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Why One of Congress’ Most Polarizing Democrats Is Finally Facing a Serious Primary Challenge

After years of reporting on Jared Moskowitz’s political evolution, I sat down with the only Democrat trying to unseat him.

For years, Jared Moskowitz has cultivated a national image as one of the Democratic Party’s sharpest critics of Donald Trump. His viral committee exchanges and cable news appearances have made him one of the party’s most recognizable faces.

But I know Jared. We were friends once. And I know the facade he presents is nothing like the man underneath the mask.

Before the pandemic, I worked alongside Moskowitz while he led the Florida Division of Emergency Management. After I was fired from the Florida Department of Health for opposing the state’s misleading COVID messaging, he became an unlikely source, communicating with me privately even as I publicly challenged Gov. Ron DeSantis’ pandemic response. That relationship—and the political dynamics surrounding it—was later documented by the Miami Herald in an extensive investigation.

As Moskowitz’s political career moved to Congress, so did my reporting.

What I found increasingly conflicted with the public image many Democrats had of him. His campaign finance, political relationships, and, most importantly, his legislative record painted a more complicated picture than the one presented on television.

Last year, I published a legislative analysis examining dozens of key House votes where only a small fraction of Democrats broke with the party. Rather than measure speeches or social media posts, I looked exclusively at how members actually legislated. Moskowitz consistently ranked among the Democratic members who most frequently sided with Republicans on high-profile, divisive legislation.

Now, for the first time, that record is being directly challenged at the ballot box.

A Different Kind of Democrat

Oliver Larkin isn’t running as a moderate.

He’s running as a Democratic Socialist.

Conventional political wisdom, often by paid consultants who prefer safety over progress, would suggest that makes winning a competitive South Florida district difficult. Larkin argues exactly the opposite.

His campaign is built on the idea that voters are looking for Democrats willing to fight unapologetically for working-class families rather than compromise with Republicans. During our conversation, he repeatedly returned to two themes he hears from voters: protecting democracy and addressing the rapidly rising cost of living.

For Larkin, those issues are inseparable.

He argues that concentrated corporate wealth has not only driven higher housing, insurance, and health care costs, but has also distorted American democracy through campaign financing and political influence.

That philosophy shapes nearly every part of his platform: Medicare for All, banning congressional stock trading, rejecting corporate PAC money, universal child care, paid family leave, and stronger labor protections.

The Campaign’s Central Argument

Perhaps the most interesting part of our conversation came when I asked Larkin how he responds to Democrats who argue that Democratic Socialists fall outside the party mainstream.

Rather than argue he is further left than today’s Democratic Party, he argued he is actually more loyal to it.

Larkin contends that his disagreements with Democratic leadership come from pushing for stronger protections for civil liberties, labor rights, and economic equality — not from supporting Republican priorities. By contrast, Moskowitz’s voting record frequently places him among the small minority of Democrats willing to support GOP-backed legislation.

Whether voters ultimately agree with that assessment remains to be seen.

But it reflects a broader debate now unfolding within the Democratic Party over whether moderation is still an electoral asset — or whether voters increasingly want representatives willing to draw sharper contrasts.

In 2024, a party-wide shift to the right, of which Kamala Harris’ campaign fell victim to, resulted in major election losses across the board.

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Climate Still Matters

As readers of Mesoscale News might expect, our conversation eventually turned to climate change.

Unlike many congressional interviews where climate becomes an afterthought, Larkin spoke at length about Everglades restoration, protecting Florida’s coral reefs, investing in renewable energy, modernizing the electric grid, and opposing the rapid expansion of energy-intensive AI data centers.

For a state already grappling with sea-level rise, worsening hurricanes, insurance instability, and ecosystem collapse, those issues aren’t abstract policy debates.

They’re existential.

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Democracy Begins in the Primary

Democrats often ask why voters lose faith in institutions.

Part of the answer is that too many incumbents stop being seriously challenged.

Primaries are not acts of disloyalty. They’re one of democracy’s most important accountability mechanisms.

Whether Oliver Larkin ultimately succeeds is as important as the questions his campaign forces Democratic voters to confront.

Should representatives be judged primarily by viral moments and television appearances?

