Freshman U.S. Rep. Maxwell Frost and party Chair Nikki Fried will lay out their visions for their party at the Florida Democrats’ annual convention on Saturday in Orlando.
“We’re in the off-year,” said Frost, D-Orlando, in an interview with Orlando Sentinel on Friday. “And this is when the work really needs to be done. … When we start building our infrastructure in the year of the campaign, we set ourselves up for failure. Unfortunately, that’s something our party has done here in Florida for far too long. And I think Chair Fried recognizes that.”
Fried, a former state agriculture commissioner and candidate for governor, was elected chair in the wake of the party’s biggest loss in decades in the 2022 election. Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis was reelected by 19 points, and the GOP won supermajorities in the Legislature.
But Fried said DeSantis’ woes on the presidential campaign trail, coming after a year of controversies including the governor’s war with Disney over the so-called ‘don’t say gay’ law, a pending six-week abortion ban, and the worsening homeowners’ insurance crisis, leaves both him and the Republican Party vulnerable.
“The implosion of Ron DeSantis on the national stage has only continued to highlight the things that Democrats have been saying for five years now,” Fried said in an interview. “… The rest of the country has been exposed to who Ron DeSantis is, and his agenda isn’t popular with the nation. And it’s not popular here, either.”
Fried has been adamant that she will turn around the state party’s fundraising woes following a 2022 campaign season in which big national donors mostly spent money elsewhere.
“We’re receiving significant contributions from not only donors here in Florida, who had walked away from the party but also donors across the country,” she said.
Small donor contributions have also increased significantly, she said, and the party has reestablished a 40-plus-member Board of Trustees committed to providing and soliciting donations.
The party raised about $805,000 during the third quarter of 2023, according to state filings. The Republican Party of Florida took in $2.7 million over the same period.
Frost said his goal at the “Mission: Take Back Florida Dinner” at the Rosen Centre on Saturday night will be to get Democrats excited about 2024 and focus on strategy.
He also said it shouldn’t be forgotten that the state has been won by razor-thin margins in governor’s races over the past decade before 2022’s blowout.
“So we only had one year of a really bad performance in the past 20 to 25 years,” he continued. “That to me isn’t something where you should throw your hands up and give up. That shows, ‘Hey, we’ve got to hit the gas on this.’”
Frost said donors “haven’t seen a plan that they believe in or a unified message that they believe in. … [They] want to know what the plan is. And I think the previous leadership of the party just wasn’t able to really provide that.”
Fried said the party’s attempts this year at “proof of concept” to donors that it can be successful included Democrat Donna Deegan winning the Jacksonville mayoral election in May and the “Take Back Florida” tour over the summer, where Fried and state Democrats traveled the state to register voters.
The party, however, still doesn’t have any candidates filed to run in key swing districts of the Legislature, including the western Orange County seats won in 2022 by freshman Republican state Reps. Doug Bankson and Carolina Amesty.
In a district that is admittedly a longer shot for Democrats, there is also just one member of the party filed to run against Republican U.S. Rep. Cory Mills in Seminole and Volusia counties.
Fried said the party is committed to finding viable candidates in all districts.
“That is the goal for November [2024],” she said. “To make sure that we are competing everywhere, that we are not leaving any region unturned in progress, and that we are going to be competitive in all parts of the state.”
Frost said the party also has to look at “the bigger picture.”
“We have to be strategic,” he said. “It’s not just congressional seats, but school boards, city councils, county commissions. This is how we win.”
Frost acknowledged that it would be a difficult road for Democrats to win back seats in Congress due to what he called the “racist, bigoted gerrymander” drawn up by DeSantis and passed by the GOP-led Legislature. But part of that map could be redrawn to include a majority Black seat in North Florida if a judge’s ruling is upheld.
He said he did think that seats held by Republican U.S. Reps. Anna Paulina Luna, R-St. Petersburg, and Maria Salazar and Carlos Giménez, both R-Miami, were all potentially winnable with “the right candidates and the right message.”
Fried wouldn’t go so far as to say that candidates such as Frost, the first Afro-Cuban and member of Generation Z elected to Congress, are the future of Democrats in Florida.
But she did say the party must have diverse voices.
“We need to make sure that we truly are the big tent that the Democrats have always talked about,” Fried said.
