Gibson will challenge Rep. Bill Hager, R-Delray Beach. Hager has held the seat since 2012.
“The past five months have crystallized what’s been coming to me for a decade more gradually – the Republican Party is no longer the right fit for me,” Gibson writes on the political crowd-funding website Crowdpac. “I am proudly running as a Democrat.”
“I am an authentic consensus seeker, a focused listener, a joyful lifelong learner,” she continues. “Hailing from Alabama, I was graduated by Auburn University with a B.A. degree in philosophy and have lived in Palm Beach County for 32 years.”
In a story with the Washington Post in December, Gibson admitted to having dated Moore for a few months when she was 17 years old. Moore, at the time, was 34 years old.
Gibson’s story broke as a series of misconduct allegations began to steal momentum from Moore’s campaign. A big, steaming endorsement from President Donald Trump at a rally in Pensacola wasn’t even enough to prop up the seemingly stunted effort – that’s what happens when the public gets wind that the Chief Justice of the Alabama Supreme Court allegedly has a soft spot for younger (really, really young) women.
She reportedly said she had held Moore in “high esteem” until his accusers surfaced – and then continued to surface. She told the Post in December: “It takes what I thought was a very lovely part of my past, and it colors it, and it changes it irrevocably. It changes it permanently.”
In speaking about a video of Moore denying the allegations, she continued in the interview with the Post: “At 34 minutes and 56 seconds into the video, he says, unequivocally, I did not know any of them. In that moment, it changed my perspective. I knew he was a liar.”
Gibson has so far raised just shy of $2,000 of her $25,000 fundraising goal.
According to Gibson’s fundraising page, her platform will be available in greater detail in the near future.
“Division has itself become a primary and proximate issue, and it is time that we govern again,” she writes.
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This article appears in Mar 7-13, 2018.