FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. — After Florida Democrats suffered massive setbacks in November — even worse than their usual election losses — the search was on for someone to blame.
Out came the knives, pointed at state Democratic Party Chair Manny Diaz. After initially resisting calls for his resignation, Diaz stepped down earlier this month, halfway through his four-year term as state party leader.
That was the easy part.
Now, Democrats need to find a new state chair, someone able to work through multiple priorities for a party that many believe is facing years of election losses and an exhausting struggle to escape the political quicksand.
How bad is it?
“The reality is that we’re below zero. We can’t get any lower than we are right now. Every aspect of our party needs to be rebuilt,” said Stephen Gaskill, president of the Florida LGBTQ+ Democratic Caucus, who was among those who favored Diaz’s departure.
—No Democrat currently holds a statewide elected office in Florida. Republicans have won 30 statewide elections since 2002; Democrats just six. Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis won 62 of the state’s 67 counties.
—South Florida, long the state’s Democratic stronghold, is increasingly Republican. DeSantis won both Palm Beach and Miami-Dade counties last year, and did much better in Broward in 2022 than he did four years ago.
—Republicans vastly outnumber Democrats in the state Senate, state House of Representatives, and state’s congressional delegation.
Alex Berrios, a political consultant and former vice chair of the Palm Beach County Democratic Party — and a candidate to succeed Diaz as state party chair — said the already diminished ranks of Democratic members of Congress from Florida (down to only eight of 28) are in jeopardy.
Election results from 2022 suggest to Berrios that U.S. Reps. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, Lois Frankel and Jared Moskowitz from South Florida and Darren Soto from central Florida could be in political trouble if Democrats don’t get their act together.
Red or purple
For most of the last two decades, Democrats ran competitive races in Florida. Even though they lost most, they were close, with the highest-profile contests sometimes decided by a percentage point, or less, of the statewide vote.
After Democrat Barack Obama twice won Florida, many saw an up-for-grabs purple state, neither Republican red nor Democratic blue.
But President Donald Trump performed especially well in 2020, winning the state by 3.3 percentage points even as he lost the presidency. That was larger than Trump’s 2016 Florida victory and more than qualified for what people in the political world had called a “Florida landslide,” which is anything greater than 1 percentage point in a statewide election.
And DeSantis won an overwhelming 2022 victory, winning the state by 19 points as Democratic turnout collapsed.
Florida is now viewed by many as a red state.
But Wasserman Schultz, a former chair of the Democratic National Committee, said it’s a mistake to assume Florida is a lost cause for her party.
She and Broward County Commissioner Steve Geller, a former Florida Senate Democratic leader, see 2022 more as a low point than a point on a continuous decline.
Democratic turnout was anemic during the midterm elections, but they said it is certain to increase during next year’s presidential contest.
Financial challenge
Still, Democrats face numerous challenges, many of them intertwined and difficult to unravel.
“Finances is the single biggest issue,” Geller said.
With statewide election losses before 2022, and no good prospects for victory last year, national Democratic donors who could have helped finance voter registration and turnout efforts in Florida put their resources elsewhere, spending in places where Democrats had more of a chance.
Without money, Democrats weren’t able to effectively maintain the political basics such as voter registration and staying in touch with important constituencies. One result: in 2021, Republican voter registrations in Florida overtook Democrats.
Now they’re outnumbered, so they start any election season at a disadvantage. And a critical component of turnout is another big problem. Democrats’ use of mail voting increased sharply in 2020 because of the COVID pandemic. But all voters’ requests for mail ballots through last year’s November election are now void.
To get a mail ballot for this year’s municipal elections or the 2024 presidential election in Florida, voters will have to reapply. Republicans have funding and infrastructure to encourage their voters to reapply for mail ballots; Democrats don’t.
At the same time, Democrats are facing headwinds from a shifting population. DeSantis’ brand of governance, which emphasizes freeing people from government mandates conservatives don’t like and imposing government mandates liberals dislike — and packaging them as representing the “free state of Florida” — is attracting Republican-leaning voters from elsewhere in the country.
Though Republicans did well in 2022, U.S. Rep. Sheila Cherfilus-McCormick, a Broward-Palm Beach County Democrat, said that’s not a given in the future. Knocking at doors, attending parades, going to other events, she said she has seen potential. “I’m not seeing a love for the Republican Party. I’m not seeing a love for the Democratic Party. So the people are still swayable.”
Long term
Like many inside and outside the Democratic Party, Lourdes Diaz, a Pembroke Pines Hispanic media and branding strategist, said what the Republicans have done for years — constant work on voter registration, outreach and turnout — is a model. “The Republicans win today for something they did 20 years ago. They are long-term thinkers,” she said. “We cannot be short term any more.”
