Nikki Fried is killing the Florida Democratic Party
One year into her vanity reign, chaos has consumed the beleaguered party
I take zero pleasure in saying this, but well, we were right: Nikki Fried has been an abject disaster as chair of the Florida Democratic Party.
When Fried, a former corporate lobbyist and state commissioner of agriculture, took over the beleaguered state party, she promised to rebuild it “from the ground up.” Instead, she has all but razed what remained of the Florida Democratic Party, having overseen a dramatic decline in fundraising and terrible slump in voter registration, and more recently, ignited civil wars in key local parties and cost Democrats more than a dozen local elections that no Democrat should lose.
Things have gotten so bad that one begins to question Fried’s basic understanding of political organizing. Take her decision in late November to cancel the Florida Democratic presidential primary, when she cited arcane procedural rules to roll over the protests of some of the state’s party’s most passionate members. There was no obvious benefit to canceling the primary — it came well before the “uncommitted” protest vote movement — and the downside should have been obvious.
Even a blowout primary election gives parties runway to actively engage and register voters, organize volunteers, work out the kinks of a get-out-the-vote operation, and raise money. It keeps the party and its presumptive nominee in the news instead of surrendering all headlines to the opposition, engages voters, and helps down-ballot candidates in their own elections.
That final point should underscore the ludicrousness of Fried’s later attempt to spin the primary cancellation as essential to focusing on local races, as Democrats got their teeth kicked in during Tuesday night’s municipal elections.
The numbers are stark: Republicans flipped seven offices, including mayorships in places where Biden won by 50 points in 2020. Three of the losses came despite investment from Fried’s “Take Back Local” operation, which was aimed at protecting Democrats in seven important local offices.
Fried has tried to argue that some of these losses would have happened regardless of whether the presidential primary had been canceled, but if that’s the case, it’s because Democrats have hemorrhaged supporters.
The party now trails the Florida GOP by more than 875,000 registered voters, a gap that’s grown by nearly 300,000 since October. Expect that number to continue to grow in the wake of Fried’s sudden decision to break party rules, throw the chairs of the Miami-Dade and Palm Beach County Democratic Parties under the bus, and suspend them just weeks before the election.
The suspensions, Fried told the press, were necessitated by the local parties’ struggles over the past few years. It was more than a bit disingenuous, as the decline in those counties cannot be divorced from the larger state party’s dreadful performances in elections and the sustained failure to finance or build out the sort of long-term, on-the-ground infrastructure that Republicans have opened in traditionally Democratic counties over the past few years.
Last April, Fried parachuted into an abortion rights protest and got herself arrested alongside activists and legislators. The newly elected Democratic Party chair split as soon as she was bailed out, leaving her fellow protestors — the core of the Democratic base — to sit in jail late into the night, until a few lawmakers and local leaders could finish getting the cash from friends to secure their release.
Those details weren’t included in the media coverage that followed, but Fried made sure to plaster the photo of her in cuffs everywhere, and even sell the replicas of the shirt that she wore.
A friend who is active in Florida politics suggested to me that Fried has turned the state party into her own personal exploratory campaign ahead of another run for governor in 2026, which both makes perfect sense and frankly beggars belief.
On the one hand, she’s put her face on virtually all Florida Democrats’ communications (see below), even materials used during canvassing to get out of the vote for actual elections with other candidates. At the same time, running for statewide office requires a strong party infrastructure with as many registered voters as possible.
It’s unclear whether Fried is aware of these basic facts, but there’s reason to believe that perhaps all her years as a lobbyist numbed her to the mechanics of political movements.
There’s no question that Fried took on a major challenge when she stepped in to lead the Florida Democratic Party. The state had already begun its drift from purple to red state years before her ascension, leading to Ron DeSantis’s 20-point romp in 2022 and giving the GOP a supermajority. Rebuilding was always going to be an uphill task.
That said, this was the moment to do it. Between DeSantis’s ambitions and the state GOP’s ongoing wars on children, queer people, immigrants, working people, and books, Fried has had one opportunity after another to turn national outrage into fundraising dollars, candidate recruitment, and enthusiastic volunteers. She has not been successful at any of those things.
Instead, Florida Democratic Party leaders continue to depress their voters and embarrass themselves with a rare level of cluelessness. Based on a tweet that the party posted on Tuesday night, I’m not even sure that its leaders know the meaning of democracy:
“Tonight, President Joe Biden was declared the automatic winner of the Democratic primary and allocated 224 delegates from Florida. In November, we have a choice between continued progress or the end of our democracy as we know it.”
It doesn’t get much more obtuse than that — or so I hope, anyway. If Fried continues to operate the Florida Democratic Party as a vanity project, the nation’s third-largest state will likely become a safe red stronghold for decades going forward, making it a dangerous place for so many of its residents and a source of ongoing federal power for the GOP.
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