MJP –
Hillsborough County Democratic Executive Committee Chair Ione Townsend announced on Thursday that she will not run for reelection to her post next month, ending her nine-year run as party leader.
Meanwhile, Florida Democratic Party (FDP) Chair Nikki Fried took to the op-ed pages of the Miami Herald Thursday to speak out for the first time since the state party suffered its latest electoral setback, writing that the final result “wasn’t enough, but it’s a start.”
Also, Miami filmmaker Billy Corben, who briefly competed earlier this year to serve as chair for the Miami-Dade County Democratic Executive Committee before dropping his candidacy, announced that he was quitting both the Miami-Dade County Party as well as Florida Democratic Party and reregistering as an NPA (no party affiliation).
“It is my sincere hope, if you have a modicum of pride or shame after last week’s electoral bloodbath, you will resign from your positions as well,” he wrote in a letter addressed to Fried and Miami-Dade Democratic Executive Committee Chair Shevrin Jones.
As for Hillsborough, during the second part of the 2010s the county emerged as one of the strongest performers for Democrats in the state with Townsend at the helm but, like every other county in the state, it performed poorly in the past two election cycles.
“This county is turning red,” Townsend told the Phoenix in a phone conversation shortly after she released an email to party members announcing that she will not run next month for another term, after initially saying that she would.
“The demographics in this county have significantly changed. When you look at the migration, it’s significantly people over the age of 55, mostly white, 70% of them are registering as Republicans,” she added. “The demographics in the state of Florida and in Hillsborough are changing pretty dramatically, and they don’t favor Democrats.”
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As the Phoenix noted going into last week’s election, Hillsborough had seen a voter registration advantage of more than 70,000 during the 2020 election reduced to fewer than 5,000 before Election Day 2024.
That’s a factor in why former state attorney Andrew Warren lost to Republican Suzy Lopez by 6 points last week. In 2020, the Democrat won re-election to his seat by more than 6 percentage points. But that change in voter registration, as well as an onslaught of television and direct mail ads attacking his tenure in office, doomed the man dubbed just three years ago as a rising star in the Florida Democratic Party.
Flow and ebb
In her statement to party members, Townsend reflected that monthly party meetings in early 2016 could often barely fill 30 seats. Voter engagement turned around rather dramatically later that year after Donald Trump took the White House that November (Trump lost by more than 7 points to Hillary Clinton in Hillsborough that year and by 7 points to Joe Biden in the county in 2020. Trump won Hillsborough by more than 3 points last week).
She remarked that the party’s bank balance was $4,000 in 2016 and now is over $100,000. And she is proud that despite key losses last week in county commission and clerk of the court races, Democratic voter turnout rose to nearly 80% last week, “the best we ever had.”
Townsend insists her decision not to run for re-election was not because of calls on social media by local Democrats to step aside, saying she never looks at Facebook.
“So, I’m totally unaware of it,” she said of the criticism being a factor. “Absolutely not.”
‘In play’
Although no longer a swing state, Fried and other party leaders frequently maintained in news conferences throughout the year that Florida “was in play,” but the results from last week’s election proved that is definitively not the case.
Not only did Donald Trump and Rick Scott breeze through their races, winning by 13 percentage points each, the party failed to achieve its goal of breaking the Republican Party of Florida’s supermajority in the state House, and in fact lost a seat in that chamber.
The party didn’t lose seats in the Senate, but didn’t add any either as their hopes of ousting Republican Corey Simon in District 3 fell woefully short. That means the GOP maintains supermajority status in that chamber as well, with a 28-12 advantage.
“In the middle of a nationwide Democratic collapse, Florida moved six points to the left from the 2022 election,” Fried writes, noting that Kamala Harris’ losing margin was better than Charlie Crist’s 19-point loss to Ron DeSantis in the 2022 gubernatorial election. “It wasn’t enough, but it’s a start.”
Despite the party being badly outspent in legislative races, the FDP “netted one loss” in the Legislature and didn’t lose any of the eight congressional districts that Democrats hold, she added.
‘On you’
Not every Florida Democrat agrees, obviously. Take Corben.
“To be fair, you inherited a dumpster — but all you’ve done is light a match,” he wrote in his letter to Fried and Jones.
“This mess is entirely on you now. You’ve achieved the unthinkable: dragging the state and local party from rock bottom to the abyss. Sucking the last breath (and penny) from a moribund brand, putting the final nail in its coffin, burying it and writing its obituary. You’ve never missed an opportunity to miss an opportunity.”
Fried’s op-ed on Thursday wasn’t exactly welcomed by some observers.
“This is the most insane cope I have ever seen,” said Benjamin Freeman on X. (Freeman has a YouTube channel where he makes election predictions). “’Yes, Florida shifted 10+ points right from the last Presidential election, but we’re still counting this as a win’????”
When reached later on Thursday, Sen. Jones told the Phoenix that he’s aware that Democrats in Miami, in Florida and across the nation remain frustrated with last week’s election results.
“You have a couple of things that are happening,” he said. “You have those individuals who are pointing fingers… and there are those who are saying collectively what does it look like to reset and restart who we are?
And I think there’s a place for both of them. I think Billy [Corben] has been very vocal about the DEC, even prior to me coming on. I’ve only been the chair fulfilling the past chair’s role after he was ousted over the past five months, and so we were able to raise half a million dollars for a full program, hire a field organizer, hire an executive director and really put a structure in place, so that whomever the chairman who comes in after that, they can continue to do infrastructure, create a deeper bench and engage with people within Miami-Dade County. We weren’t going to see that change under my leadership while this election cycle was happening. If we had not done the programming that we had done, the numbers probably could have been far worse in Miami-Dade County but that’s because we did put up a fighting chance with the resources that we had.”
Jones added that the next chair of the Miami-Dade Democrats also needed to be focused on voter registration and voter engagement.