Gaskill said the next party chair needs to develop “a 10-year plan for Florida. We’re not going to take Florida back in 2024 or in 2026, but we need to start getting some wins on the board. ... We can rebuild the party from the ground up, but we all need to recognize the enormity of the task and stay committed to the long-term goal.”
The most important thing for the Democratic Party, Cherfilus-McCormick said, is to have people in communities talking to people all the time, not just during election season.
“Can the Democratic Party turn it around? Yes, but we have to be on the ground continuously. At the end of the day we might not be able to compete with [the Republicans] financially, but I can compete with you at the door. Because if I can get to your door and talk to you, you can see the compassion that I have for you and your family … you understand that I have your back. Where we need to be is at the door,” she said.
Job qualifications
Several elected Democrats and party activists said the next chair needs to combine vision with operating skills, including an ability to raise money, organize grassroots efforts at things like voter registration and signing people up to vote-by-mail, and engaging with voters year-round, not simply when an election approaches.
“In short, we need an experienced, focused person with the ability to raise money, the ability to organize, and the ability to communicate,” Wasserman Schultz said.
Cherfilus-McCormick said the party needs a chair who “knows that it takes grunt work and it’s not the pictures and caucus parties but the hard labor.”
“We’ve had enough of this bougie politics, I call it, where people just do TV and have these meetings and rallies with only us. Where’s the community? We have to do away with the idea that we’re doing politics just for ourselves and actually engage people.”
Ronald Surin, president of the Haitian American Democratic Club of Broward, said the times call for a “charismatic leader, somebody who can energize the base and craft a serious, clear message” to motivate activists and voters. “We cannot be defined by our opponent,” Surin said. “Oftentimes we have passive leaders [and] we react to the Republican agenda.”
Geller said the next chair needs to understand the nuances of Florida voters, recognizing that African American and Caribbean American voters have different interests and Hispanic voters aren’t monolithic. Cuban Americans have different outlooks than people who moved from Puerto Rico, who have different priorities than people who emigrated from Mexico, Nicaragua or Venezuela.
Diaz, former president of the Pembroke Pines Democratic Club, wants as state party chair “somebody who’s a fighter, somebody who’s bold, somebody who’s not afraid.” More specifically, she said, the party needs someone who can anticipate and respond to suggestions that Democrats are communists and socialists, an allegation that has helped Republicans with Hispanic voters in South Florida.
Candidate recruitment
Years of Democratic underperformance means the party doesn’t have a deep bench of experienced candidates to run for higher offices. The three announced candidates for party chair cited candidate recruitment as a priority.
“We must recruit strong diverse candidates that reflect the best our state has to offer in order to rebuild our bench at every level,” former state Sen. Annette Taddeo said in her announcement video on TikTok.
Cherfilus-McCormick, a lawyer who was CEO of her family’s home health care company before she was elected to Congress, said the Democratic Party needs to run new, fresh faces, and not serve up the kinds of people who have lost elections.
“We have to be recruiting candidates who actually have the heart to serve, and not recycling candidates and praying that, ‘Hey, this time you’ll bite.’ I would say to people that my children don’t even like leftovers. My husband won’t eat leftovers. So why are we trying to recycle candidates and say, ‘Hey eat this.’”
Both parties
So far, Berrios and Rick Hoye, chair of the Broward Democratic Party, and former state Sen. Annette Taddeo, have declared their candidacies for state Democratic Party chair.
Berrios is of Cuban and Puerto Rican ancestry. Hoye is the first Black Broward Democratic chair and would be the first Black state party chair if elected.
Taddeo, who was born in Colombia, is a former chair of the Miami-Dade Democratic Party and has unsuccessfully run for lieutenant governor and Congress.
The Republican Party of Florida is also picking a new chair. But it comes against a backdrop of years of successes. The current chair, Joe Gruters, is running for Republican National Committee treasurer.
So far, Christian Ziegler, current vice chair of the state Republican Party, and Evan Power, chair of the Leon County Republican Party, are running. Another possible entrant is former state Rep. Anthony Sabatini, who who comes from the MAGA, far-right wing of the Republican Party.
Work ahead
Wasserman Schultz said Democrats shouldn’t despair.
“I’m not someone who spends a lot of time getting out my violin and whining about our situation. We have to roll up our damn sleeves and get to work, and we all have to pull together,” she said. “We have a lot of motivated, focused Democrats who understand that we have a big job ahead of us.
“But let’s just remember this is a state that has consistently been able to deliver pluralities for Democratic candidates, that has helped elect presidents, and that has been and continues to remain a purple state despite the recent results in elections.”
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