Opinion | Charlie Crist Goes All In for Teachers Unions

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis is favored to win re-election, and his Democratic opponent, Rep. Charlie Crist, seems determined to lose. On Saturday, four days after winning the nomination in a primary, Mr. Crist chose Karla Hernández-Mats, president of Miami’s United Teachers of Dade, as his running mate.

Ms. Hernández-Mats, who is also a vice president of the American Federation of Teachers, opposed reopening Florida public schools. In September 2020, the UTD organized a caravan, including a hearse, to protest reopening schools outside the Miami-Dade County School Board headquarters. Ms. Hernández-Mats insisted that “lives are going to be lost” if Miami schools reopened. Florida’s schools reopened in 2020, but in 2021 the AFT successfully lobbied the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to tighten school-reopening guidelines, which kept schools elsewhere closed longer.