Or by the bills they sponsor, the votes they cast, and the coalitions they build?

Those questions extend far beyond one congressional district in South Florida.

Florida’s Democratic primary for the 25th Congressional District will be held on August 18, with early voting beginning in early August depending on the county. Whatever the outcome, Democratic voters now have a choice, and, perhaps more importantly, a conversation that has been overdue for years.

Learn More About Oliver

Check/update Florida voter registration

Record Versus Reputation

One reason this race matters is because it raises a larger question than who represents Florida’s 25th Congressional District.

How much should voters weigh legislative records against political branding?

Over the past two years, my reporting has focused on that disconnect.

I’ve written about Moskowitz’s relationships with prominent Florida Republicans, his campaign financing, and the contrast between his media persona and congressional voting history. My legislative index was designed specifically to remove personality from the equation, evaluating members solely on votes cast and legislation supported.

The results consistently placed Moskowitz among the Democratic caucus’ most significant outliers. As one of the most MAGA democrats, it would difficult to downgrade outside of electing a Republican.

Larkin is someone whose ambitions are to serve the people, not himself.

And for that, we should all be rallying around him.

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Disclosure: I worked with Jared Moskowitz while we were both at the State Emergency Response Team during multiple hurricanes and the COVID-19 pandemic. To learn more about our relationship, read this article by the Miami Herald.

To read my previous warnings about Jared Moskowitz, click here.

Exclusive interviews and first-looks at scientific research before it’s public are just two of the perks given to paid subscribers of Mesoscale News.

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Climate Change, This Global Coral Crisis Wouldn’t Exist

For decades, scientists believed global coral bleaching events were primarily driven by El Niño.

New research suggests they wouldn’t happen at all without human-caused climate change.

In an interview with Mesoscale News, Climate Central Chief Program Officer Dr. Andrew Pershing discussed a new study concluding that global coral bleaching events, the most recent one of which began in 2018 and continues today, is almost entirely the result of human-caused warming.

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That won’t happen in television studios.

It happens in union halls, church basements, campaign offices, community centers, college campuses, and living rooms across the country.

That’s where I intend to be.

From August through Election Day, I’m launching the largest reporting project in Mesoscale News’ history: traveling across the country to cover the 2026 midterm elections from the ground, not from behind a studio desk.

I’ll interview candidates from across the Democratic Party. I’ll challenge them when they dodge questions. I’ll speak with organizers, scientists, teachers, veterans, election officials, workers, and voters. I’ll report from races national media often overlook until they’re suddenly “surprising.”

Democracy only works when people have access to honest information, and honest, independent reporting has never been more important.

Why This Election Matters

We’ve watched attacks on science, public health, voting rights, higher education, civil liberties, climate research, and democratic institutions accelerate at a pace few imagined possible.

At Mesoscale News, I’ve spent the last several years documenting exactly that. Just in the last few months, I’ve:

• Investigated the dismantling of America’s disease surveillance systems and what that means for future outbreaks.

• Covered the constitutional crisis unfolding in Louisiana.

• Reported on military politicization, attacks on scientific institutions, AI infrastructure, disaster preparedness, climate change, and the slow erosion of democratic norms.

Again and again, I’ve gone beyond the headlines to explain not just what happened, but why it matters.

Those stories aren’t isolated.

They’re all connected.

And now comes the next chapter.

The people asking to lead this country should answer difficult questions before they earn our votes, not afterward.

Why Me?

Long before millions of Americans knew my name, I was a scientist.

I earned a dual degree in Earth Science and Journalism from Syracuse University, and a Master of Science from Louisiana State University, where I minored in mass communication, before finishing my doctoral work at Florida State University.

My career was built on evidence, transparency, and following the data wherever it led.

When Florida attempted to manipulate COVID-19 data, I refused to stay silent.

Millions of people relied on the dashboard I built because they trusted transparent data more than political spin.

That decision changed my life forever.

Since then I’ve become one of the country’s most recognized science whistleblowers, receiving honors including Forbes Technology Person of the Year, Fortune 40 Under 40, and national recognition for transparency and public service.

Today I bring that same philosophy to journalism.

