Saying that she comes from a long line of public servants, Pinellas County-based state lawmaker and civil rights attorney Michele Rayner today became the latest Democrat to announce her candidacy for Florida’s 13th Congressional District seat being vacated next year by Charlie Crist.

“I am running for Congress because I believe that is where I can do the most good for the community,” Rayner said this morning before a group of supporters in front of the Lighthouse Church of Jesus in Largo. “The community that raised me, the community that I love. We need representatives in Congress who understand that politics is a calling to public service, not self-service.”

The 39-year-old Rayner made history last year when she became the first openly LGBTQ Black female to be elected to the Florida state Legislature, representing House District 70 (which encompasses parts of Pinellas, Hillsborough, Manatee and Sarasota counties). But she emphasizes that public service is an essential part of who she is and where she comes from.

She says her mother was one of the first Black social workers in Pinellas County and that her uncle was Harry K. Singletary, the first Black man to lead the state’s Dept. of Corrections from 1991-1999. And her grandfather, the late T.Z. Rayner, Sr., was the senior pastor at Lighthouse Church of Jesus, and along with his wife helped build the church more than 40 years ago.

“My whole life has been rooted in serving others, and that’s why I decided to become a lawyer and that’s why I actually decided to actively pursue the route of becoming a public defender,” Rayner told Spectrum Bay News 9 about an hour before her official press conference.

Rayner’s public profile as an attorney grew in 2018 when she represented the family of Markeis McGlockton, the unarmed Black man who was shot and killed in a Clearwater convenience store in 2018 that was initially declared to be a “Stand Your Ground” case by the Pinellas County Sheriff’s Office.  Working alongside nationally known attorney Benjamin Crump (who represented McGlockton’s girlfriend Brittany Jacobs), a Pinellas-Pasco County jury ultimately found McGlockton’s assailant, Michael Drejka, guilty of manslaughter.

“I was so proud of my city,” says Rayner, who grew up in Clearwater and said that she had probably visited that same convenience store hundreds of times. “So proud of my community. Because we came together in such a way to push forward for change that we actually got.”

Rayner is now the third major Democrat to enter the race for the seat being vacated by Crist, who is now running for governor. State Rep. Ben Diamond and former Obama administration official Eric Lynn entered the race last month.

On the GOP side, the only major candidate to file for 2022 is Anna Paulina Luna, the 2020 GOP nominee for the seat. There are other Republicans expected to get into the race in the coming months, however.

A looming question for everyone who enters this contest is what the make-up of the district will look like a year from now. Like every other congressional and legislative seat, District 13 will be re-drawn by the Florida GOP-controlled Legislature in early 2022. Currently, the seat leans Democratic by about 4.6 percentage points over Republicans (39%-34.4%), with another 27 percent registered as Non-Party-Affiliated. That gap is expected to change once the seat is redistricted, but how much it will change won’t be known until those new lines are drawn up and publicly released.

Rayner is part of a growing list of Florida House Democrats who have just served for a session or two in recent years before transitioning to run for congress (including Diamond, who was slated to become the Democratic House Minority Leader next year). 

She insists that if she felt she could do the most good in Tallahassee instead of Washington D.C., she’d stay in her seat, but “after talking with the community leaders and talking with stakeholders and leadership and family, I came to the decision that being in Congress is where I could do the most good for my community and for my county that I love and that I was born and raised in.”

She says climate issues, the environment, health care and supporting public education are all top items that she'd like to work on if elected to serve in D.C. next year.

“There’s a lot of work that needs to be done,” she says. “And what we’re seeing is this partisan bickering – this misinformation – instead of people just getting down and doing the work of the people.”