Andrew Gillum, the former Democratic candidate who came within a whisker of becoming Florida's governor in 2018, has once again found himself on the wrong side of a booking desk. This time the venue is Daphne, Alabama, which is a lovely little town on Mobile Bay that probably was not expecting to host a former political rising star in its county jail.
Gillum was taken into custody Thursday night by Daphne police officers and booked into the Baldwin County jail on charges of possession of dangerous drugs, possession of drug paraphernalia, and possession of marijuana, according to online police records cited by Trending Politics. The Daphne Police Department has not released details on what led to the arrest, so for now we are left to wonder what exactly brought Gillum to coastal Alabama in the first place.
For those who need a refresher on the Gillum timeline, buckle up because it is quite a ride. He served as mayor of Tallahassee from 2014 to 2018, then won the Democratic primary for governor and lost the general election to Ron DeSantis by roughly 30,000 votes. Democrats and the media treated him like the next big thing. He was going to be a national star. He was going to reshape Florida politics. Instead, he reshaped his own Wikipedia page into something that reads like a cautionary tale.
In 2020, paramedics found Gillum inside a room at the Mondrian Hotel in South Beach alongside another man who appeared to be suffering from a possible overdose. Police body camera footage showed several prescription pill bottles in the room. Officers also recovered three small bags of methamphetamine. Gillum was not charged in that incident because prosecutors said there was insufficient evidence tying either man directly to the drugs, which were not found on their persons. That is what you might call a technicality working overtime.
Gillum later said he would step away from public life and seek help after the South Beach incident. He also faced federal fraud charges tied to his political operation in a separate case, though that prosecution ended without a full conviction, as TMZ reported.
So to recap the career arc here: mayor, gubernatorial nominee, hotel incident with methamphetamine, federal fraud case, and now a drug arrest in Alabama. That is not the trajectory anyone drew up on the whiteboard at Democratic Party headquarters.
The mugshot is out there for all to see, and it does not exactly scream "future of the party." Whatever happened in Daphne, Alabama, on Thursday night, Gillum is once again making headlines for reasons that have absolutely nothing to do with policy proposals or campaign speeches. At some point you have to wonder if the people who once called him a rising star feel a little silly about that prediction, or if they have just quietly moved on to the next one.
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