According to the state Division of Elections website, Clermont Democrat Ryan Morales opened a campaign account on April 2 and will now go up against Sabatini in 2020.
At the moment, not much is known about Morales other than he has a website, his Facebook profile describes him as an author, DJ and a former political consultant, but most importantly it doesn’t appear that he has a history of blackface, so that’s a good start.
Sabatini, on the other hand, has a storied career so far in Florida politics. Besides trying to ban cities from banning plastic straws, the freshman representative refused to step down back in February after a photo emerged of him wearing blackface and another showed him dressed up as a stereotypical “Mexican” while attending Eustis High School in 2008.
On top of these two separate incidents, a former classmate told Orlando Weekly that when the lawmaker was in high school he “drove a junker car painted like the General Lee.”
Even before his notorious blackface and brownface stories, Sabatini was also busted “liking” multiple racist Facebook posts, and while he was a City Commissioner he famously tried to relocate all of the country’s removed Confederate statues to Eustis, which then forced the city to issue a statement basically saying Sabatini is a loud idiot.
To make matters worse, his home newspaper even penned an editorial scolding the 30-year-old manbaby to “grow up,” and that he’s “at the least, grotesquely racially insensitive, and perhaps worse.”
But who knows how much this will matter. Despite Sabatini’s track record, there’s a good chance it’ll still be a close one between him and Morales in 2020.
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This article appears in Apr 4-11, 2019.