I don’t chase outrage.

I chase evidence.

I read the reports.

I verify the documents.

I interview the experts.

And when politicians refuse to answer a question, I keep asking.

That’s why more than 750,000 people follow my work across platforms.

It’s why Mesoscale News has become one of Substack’s bestselling science and environment publications.

And it’s why readers trust me to cover stories others either miss or won’t touch.

Legacy newsrooms are shrinking. Statehouse bureaus have disappeared. Science desks have been gutted.

Too much political coverage has become a horse race of fundraising numbers, polls, and campaign strategy.

Mesoscale exists to do the opposite.

When history happens, I don’t want to summarize someone else’s reporting.

I want to be there.

What We’re Building Together

This isn’t simply funding a road trip.

It’s building an independent newsroom capable of reporting where corporate media increasingly can’t—or won’t.

Every paid subscription.

Every donation.

Every ethical sponsorship.

Every share.

Every new reader.

Helps expand independent journalism.

The stronger this campaign becomes, the more races I’ll cover.

The more candidates I’ll interview.

The more communities I’ll visit.

And the more accountability we can demand from the people asking to lead this country.

Where I’ll Be

Democratic Primaries

Michigan (August 4)
Senate primary featuring Dr. Abdul El-Sayed and Rep. Haley Stevens.

Virginia’s 1st District (August 4)
One of the closest House races in America, with seven Democratic candidates competing to challenge Republican Robert Wittman.

Minnesota Senate (August 11)
Angie Craig vs. Peggy Flanagan.

Florida (August 18)

• District 20: Elijah Manley vs. Debbie Wasserman Schultz

• District 25: Oliver Larkin vs. Jared Moskowitz

• U.S. Senate: Alexander Vindman vs. Angie Nixon

Massachusetts Senate (September 1)
Ed Markey vs. Seth Moulton.

General Election

Coverage will focus on the races most likely to determine control of Congress, prioritizing competitive House and Senate contests across Arizona, California, Florida, Georgia, Maine, Michigan, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Texas, and Virginia.

As funding grows, so will the map.

What Your Support Makes Possible

Rather than asking you to fund “travel,” I’d rather show you what your support actually accomplishes.

Every dollar goes directly toward journalism.

Not overhead.

Not executive salaries.

Not shareholders.

Reporting.

A paid subscription ($49.99 a year)

Helps cover fuel between campaign stops, keeps breaking news and daily reporting free for everyone, and supports an hour of reporting, filming, writing, and editing.

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Direct Donations via PayPal or CashApp

$100

Helps fund a candidate interview or town hall visit.

$250

Covers one night of lodging while reporting in the field.

$500

Funds travel between campaign states.

$850

Fully equips the newsroom with upgraded cameras, microphones, lighting, batteries, storage, and travel equipment.

$5,360

Fully funds the entire primary reporting project across five states.

CashApp

PayPal

Budget Transparency

Primary Election Goal: $5,360

Reporting Equipment: $850

Portable lighting, microphones, 4K camera upgrades, backup batteries, memory cards, tripods, and a durable travel case.

Travel: $1,800

Flights, rental vehicles, fuel, parking, and transportation between campaign stops.

Lodging: $2,510

Four days in Michigan, three in Minnesota, eight in Florida, and two in Massachusetts. I’ll stay with friends whenever possible, but I’ve budgeted conservatively so coverage isn’t dependent on finding a couch.

I’ll continue publishing updates so readers know exactly how funds are being spent.

Sponsorship Opportunities

I’m also seeking partnerships with organizations that believe in independent journalism, civic engagement, science, education, environmental stewardship, and democracy.

Sponsors expand coverage.

They do not influence it.

Editorial decisions remain mine alone.

Every sponsorship will be publicly disclosed, and my reporting will remain fully independent.

If you or your organization wants to help bring trusted, on-the-ground reporting to more communities during one of the most consequential elections in modern history, I’d love to talk.

Help Send Me Where History Is Happening

For six years, millions of people have trusted me because I refused to let politics bury the truth.

That commitment hasn’t changed.

The battlefield has.

This election will shape the future of science, public health, climate policy, voting rights, civil rights, and American democracy for years to come.

