The invitation list for the Seminole Republican Party’s annual Lincoln Day Dinner in February includes Matt Gaetz and Marjorie Taylor Greene, two of the most controversial figures in Washington.
The lineup, which also has Donald Trump Jr. on it, was a notable choice in a county that had been trending toward the Democrats before the Republican wave in the midterm 2022 elections.
“That’s a bad list of people to have in such a suburban, highly educated [county] that’s only growing more diverse with each cycle,” said Matt Isbell, a Democratic elections analyst who runs the MCIMaps site.
Greene has been a nexus of controversy in her three years in Washington, including saying that if she had organized the 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol, “we would have won [and] it would’ve been armed.”
Eleven Republicans joined with Democrats to remove her from committees in 2021 for her past posts seemingly threatening violence against Democrats and calling the 2018 Parkland shooting a “false flag.”
Gaetz, meanwhile, has become a target of many in his own party for his role in removing GOP House Speaker Kevin McCarthy earlier this month.
A visit to Seminole County would also return him to the scene of the now-closed federal investigation of him for alleged sex trafficking, and spotlight the House ethics investigation that some of his fellow Republicans have mentioned as a way of forcing him from office.
“I can easily see that guest list being used against Republicans by Democrats who are running in districts and countywide in the area,” Isbell said. “That’s a quintessential example of the party existing within a bubble.”
The Seminole County GOP did not return multiple requests for comment.
GOP wave, Democratic trends
J. Miles Coleman, associate editor of Sabato’s Crystal Ball at the University of Virginia Center for Politics, said it’s understandable why county organizations sometimes aim for headline-grabbing names.
“These local parties need to raise money,” Coleman said. “Even though they’re very controversial, I know people like Gaetz and Marjorie Taylor Greene are very good at fundraising. So from that perspective, those are probably some heavy hitters that you would bring in.”
Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis won Seminole by 12 percentage points over Democrat Charlie Crist last year, as the GOP swept all the legislative races in the county, seemingly returning Seminole to its traditional role as a rock-ribbed Republican bastion.
But all three of Seminole’s state House seats and its state Senate seat are Democratic-leaning on paper.
Back in 2018, progressive Democrat Andrew Gillum beat Ron DeSantis in Seminole in the race for governor that year. Seminole was also one of just a handful of counties in Florida that voted for Donald Trump in 2016 and then flipped for Joe Biden in 2020, Coleman said.
Biden also did much better than Hillary Clinton’s 2016 numbers in Escambia County, the biggest county in Gaetz’s own district.
“I do wonder like how Matt Gaetz being the face of the Republican Party in that area may have turned off some voters who may have gone for a normal or anti-Trump type Republican,” he said.
Seminole is “a must-win county for Florida Democrats going forward,” Coleman said, and Republicans should be wary about getting overconfident after the 2022 results.
Among the Republicans who won in Seminole County in 2022 in the midst of the statewide red wave was incumbent state Rep. David Smith, who won his redrawn, southern Seminole seat over Democrat Sarah Henry by about 4.6 points.
“If you are a Republican that is in office and had a close race, then it would seem to me … you would want the party to be thinking of expanding and becoming more popular, not becoming more ideologically extreme and maybe turning off a lot of independent voters,” said Aubrey Jewett, a professor of political science at the University of Central Florida.
Smith did not return a request for comment.
The potential schism echoes the battles within the national GOP, including the fights over the speaker’s gavel in Congress and the 2024 presidential primary.
“Which direction should the party go?” Jewett said. “… Should it be [those] who are viewed as some of the more extreme elements of the party or should it be some of the folks that are conservative but yet willing to work to actually accomplish policy? It sounds like we know which direction they want to head in.”
Ground zero for investigations
Gaetz has had a checkered past in Seminole, where he spent time with his friend, former Tax Collector Joel Greenberg and other associates. Greenberg was sentenced to 11 years in prison after pleading guilty to charges including sex-trafficking a teenager, stalking a political rival, stealing identities and using public money to pay for sex and cryptocurrency.
While Gaetz was the subject of a federal investigation for allegations related to sex trafficking and obstruction of justice in connection with the Greenberg case, the U.S. Department of Justice decided not to bring charges against him earlier this year, in part because of the potential unreliability of Greenberg and other witnesses.
But a House Ethics Committee into allegations of sexual misconduct, drug use, campaign and lobbying violations, originally started under a Democratic-controlled House, was revived this year under Republican leadership.
The ethics investigation received increased attention after Gaetz successfully called for a motion to evict McCarthy from his job as speaker earlier this month, with some of his Republican colleagues reportedly considering using the probe as a reason to expel him.
David Jolly, a former Republican congressman from St. Petersburg and co-founder of the Forward Party, said he would not be surprised to see Gaetz show up in Seminole, despite his history there.
“Gaetz has shown us that his strategy, just like Trump’s, is a public affairs strategy more than a legal one,” Jolly said. “He just intends to poke the bear. … He’s going to claim he’s a victim, he’s going to claim it’s a witch hunt. And I don’t think it bothers him whatsoever to be there. But I think that the GOP should think twice.”
