As Jacksonville City Council Member Leanna Cumber announces her campaign for Jacksonville Mayor today, voters should know about her radical views and the far-right extremists that she aligns herself with.
During her first campaign, where she never faced the voters on a ballot, and now as she positions herself to run for mayor, Cumber has spun a tangled web of national corporate and pro-Trump donors, which includes one notable local contribution: a $1,000 donation given on October 20, 2017, by corrupt former JEA CEO Aaron Zahn. In 2018, Husein Cumber, LeAnna Cumber’s husband and a JEA board member at the time, voted to install Aaron Zahn as interim managing director and CEO and again as permanent JEA CEO.
Masquerading as a moderate, Cumber has refused to denounce the extremist pro-Trump forces that led to January 6th. In an interview just five weeks after that fateful day, she said “what I’d like to do is move forward” as if this blatant attack on our democracy had never happened. In February 2022, Cumber held a fundraiser with former Texas Governor Rick Perry, who advocated for an “aggressive” strategy to steal the 2020 election.
Relatively unknown, Cumber will now have to spend her millions covering up her extreme record and boosting her name identification. In a February 2022 UNF poll, she was the choice of only 9% of voters.
Duval Democratic Party Chair Daniel Henry issued the following statement on Cumber’s entry into the race for Jacksonville mayor:
“I join the people of Jacksonville in expressing my outrage that far-right Republican LeAnna Cumber is running for mayor of our great city. She is the very type of politician that a majority of voters dislike: a calculating and corrupt political opportunist in the mold of Donald Trump who will do or say anything to get elected. Her millions raised from a national network of right-wing and pro-Trump extremists won’t be enough to cover up the simple fact that she will always put her political career before our community. Jacksonville voters deserve to know about every facet of the JEA scandal and the millions of dollars being spent by right-wing extremists to buy the Mayor’s office.”