On the impacts of Graham's name, since it just occurred to me: the past three "legacy candidates" were LeRoy Collins Jr., Bud Chiles, and Connie Mack IV, and none of them won their races (or really even came close). Only Mack has the political experience Graham does, but it's something worth noticing.
To be fair, not only was Mack the only one with the sort of experience Graham had, but even Mack was a pretty awful candidate. Say what you will about Gwen Graham (and she's not some sort of perfect candidate or anything like that), but I think she's far stronger than Connie Mack and unlike him, she's actually won a very competitive race in a huge wave year for the other party. Admittedly, Steve Southerland was a weak incumbent with a tendency to say really stupid things about women IIRC and Graham has only won one house race, but even so, I do think she's at least somewhat battle-tested in a way that Mack never was by virtue of his district.
My concern with Graham is that she (as others have noted) is straight out of the usual FL Democratic playbook and Adam Putnam is a stronger candidate than Rick Scott (and certainly far stronger than Steve "Has Gwen Graham ever been to a lingerie shower?" Southerland). This may be somewhat neutralized as a factor if 2018 does end up being a Democratic wave, but I could also see this race more or less going the way of the 2006 FL Governor's race. Paradoxically, I think Morgan is probably a stronger candidate than Graham and far more likely to lose in a landslide after completely imploding. Graham is essentially a safe play and I'd definitely pick her over Morgan if we were running against a weak Republican like Rick Scott. However, I think a high-risk/high-reward candidate like John Morgan might be a better bet against someone like Putnam (my main concern with Morgan is that if he does implode, he'll drag other folks down with him).
Speaking of Florida, the Democrats really need to run stronger candidates for some of these statewide offices and congressional seats where they seem to have been punting the past couple of cycles (and not just the obvious places like FL-27 where it'd be great if the DCCC could recruit JJR to run in 2018). We should be recruiting credible wave insurance candidates to run against Vern Buchanan and Brian Mast, both of whom are weak and scandal-tarnished Congressmen from winnable districts (albeit Republican-leaning ones). The one time we ran a solid wave insurance candidate against Buchanan was 2012 and even without a wave we held him to a single-digit win. The FL Dems should be making a serious play for offices like FL AG, but knowing the FL Dems, we'll probably end up nominating some has-been-that-never-was like Rod Smith instead of someone like Bob Buckhorn who could actually win.
Incidentally, this problem is pretty similar to one of the biggest (perhaps even the biggest) hurdles Democrats face in their efforts to re-take the House: we've done a piss-poor job of recruiting strong candidates (the DSCC seems to be the exception) the past few cycles and often don't even bother running solid wave/scandal insurance candidates or competing in winnable and/or elastic areas that have leaned toward the other party lately. The reasons may be different (the national Democratic leadership is over-reliant on data metrics and subscribes to some highly inaccurate CW rooted in classist elitism while the FL Democratic party is simply a disorganized mess), but the FDP and national Democratic establishment both shoot themselves in the foot with poor candidate recruitment and a tendency to ignore places where they could gain more votes and/or win more races.
Of course, the most important place where the FDP, ODP, and most other state Democratic need to improve their recruitment is in state legislative and county-wide offices. That's how you build a bench: from the bottom up. For whatever reason, regardless of their ideology, many Democrats seem to have trouble with bottom-up political strategies and it's not just something you see with state parties. Look at the Berniecrat approach to reforming the Democratic Party (although to be fair, they have started trying to takeover state parties so maybe they're starting to realize that a top-down approach will never work). Did folks start by working to take control of the big city political machines that would otherwise fight any future effort they might make to take control of the national party? Did they channel their energy into laying the groundwork for serious primary challenges against powerful, entrenched Democrats in safe districts who regularly work to kill progressive legislation such as the members of the IDC or Nicholas Mattiello? Did they work in an organized manner to take control of the key levers of institutional power within the Democratic party and then use said levers when successful? No, they instead directed all their energy into a race for DNC chairman that they were never going come close to winning in hindsight. Whether we're talking about building a strong bench in a state or taking control of a political party, it may not be as exciting to start at the bottom, but it's usually where you have to start in order to be successful. Anyway, I'm getting off topic and this post has gone on long enough
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