Candidate Profile: Travaris McCurdy

Five years ago, Travaris McCurdy, 41, was the “Covid representative,” elected to the Florida House of Representatives where he served a single term, largely representing Orlando's downtown area. He worked on vaccine distribution with the late State Sen. Geraldine F. Thompson and resolved unemployment claims issues with State Rep. Anna V. Eskamani. He handed out groceries in Pine Hills. He served as a Democratic Minority Whip.

Then politically, things began to go sideways.

He staged a surprise sit-in with other Black lawmakers on the House floor in April 2022 to protest the Congressional redistricting map Gov. Ron DeSantis substituted — which eliminated a Black voting district — for the one legislators had passed. But the maneuver put McCurdy on the outs with his own party.

He lost his bid for re-election.

Then a year ago, he made a run for Orlando City Council in a special election that became so rancorous, McCurdy said it ultimately cost him his job at the Greater Orlando Aviation Authority.

But today, McCurdy is newly married with a blended family that includes four children (ages 7 to 21) and a new job at the Orlando Housing Authority. And he wants to return to Tallahassee to serve the community where he was born and raised.

“I know the heartbeat of this district. I know what makes us stay up at night because I lived it as a child, as a working professional, and now as a husband and a father,” said the alum of Robinswood Middle School and West Orange and Olympia high schools. “I’m looking to bring my experience, my lived experience, my legislative experience back home to this district at a time when it’s greatly needed.”

McCurdy faces Rashon Young in the June 24 Democratic primary for House District 40. The district includes Windermere, Ocoee, Pine Hills, College Park, Apopka and parts of Orlando, Maitland and Winter Park. The winner will square off against Republican Tuan Le. The Apopka aerospace engineer, who twice ran unsuccessfully for Congress in District 10, is the only Republican to qualify for the Sept. 2 special election to fill the House seat that opened when State Rep. LaVon Bracy Davis announced her decision to run for the senate seat that opened following Thompson’s death in February. Write-in candidate Christopher Hall also qualified.

Representatives serve two-year terms and earn $29,697 a year.

The deadline to request a mail-in ballot is June 12. Early voting will take place daily June 14 to 22, from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Click here for early voting locations.

"I've done the job"

In another timeline, McCurdy and Young might be compatriots rather than opponents. Both are outspoken liberal Democrats who worked as legislative aides to Bracy siblings before running for office themselves: McCurdy worked as chief legislative aide for former State Sen. Randolph Bracy while Young was chief of staff for Bracy Davis. And both can claim connections to Thompson — McCurdy as the senator’s chief legislative aide; Young through Bracy Davis who was the senator’s frequent legislative partner in the Florida House.  

The difference, said McCurdy, who’s clocked 11 years in the Florida Legislature as an aide and representative, is that he’s already “done the job” of the legislator.  

“I've been there working with the farm workers in Apopka. I've been in Pine Hills working with them on police response and issues with the Sheriff's Office and collaborating with the Urban League and the state attorney's office," he said in an interview with VoxPopuli.

"And I've been feeding our communities, those who couldn't afford groceries at the Pine Hills Community Center. I've been in Ocoee working on the July in November, making sure that we know the story [of the Ocoee Massacre]. I've been in Winter Garden … helping small businesses making sure that they attain their certifications. So I know this community. I was raised by this community. I was taught by this community. I know what it needs. I know what it deserves, and I have the experience to deliver on that.”

McCurdy’s top agenda items are the twin affordability crises of housing and property insurance, along with education and criminal justice reform. Addressing them, he said, “would give people a fairer shot in this state.”

In his first term he introduced a bill that would reduce the percentage of time served before one could be eligible for parole from 85 percent of the sentence to 65 percent and another bill to prevent college students from going hungry. Both died in committee.

This time around he is focused on increasing teacher salaries — ranked 50th in the nation for the second year in a row — so they're not forced to juggle two and three jobs after school just to put food on their own tables.

And as insurance rates are already ticking up in early 2025, McCurdy said he wants to bolster Citizens Property Insurance so that it is more than the insurer of last resort. He also wants to look to other cities to see how they have incentivized developers to build affordable housing and what may be done through zoning and permitting to smooth that process, something that becomes particularly relevant as the Trump administration seeks to slash funding for Department of Housing and Urban Development rental assistance programs by 42 percent while shifting oversight of those programs to state and local governments.

“ I was taught right here in these public schools that that's the American dream, and that the key to economic success and economic legacy is land ownership, home ownership," he said. "That’s slipping away … The system is not friendly to folks. I just don’t know if a lot of people in Tallahassee have had that problem because of their lived experience. We need someone who understands it, and I work in the public housing sector.”

Still, he’s pragmatic about what can be achieved in a Democratic caucus that’s smaller than when he was first in office.