I intend to be there—not after history happens, but while it’s happening.

If you’ve ever wished journalists would stop talking about voters and start talking to them...

If you’ve ever wanted someone to ask the questions politicians spend millions trying to avoid...

If you’ve ever believed independent journalism is worth fighting for...

Then help build this newsroom.

Become a paid subscriber.

Make a donation.

Sponsor the mission.

And let’s cover this election the way it deserves to be covered.

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Norovirus is sweeping through cruise ships. Cyclospora is spreading through the nation’s food supply.

At the very moment these diseases are making headlines, the federal government weakened several of the public-health programs created to detect, investigate and contain exactly these kinds of outbreaks.

I know how important those systems are because I’ve …

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While the sparsely-attended July 4 fireworks topped off a failed 16-day “American fair” in Washington, DC, a constitutional crisis was unfolding in Louisiana.

Louisiana…

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Climate change isn’t just threatening our future. It’s erasing our past.

The story you’re about to read begins with a Climate Central investigation into the threats facing Jamestown. It led me back to my own research on disappearing Indigenous sites along the Gulf Coast — places that preserve histories thousands of years older than the United States itself.

This kind of reporting takes time: digging through academic literature, historical records, scientific studies, and the lived experiences of communities whose stories are too often overlooked. If you believe science journalism should connect data to people, history, and power, please consider becoming a paid subscriber.

Paid subscriptions make investigations like this possible and help ensure these stories aren’t lost, too.

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At Jamestown, Virginia, archaeologists are racing against the water.

More than four centuries after English settlers established the first permanent English colony in North America, researchers are working methodically to excavate the site before rising seas and recurrent flooding claim what remains.

Climate Central recently documented the growing threat facing Jamestown, where sea level has risen approximately 1.6 feet over the last century and is projected to rise several feet more in coming decades. Archaeologists there now describe their work as a form of triage: deciding what pieces of history can be saved before they disappear.

It’s a sobering question.

But along the Gulf Coast, another race against time has been underway for decades, largely outside the national spotlight.

Seas are rising at a rate of 5.27 mm per year in Virginia. However, the rate of sea level rise in south Louisiana is 8.44 mm per year.

In Louisiana, climate change is not only threatening historic sites associated with the founding of the United States. It is erasing places that preserve histories that predate the nation itself — Indigenous landscapes, sacred places, archaeological sites, burial grounds, and oral histories that stretch back thousands of years.

And unlike Jamestown, many of these places were never fully documented to begin with.

The First Americans’ Vanishing Coast

Louisiana loses land faster than almost anywhere else in North America.

A combination of sea level rise, land subsidence, oil and gas development, saltwater intrusion, and increasingly destructive hurricanes has transformed large portions of the state’s coastline over the last century. Entire communities have relocated. Others remain trapped in a cycle of rebuilding and retreat.

For Indigenous nations whose histories are inseparable from the wetlands and bayous of south Louisiana, the consequences extend far beyond economics or infrastructure.

The land itself is the archive.

For generations, archaeologists and historians have treated Indigenous communities primarily as observers of environmental change. But my own research on Indigenous sites along the northern Gulf Coast has suggested a different perspective: Indigenous peoples were not simply witnesses to environmental catastrophe. They documented it through stories, migration patterns, settlement choices, burial practices, and the physical landscapes they constructed.

In many cases, those landscapes may contain records of extreme weather events that occurred centuries or even millennia before modern meteorological observations began.

Today, those records are disappearing.

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The Stories the Land Remembers

Long before satellites and weather stations, Indigenous communities across North America developed sophisticated systems for observing and interpreting environmental change.

Researchers working with Indigenous communities in Australia, Canada, and the Pacific Islands have found that traditional ecological knowledge systems often preserve detailed observations about changing weather patterns, species behavior, sea levels, seasonal cycles, and environmental disruptions across generations.

These observations are not simply folklore. They represent long-term environmental datasets encoded in stories, practices, language, and lived experience.

In British Columbia, Indigenous elders have documented changes in species distributions, weather patterns, and ecosystem behavior occurring over their own lifetimes. Researchers there argue that Indigenous communities possess unique adaptive knowledge precisely because they have spent millennia living with environmental change.

