Shortly after winning a seat in the Florida Legislature, Leonard Spencer tried to tell someone he wasn’t a politician. He was quickly corrected.
“‘Nope,’” he said, laughing, as he told the story. “‘You’ve been elected. You’re a politician now.’”
Spencer, 53, of Gotha, is that rare unicorn in Florida politics in 2024 — the only Democrat who flipped a seat in the state House from red to blue in a GOP wave year.
Now the question is what the political newcomer can accomplish amid a Republican supermajority in Tallahassee, and whether he’ll be able to build a long career in a district that this year narrowly supported President-elect Donald Trump.
“He will have to work really hard over the next two years if he wants to keep this seat,” said Aubrey Jewett, a professor of political science at the University of Central Florida.
Spencer’s victory came against one of the most vulnerable Republicans in Tallahassee. Then-state Rep. Carolina Amesty was indicted in September on four felony charges related to the alleged forgery of a man’s signature on an employment form she notarized as an administrator for her family’s small school.