“This is a very Democratic district, but Tallahassee is not District 40,” he said. “I want to get things done for the residents in District 40 and across the state. I gotta take a more strategic approach, build stronger relationships with current leadership.”

This means eschewing stand-alone bills and looking instead for opportunities to add amendments or tweak language in other bills, he explains.

“Sometimes you can make life better for people by changing the word in an existing bill or by giving options, opening it up. I’m looking to do things like that, be creative, to find red tape that we can cut … maybe we can have an amendment to a bill that’s accepted to address some of these issues, knowing that we can’t get everything we want in one chunk. This process in Tallahassee, it’s step by step. You gotta get it in increments and I’m prepared for that.”

It’s a strategy that Thompson often spoke of employing to move her agenda forward.

"Being strategic"

McCurdy talks a lot these days about “being strategic,” working across the aisle. That’s good governance. But it’s also image rehab and fence mending to show that he’s no longer the maverick who led the Stop The Black Attack three years ago that temporarily halted voting on the governor's voting districts map.  

“We shouldn’t be here begging for representation in 2022,” McCurdy told the Florida Phoenix at the time. “I’ve had enough of being kicked around in this building, in this chamber and still being expected to smile and shake your hands and engage in conversation with the same people who are trying to oppress my people.”

The sit-in was the kind of “good trouble, necessary trouble” the late Congressman John Lewis advocated; the kind that made instant heroes out of two Black Tennessee representatives for joining a gun control protest in their legislature chambers. But McCurdy said he paid a price.

“When I decided to do something that I felt compelled to do without permission to kind of change some people's perspectives because they want you to play along and get along, or they appreciate the fact that you don't seem willing to stand up to them. When I displayed those actions, it kind of made people back off. Which is fine.”

McCurdy said he’s learned from the experience.

 “ Unfortunately that didn't change the outcome of that situation. So the definition of insanity is to try the same thing and expect different results. So I have to take a more strategic approach, build stronger relationships with current leadership so that I can have an opportunity to pick up a phone directly and speak to the Speaker. I'm more than just a protestor. I'm a problem solver and I find solutions. And I'm a man of dignity. I'm a man of faith.”

Refusing to go low

A year ago, when McCurdy ran in the special election for Orlando’s City Council, there was a barrage of negative press. Misrepresenting where he got his bachelor’s degree. Drug and weapons arrests from the early aughts. An allegation that he’d kicked in the door of a former girlfriend’s home. And a text sent from his opponent Shaniqua Rose's phone that offered, if he dropped out of the race, to keep the damaging material under wraps.

McCurdy said he was blindsided by the intensity of the negative campaign.  "We had run against each other in the past [during the 2022 midterms]. I was just asking myself like, Why? And all of us, like, Where is this coming from?"

McCurdy told VoxPopuli he attended FAMU but finished his bachelor's degree at Ashland University, a for-profit online institution that was eventually taken over by University of Arizona Global Campus.

No charges were ever filed with the door vandalism. When asked if he’d kicked the door, he told VoxPopuli unequivocally “I did not.”

The most damaging report was from 2004 and involved crack cocaine and a .357 magnum found under the passenger seat in a car McCurdy was in. The way McCurdy tells it, he and his cousin’s boyfriend were driving to the store when they were pulled over by police.

“He was a seasoned criminal because he knew to put the gun under my seat … He didn’t have a license. He had drugs on him. I don’t think he wanted drugs and a gun. Of course, he put it under my seat,” McCurdy recalled.

McCurdy told VoxPopuli that he pleaded with the boyfriend to tell the police the firearm wasn’t his. “I’m like Dude, will you please tell the people this is not my gun?! I don’t even know you. McCurdy asked the officers to check the weapon for fingerprints to prove he hadn't touched it. “They weren’t running fingerprints, but what they were going to do is put me in handcuffs.” He said he spent that night in jail but was released the following day.

Nothing came of the incident at the time — “The gun wasn’t mine. I don’t own a gun today,” he said. But he said lost his job at the Greater Orlando Aviation Authority over the steady drip of negative news around the election.

“ I was in a very compromised position just trying to protect myself, the image of the airport at the time,” McCurdy said. “That campaign eventually caused a mutual separation from me and the airport just because of all the negative hits and press and people doing public record requests there every day. So that was tough.”

McCurdy weathered the attacks and refused to go negative during the campaign. Even today, he still won’t say his opponent’s name. But he told VoxPopuli he saw her in his 7-year-old daughter, and he “didn’t want to appear to be a man attacking a woman. Not for a political seat,” he said.

Since then, he said, he’s worked to put the negativity of that election behind him.

"I'm going to continue to show up in this community and work,” he said. “People have to make their own assessments for themselves.”