dysfunction if not corruption .
This group, as Garcia reported, has been closely linked with Associated Industries of Florida, which blitzed voters with attack ads against Wilson in 2020 when she ran against Betsey VanderLay, another darling of developers.
Arthur has dropped his own attack ads against Wilson, crafted by Edgewood mayor and master of the nasty campaign John Dowless of Millennium Consulting. Winter Garden voters will remember his handiwork from Iliana Jone’s ugly, divisive March campaign for District 2 Commissioner.
Bottom line: We can see the value Austin Arthur holds for the community. He’s a kind man, a generous man. We like him personally. He checks in with his neighbors. He raises money for charity. He works food drives. He serves on multiple community boards (though VoxPopuli had to break the story about his involvement with the fake abortion clinic board before he owned that). He’s been invaluable to the One Winter Garden neighborhood association in Historic East Winter Garden.
But Arthur has no previous political or government, or even community organizing experience to draw on to help him do the job. And at the moment, he is too burdened by whomever is behind The American Promise to serve Orange County on the commission.
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Wilson is beholden only to residents and her conscience. One more reason she earns our endorsement.
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Correction: An earlier version of this endorsement described John Dowless as the mayor of Edgewater. He is mayor of Edgewood.
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Anne Douglas — District 4, Orange County
School Board RUNOFF
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In the Nov. 5 runoff for District 4 Orange County School Board, VoxPopuli endorses reading teacher Anne Douglas over Kyle Goudy, an online golf reservation site business development manager. Education decisions ought to be made by professionals, and a teacher with 25 years of classroom experience beats a sports enthusiast every time .
Plus, VoxPopuli obtained Goudy’s candidate survey for the ultra conservative, anti-LGBTQ+ American Family Association and many of his answers were … jarring. Goudy stated on that survey that he favors allowing teachers to carry guns in classrooms; removing civics lessons from the teaching curriculum; permitting instructors to opt out of teaching required material that goes against personal moral or religious values; and getting rid of the U.S. Department of Education.
On social issues, Goudy, who has claimed to be a friend to the gay community, stated that he is against gay marriage and doesn’t want trans girls using the same restrooms or locker rooms or playing on sports teams as his young daughter who is about to enter the Orange County Public School system.
Is that really the best attitude for a school board member?
Douglas, on the other, is promoting a message of “strong public schools where everyone is welcome.” That is definitely more in tune with a public school ethos. Douglas is all about inclusion. She has embraced a gender-neutral restroom solution to comfortably accommodate trans students in the county’s student population. (Is it ideal? No. Trans kids should be able to use restrooms that match their gender. But gender-neutral restrooms are a good start. After all, it took years for segregation to end.)
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Meanwhile Douglas also wants the public schools properly funded — she believes the voucher program siphoned off too much public money — with funding for transportation and a boost in teacher salaries too. And as a reading teacher with empty shelves in her classroom, she wants the books back. Book censorship is stunting students, she told VoxPopuli in an interview, cutting students off from knowledge and preventing them from becoming “valuable citizens in our society.” Book banners, she said pragmatically, should be more concerned with what kids are watching on their phones than anything they’re reading in school.
We can't help but applaud Douglas's perspective. VoxPopuli endorses Douglas for school board.
Stephanie Dukes — State Senate District 13
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​​This is the third time Democrat Stephanie Dukes has made a run for the state legislature. In endorsing her campaign to represent Senate District 13, VoxPopuli hopes the third time is the proverbial charm as the retired educator takes on former Republican State Rep. Keith Truenow.
Truenow ran such an offensively racist, anti-Chinese campaign during the Republican primary against fellow Republican Bowen Kou, that precluded any endorsement from us. Really, that should be a dealbreaker all around.
We're backing Dukes because she is a never-say-quit pro-worker, pro-education, pro-women, fighter.
She champions the teaching of accurate history and making all types of books available to students. She opposes what she called "picking knowledge" for students in her VoxPopuli interview. She also opposes the new law that blocks municipalities from requiring companies to provide heat protection for outdoor workers. In the face of the wrongs she saw being done to students and workers, she told us she had to run again. We admire that kind of determination.
District 13 and Orange County need Dukes in the legislature to help return a sense of normalcy to education, free from revisionist history and censorship, and a sense of compassion for other humans, which we find largely absent in Truenow's campaign and in bills he has co-sponsored in the House, like the anti-public sleeping law, which criminalizes homelessness. Dukes has our full endorsement. ​
Leonard Spencer — State House District 45
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No surprise, but VoxPopuli is endorsing the House District 45 candidate who hasn’t been indicted on four counts of felony forgery and racked up scandals in her two years in office like she’s going for a video game high score.
