Graham's prospective candidacy has been floating around for years. With a congressional record (albeit a short one) suggesting strong bipartisanship and loads of name recognition stemming her father, the popular former governor and U.S. Senator Bob Graham, conventional wisdom suggests she'd do well — whatever conventional wisdom is worth these days.
Her message was one of reforming Tallahassee.
“We simply — we simply — do not have time. No time for typical politics," she said during her announcement, which was streamed from Miami on social media Tuesday morning. "Not in a state that has grown to over 20 million people. No time for stale rhetoric, not in a state that has endured almost 20 years of a government with the wrong priorities, looking out for the wrong people.”
At the top of her agenda, Graham said, would be education. She said she wants to drastically change Florida's public education system by doing away with practices that compel teachers to "teach to the test" and require schools to analyze student success using "one-size-fits-all" standards.
She said Republican leadership in Tallahassee is selling out Florida's children at the behest of corporations that profit from standardized testing paid for with tax dollars, and that has to stop.
“Florida used to have a public school system," she said. "Today, though, today it has become a public school industry. Now, I am not choosing the word industry lightly. But that is exactly what our politicians in Tallahassee have turned our school system into.”
She added that she would like to put more lottery money back into education; that too many dollars have been siphoned away from the Florida lottery despite the stated purpose that the money be used for the express purpose of helping Florida's students.
As for other priorities, she said she'd like to see the state raise its minimum wage to something people can actually live on.
“When I hear [Gov. Rick Scott utter the words 'jobs, jobs, jobs], I hear you're going to have to work three jobs just to get by,” she said.
Then there's the environment, which she hopes to protect by banning fracking, ensuring offshore drilling is never a thing here and by using Amendment 1 dollars for their stated purpose rather than as a means of moving money out of the Florida Department of Environmental Protection.
“The Florida we love is running out of time.”
Of course, she would face a legislature that would probably still be heavily Republican, something she said she'd try to overcome with two nearly extinct concepts called civility and bipartisanship.
Graham is the third candidate on the Dem side to announce a bid for governor in 2018. Tallahassee Mayor Andrew Gillum and Orlando businessman Chris King are also in. A few more — including celebrity personal injury attorney John Morgan — seem to be waiting in the wings.
She'll probably face headwinds in the primary from the party's progressive wing, namely over the time she sided with Republicans on the Keystone XL Pipeline. And if she is the party's nomination, she may deal with criticisms from the Bernie wing, which could try to paint her as the Hillary Clinton of Florida (something something perfect being the enemy of good).
Responding to questions from members of the press Tuesday, she defended the Keystone vote by saying that while some Democrats may not agree with how she voted on that project, they should look at her entire voting voting record — where they'll find more things that they agree with her on than they might think.
If she does clear the primary, she'll have another major obstacle: getting Democrats excited enough to actually show up and vote.
Dem turnout in off-year elections is notoriously low. Yet with anti-Trump fervor, that could reverse itself. It's going to be a long year-and-a-half and the only safe bet is that there's no telling what Florida's voters will want in November of 2018.
This article appears in Apr 27 – May 4, 2017.