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aubet ‘Don’t forget to vote, handsome.’ NAACP hits Tootsie’s strip club for voter drive
Tootsie’s Cabaret bills itself as the largest strip club in the worldaubet, so a group of women dancing by the VIP entrance didn’t seem to surprise customers arriving for happy hour Friday evening.
The hyping of American democracy did present a twist.
“Voting is a power,” the seven NAACP volunteers in sport shirts and long pants chanted as Tootsie’s customers walked by on their way to half-priced drinks at the popular Miami Gardens club. “Don’t forget to vote.”
With Black voter rolls shrinking in Miami-Dade, the NAACP and its allies are dispatching volunteers to try and find new voters in places where the looming election may not be top of mind.
“You’re meeting them where they are,” said Reggie Leon, the Miami Gardens council member who helped organize the Tootsie’s event. He also was behind a registration tent that went up outside the nearby Studio 183 nightclub last month to target reluctant voters there.
“You can host a voter registration rally, but they’re not coming,” Leon said in an interview before the NAACP event. “You can go to them.”
The outreach at Tootsie’s is one of several events the organization is holding to get people civically engaged. Leon said the registration events also measure success by motivating people already registered who still might see the logistics of getting to a polling place as a little too daunting for their schedules.
“A lot of people aren’t informed,” he said. “They’‘ll say: ‘Oh, I didn’t know I could early vote.’ We’ll tell them you can vote by mail, too.”
At Tootsie’s, management provided a table for the NAACP’s Miami-Dade Branch, a prime spot by the entrance and chilled water bottles in a bucket for the team as the sun set on Friday.
READ MORE: A fast-growing GOP shift in Florida or voter suppression? Here’s what the numbers show
The NAACP table included framed QR codes that would let people pull up a registration website on their phones ahead of Florida’s Monday deadline for 2024 presidential election on Nov. 5. Another code let registered voters confirm their status and their addresses.
The volunteers had no takers for the codes on Friday night. Still, they were celebrating at the chance to spread a pro-voting message to customers who stopped to chat or flashed a thumbs up as they walked by.
“Lots of great vibes and lots of great feedback,” said Daniella Pierre, the chapter president. “Tonight was about voter engagement and education. And definitely fun.”
The NAACP outreach operation comes at a time when the number of Black voters is shrinking on Miami-Dade voter rolls, a trend that’s accelerating the Democratic Party’s local decline.
In the last four years, county voter rolls show about 31,000 fewer active Black voters, a decline of of 12%. That’s faster pace than the 2% dip in active registered voters countywide.
Nearly 80% of Black voters in Miami-Dade belong to the Democratic Party, and Black voters make up a third of the Democratic voter rolls.
That’s not as large as the 44% Hispanic share. But it’s still enough to make Black voters essential to a coalition that has kept Miami-Dade blue in every election for president since the 1980s.
A blue streak for governor lasted for more than 20 years, until Florida’s Republican governor, Ron DeSantis, shocked local Democrats with an 11-point reelection win in Miami-Dade in 2022.
That win put Democrats on the defensive in 2024, as did the trends in voter registration. In the last two years, Miami-Dade Democrats are down nearly 57,000 active voters while Republicans have gained more than 37,000, according to the latest county statistics.
If current voter-roll trends continue, independent voters will take the No. 1 slot sometime in the first half of 2025 and Democrats will fall to third place behind Republicans before the close of next year.
Tootsie’s customers were mostly silent on party politics as they walked by the NAACP table. The exception was John Andrews, a retired firefighter from Long Island heading out from the warehouse-sized adult entertainment complex with 76,000 square feet inside and a separate sports bar called Knockers.
“Trump, baby!” Andrews yelled as he walked past the crowd. “Sorry.”
The NAACP is a non-partisan civil rights organization, so the Tootsie’s messaging was only advocating for voting and not candidates. A mocked catchphrase by former President Donald Trump did end up on a sign Pierre waved that stated “My Black job is to vote.”
Enticing strangers into a voting discussion can be a grind for any organizer. Making it work outside a strip club wasn’t any easier.
“Don’t forget to vote, handsome,” Carol Lawrence, a chapter vice president, called out to a few young men on their way out of Tootsie’s.
Monique Simon led the way on the chants and dancing that soon made the NAACP group seem like a voting cheer squad and a prelude to the party inside.
“I enjoy this,” she said while on a break. “I think one thing we miss is showing we’re having a good time. Yes, this is a serious election. But we can show them it’s fun, too.”
Local political power was a theme of the Friday messaging, with Pierre urging people who said they were already registered to make sure they “vote all the way down the ballot.”
Ebony Johnson, advisor to the chapter’s Youth Council, had some luck getting a couple of men to play a game the NAACP had set up on the table that emphasized the importance of municipal elections.
Contestants saw a list of local offices — state attorney, city mayor, judge — and were asked to match the posts to descriptions volunteers held on laminated cards.
A Tootsie’s customer who goes by “K” Miller knew Johnson and agreed to play shortly after 7 pm. Faced with a description of someone who has the power to enhance quality of life in the city, Miller correctly answered “Miami Gardens Mayor” and was instantly celebrated with high fives and a “Black Voters Matter” t-shirt.
“That was pretty cool,” he said on the way to the parking lot. “I came here to get a happy hour drink. And I got a civics lesson.”
This story was originally published October 5aubet, 2024, 12:55 PM.