The same is true along the Gulf Coast.

For the Houma, Point au Chien and Isle de Jean Charles people of south Louisiana, hurricanes are not historical anomalies. They are part of a collective memory passed from one generation to the next.

“Hurricane stories are an integral part of Houma folklore,” writes T. Mayheart Dardar, Vice Principal Chief of the United Houma Nation. “The tales of winds and water have been told and repeated over the generations.”

The Chenière Caminada hurricane of 1893. The storms of 1915 and 1926. Betsy. Camille. Katrina. Ida.

These storms are remembered not simply because they were destructive, but because surviving them required adaptation, migration, rebuilding, and the preservation of communal knowledge.

For centuries, the pattern was familiar: a storm would come, communities would rebuild, and life would continue.

Climate change is altering that equation.

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When the Land Doesn’t Come Back

Dardar’s account of returning to his hometown after Hurricane Camille in 1969 is haunting.

“Houses were destroyed, tossed about like toys,” he wrote. “Trees were uprooted, cars flooded, boats scattered on the bank, and dead animals were hanging from trees.”

But his community returned.

The wetlands remained. The fisheries survived. The land endured.

Today, many Indigenous communities across coastal Louisiana face a fundamentally different reality.

The islands are shrinking.

The marshes are disappearing.

The cemeteries are flooding.

Sacred places and archaeological sites that survived hundreds or thousands of years of hurricanes are now disappearing beneath rising seas and accelerating erosion.

Many were never mapped.

Many were never excavated.

Some survive only in oral histories passed between generations.

Once these places disappear, they cannot be reconstructed.

NY Times: Isle de Jean Charles

Who Gets Remembered?

Climate Central’s reporting on Jamestown raises an uncomfortable but necessary question: in an era of climate change, what can we save?

Some places can be protected.

The Cape Hatteras Lighthouse was moved inland. Jamestown’s seawall has been reinforced. Archaeologists there are deploying sophisticated technologies to preserve as much of America’s colonial history as possible.

But many places cannot be relocated.

And some histories have never received the resources, recognition, or political attention required to preserve them.

The irony is difficult to ignore.

The United States is mobilizing to save the birthplace of colonization while many of the places preserving the histories of the people who lived here long before the nation’s founding are disappearing with comparatively little public attention.

Climate change is forcing us to confront a question far larger than sea walls or archaeological excavations.

It is forcing us to decide whose history matters enough to save.

Because along the Gulf Coast, the water is not only claiming land.

It is claiming memory.

And unlike Jamestown, many of these stories exist nowhere else.

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If this story resonated with you, I hope you’ll consider becoming a paid subscriber.

At Mesoscale, I don’t just cover climate change as a future threat. I investigate how it intersects with history, democracy, public health, and the communities living through it right now. That means original reporting, archival research, interviews, scientific analysis, and, sometimes, revisiting research I’ve spent years pursuing to tell stories that larger outlets often miss.

As seas rise and storms intensify, we’re not only deciding what kind of future we want to build. We’re deciding what parts of our shared past are worth saving — and whose stories get remembered.

Your subscription helps make sure those stories continue to be told.

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The milestone comes after Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth intervened in a series of military promotion decisions that disproportionately affected women and minority officers.

Military promotion boards sel…

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Disaster Briefs are semi-regular summaries of natural and man-made disasters, climate change, public health, and global conflict. Data is retrieved, analyzed, and synthesized on the day of publication unless otherwise noted.

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The Washington, D.C. City Council is poised to make permanent a policy that does not solve youth violence, does not make communities safer, and does not respect the rights of children.

Instead, it risks doing something far more dangerous: normalizing the idea that young people themselves are the probl…

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Most outlets don’t dig into the data on controversial or overlooked issues. But I do.

If you want consistent, data-driven reporting that follows the story all the way through, support this work by subscribing to Mesoscale.

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If the Trump regime’s proposed 2027 budget is passed, it will undermine science as we know it in the U.S.

With cuts of nearly 70% in some areas, the current administration seems determined to destroy our nation’s overall leadership in the sciences, with disproportionate reductions for geography, climate, …

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