(Video) Oliver Larkin - Congressional Candidate for FL - District 23
- Indivisible Boca Raton
- 6 days ago
- 5 min read
The Progressive Who Quit His Job and Drove to New Hampshire to Support Bernie Sanders in 2015 Is Now Running for Congress in Your District
Indivisible Boca Raton reached out to all candidates in Florida’s 23rd Congressional District who support democratic values and the protection of our democracy to give voters a direct opportunity to hear their platforms. Candidate forums should not be interpreted as endorsements.
Meet Oliver Larkin
There’s a moment in Indivisible Boca Raton’s forum where someone in the audience asks Oliver the question everyone eventually asks progressive candidates: How are you going to pay for all of this?
Oliver doesn’t flinch. He doesn’t pivot. He doesn’t do the thing where politicians suddenly remember a “nuanced” position that conveniently avoids any real answer. He talks about taxing billionaires and corporations, but then he does something more interesting. He points out that the United States already pays twice as much per capita for health care as any other country on Earth, and that every single working person in this room already has Medicare taxes coming out of their paycheck. “We’re just asking for the payroll tax to be enough to actually cover your vision, your hearing, your dental, your mental health care, your reproductive health care, without a premium, a deductible, a copay, or an out of pocket cost.”
Simple. Direct. No rhetorical escape hatch. That’s the Oliver you’ll see in this video.
The candidate, and why he’s in this race
Oliver is a first-time candidate running in Florida’s 23rd Congressional District against incumbent Jared Moskowitz. He was born on the Fourth of July, grew up in Fort Lauderdale, and spent the better part of a decade as a behind-the-scenes organizer and political consultant in the progressive movement.
His origin story is one of those things you’d think someone made up for a campaign ad, except it’s true: in 2015, when Bernie Sanders was down 50 points in the polls, Oliver quit his job as a line cook making $7.25 an hour and drove to New Hampshire with no guarantee of a paycheck, slept at his grandparents’ house across the border in Massachusetts, and showed up every day at the Sanders field office until they put him on staff. He went on to work in New Hampshire, Nevada, Kansas, Utah, New York, and Rhode Island. Later, he helped elect Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib, and Ayanna Pressley. He was in Washington, D.C. on January 6th, and within weeks was working with Adam Schiff to design the accountability structures for the January 6th committee.
He’s not a stranger to this work. He’s someone who spent years doing it anonymously, and who finally decided that no one else was going to step up in his district.
The thing that pushed him over the edge? Oliver says it was watching Moskowitz, in the weeks immediately after the 2024 election, "blaming progressives for why we lost that election while he was becoming the very first Democratic member of Congress to join Elon Musk's DOGE caucus." Then came what Oliver describes as "the nonprofit killer bill that would have allowed the Trump administration to designate nonprofit groups it disagrees with as terrorist organizations." Then Moskowitz became, Oliver says, "the only Democrat in our state of Florida to vote for the Pro-ICE Laken Riley Act." Then, on what Oliver calls "Trump's so-called Liberation Day," he says Moskowitz "bought the dip during Donald Trump's trade war. Tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of dollars potentially in stock trades. Buying Amazon, buying Lockheed Martin stock as he was advocating for Donald Trump to bomb Iran, personally profiting from his congressional stock trading."
“If I did not step forward,” Oliver tells the room, “no one else in our community was going to.”
What he actually said at the forum
The Indivisible Boca Raton forum is a real Q&A, not a stump speech with softball questions. We don’t screen or curate our attendees’ remarks, and the result was the audience pushing Oliver on Israel and Gaza. On the federal deficit. On how Democrats lost 7 million votes between 2020 and 2024. On the FAU-ICE agreement. On ghost jobs and the AI economy. On the military budget. On how a Democrat even functions in Congress with Trump in the White House and a veto pen ready for everything.
He called what’s happening in Gaza a genocide, said the United States should immediately restrict military aid under the existing Leahy Laws, and cited a district-level poll of 491 likely Democratic voters showing that position is held by a 2-to-1 majority among Democrats in his own district.
On the military budget, he went further than most candidates will go publicly: phase out nuclear weapons, audit the Pentagon (which has never passed one in its entire history), draw down some overseas installations, and redirect that money toward military pay and benefits, which he argued are currently inadequate. He mentioned military families lining up at food banks during the last government shutdown.
On immigration, he described joining bi-weekly vigils outside the Broward Transitional Center in Pompano Beach, an ICE facility within the 23rd district where a 45-year-old Haitian woman named Marie Andre Blaise died in custody. He named her. He talked about performing surprise wellness checks on ICE facilities, and he connected that to his wife, whose parents came from Nicaragua as undocumented immigrants and received amnesty under Ronald Reagan.
On the AI economy, he said plainly: “I believe we need public ownership of large segments of big tech.”
Why this matters beyond the 23rd district
Democrats lost Florida badly in 2024. They lost it in 2022 before that. Oliver’s diagnosis is that the party has been offering young voters, especially, nothing compelling enough to come out for: a party that supported a genocide, talked about the stock market while rents skyrocketed, and gave progressives “scraps” while expecting turnout.
His prescription is not a lurch to the center to win back hypothetical swing voters. It’s a universal economic platform, Medicare for All, free college, universal child care, paid family leave, a $25 minimum wage, a Green New Deal, a federal jobs guarantee, a ban on congressional stock trading, because those things actually affect people’s lives regardless of which cable news tribe they belong to.
He raised over $325,000 in the first quarter of 2026, entirely in grassroots small-dollar donations, more than triple the previous quarter. He appeared on Don Lemon’s show. He did a stream with Hasan Piker and raised $65,000 in ninety minutes. He’s knocked on nearly 10,000 doors. He has a goal of 80,000, more than the number of votes expected to be cast in the primary.
He also notes that Congressman Moskowitz co-sponsored Medicare for All shortly after Oliver launched his campaign. “It just took a primary challenge to hold him accountable.” WATCH THE VIDEO and judge for yourself where you stand on Oliver’s bid for District 23.
Donate to support Oliver’s Campaign: https://secure.actblue.com/donate/ofc_website
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