Fortunately, Democrat Leonard Spencer, formerly of Walt Disney, currently at Amazon, has more to recommend him than just a clean record: He wants to incentivize developers to build real affordable housing and prevent legislators from raiding the Sadowski Fund to pay for it. And, oh yes, he wants to entice more insurance companies to the state to boost competition and reduce premiums.
He wants legislators out of physicians’ offices so that women can make their own decisions about contraception, pregnancy, abortion and IVF. And yes, he supports Amendment 4 for abortion rights.
He wants to raise teacher salaries — an absolute must in this state, which is rock bottom for compensating teachers — and to stop the book banning and revisionist history nonsense, which, on top of poor pay, is helping to drive educators out of classrooms.
He wants common sense gun reform and more resources for mental health services, which will hopefully find allies among those who want to address gun violence with mental health supports and those who seek to make firearms less accessible to juveniles.
Overall, Spencer is a common sense corporate guy. And the platform he’s putting forward sounds like common sense to us, which is why he wins our endorsement.
By the way, did we mention his clean record?
LaVon Bracy Davis — State House District 40
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VoxPopuli endorses incumbent State Rep. LaVon Bracy Davis for House District 40. Republican challenger Belinda Ford has a deep love of Pine Hills and would be an incredible asset to the Pine Hills Community Council. But after a successful first term during which Bracy Davis helped get legislation passed to make amusement park rides safer and expanded the Randolph Bracy Ocoee Massacre Scholarship Fund so that Ocoee students could use the financial aid at more colleges, she has earned the opportunity to return to Tallahassee to continue the work of District 40 and the people of Orange County and Central Florida.
Bracy Davis is one of those fierce but compassionate leaders who always remembers the servant part of “public servant.” Unlike those who get into politics for power or influence, Bracy Davis went to Tallahassee to improve the lives of those in her district and the state. “Service is the rent we pay for the space we occupy,” she has said. And she walks the talk. She champions returning citizens’ rights and high-school programs that teach de-escalation tactics to reduce neighborhood gun violence. She wants to roll back voter suppression laws and pour resources into public schools and affordable housing. She says she wants to create a subsidy program modeled on what was created during the pandemic for homeowners whose property insurance rates have doubled —incidentally the only concrete plan for dealing with the insurance crisis we heard this election season from any politician.
Bracy Davis thinks big, she thinks out of the box. And she doesn't abandon a cause. We can’t think of a better advocate for the constituents of District 40. For those reasons, she wins our endorsement.
Marsha Summersill — State House District 39
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Of the 19 anti-LGBTQ+ bills introduced during the last legislative session, Republican State Rep. Doug Bankson, an evangelical pastor, sponsored two of them —including one that would have identified transgender people by birth sex not gender on driver’s licenses, which is not only confusing but potentially dangerous to the individual. That same bill would have also required insurers to offer plans that don’t cover hormone treatments if they provide plans that do and to cover the discredited conversion therapy.
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This is deliberately hateful. VoxPopuli is not interested in returning politicians to Tallahassee whose mission is to legislate hate. It’s time for new representation, and so we endorse Democrat Marsha Summersill for House District 39.
While Bankson and his cronies targeted a vulnerable community, Summersill spent 18 years before becoming a family law attorney protecting the most vulnerable from child abuse, working with the Department of Children and Families, the Child Protection Team and the sheriff’s departments of both Orange and Osceola counties to evaluate child abuse allegations. Instead of inventing demons to fight, Summersill fought real monsters.
Summersill advocates expanding Medicaid so that when people of few means are at their sickest, they will still have care. This is the result of watching her brother succumb to illness when his private insurance lapsed and he couldn’t get the treatments he needed on Medicaid. For Summersill, quality care also means a Yes on Amendment 4 so that women can make their own reproductive decisions, whatever they may be. Plus, she favors leashing insurance companies with greater regulation and transparency requirements, that will mandate companies provide explanations for why rate increases are needed before they’re able to hike premiums.
Much of what has motivated Summersill’s run comes from her own experiences — fighting for healthcare, getting slapped with a property insurance premium that quadrupled in price, staring down the new state abortion ban. We expect her to serve constituents with empathy and a knowing sense of esprit de corps. For this reason, Summersill wins our endorsement.