MIAMI — Florida Democrats, still reeling from a brutal electoral defeat in 2024, should be regrouping for next year’s midterms. Instead, the party is imploding — consumed by infighting, power plays and a deepening sense of irrelevance in a state dominated by the GOP.
The latest rupture came in a single day in late April: David Jolly, an anti-Trump former Republican representative, announced that he registered as a Democrat and launched a state political committee to support a possible run for governor. Hours later, state Senate Democratic leader Jason Pizzo — also eyeing the 2026 race — declared the Florida Democratic Party “dead” and said he was becoming an unaffiliated voter.
The back-to-back announcements crystalized the crisis inside the Florida Democratic Party. It’s a party that celebrates 15-point special election losses as progress, struggles to fundraise and can’t agree on how — or even if — it should mount a real comeback in a state once considered a top national battleground.
Interviews with 20 elected officials, strategists and activists reveal months of growing resentment, confusion and declining morale within the party, leading up to recent events. The Democratic players, some of whom were granted anonymity because they feared getting ostracized for speaking out, said they were a party in ruin.
“What Democratic Party?” said one Democrat who’d just delivered a resounding speech celebrating their unity. Another’s blunt assessment: “The state party is such a goddamn shitshow.”
Pizzo’s big announcement shocked and angered many Florida Democrats, though it came after he’d gotten into several public disputes with members of his own party. And plenty now say they’re worried he’ll run for governor as an independent, spoiling the race for the eventual Democratic nominee and easing the GOP path to the governor’s mansion.
“I hope he is smart enough — I think he is — to realize it’s impossible for him or anybody else to win as an independent,” said Broward County Commissioner and longtime Democratic legislator Steve Geller, who’d leaned toward supporting Pizzo for governor when he was still a Democrat but spoke positively about Jolly at a town hall in Plantation last week.
Clashes between Pizzo and state party Chair Nikki Fried, who unsuccessfully ran for the Democratic nomination for governor in 2022, have become a dominant theme. And they’ve continued even after Pizzo’s announcement. In an interview, he accused Fried of being “consumed” with term-limited Gov. Ron DeSantis when crafting the party’s messaging — “like they dated in high school and she’s still angry,” he said.
“It’s a sign of larger problems we all know about,” said one Democratic political organizer of Pizzo’s exit. “This party right now is in shambles and has been in shambles for I don’t know how many years. At this point, we have been doing the same thing for 30 years and there’s just nothing happening.”
‘Can’t even keep the lights on’
Florida Democrats are still in mourning. Donald Trump won the state for a third time in 2024. DeSantis defeated ballot measures on abortion rights and legalized marijuana. And Republicans not only kept their supermajorities in the Legislature, but by January they got two Democratic state House members to switch parties.
Yet by many outward appearances, Florida Republicans were the ones having their civil war. For the first time in six years, DeSantis faced backlash from the GOP Legislature. Democrats began salivating over the prospect that Trump-endorsed Rep. Byron Donalds might face off against Florida first lady Casey DeSantis in a Republican primary for governor, marking another hostile proxy war between the president and the governor.
Interviews with top Democrats and party operatives revealed that much optimism in recent months was steeped in the hope Trump might self-implode. They predicted Trump’s tariffs would lead to empty shelves at Walmart, that people would soon pay exorbitant prices for basic needs, and seniors would watch their retirement funds dry up.
Their hope certainly wasn’t rooted in Florida Democrats’ own performance metrics. The party has failed to grow its voter rolls, raising a mere $300,000 between January and March compared to the Republican Party of Florida’s $4.6 million. (“You can’t even keep the lights on with something like that,” complained the Democratic organizer.)
One of the biggest frustrations voiced by members: How unproductive the state party had been at registering voters while Republicans reaped a 1.2 million-person advantage. One Democrat said the state party should have sued when the GOP-controlled Legislature narrowed third-party groups’ ability to help with voter registration.
Several said they were livid that the nearly $25 million poured into a pair of April congressional special elections was not used to invest in state-party building. (Democrats lost those races, for Matt Gaetz and Mike Waltz’s old seats in reliably safe GOP districts, by 15 points — an overperformance, but a loss nonetheless.)
Others didn’t like that the state party opted to find a Democrat to run in every legislative race last cycle instead of focusing on seats that were winnable, or that Fried implausibly insisted Florida was “in play” for the presidency.
Even now, some members worry that their economic message isn’t well coordinated. They fear Democrats have failed to get voters to understand that Republicans have governed Florida for decades and bear responsibility for how unaffordable it has become.
Miami filmmaker Billy Corben, who left the party last year after working on his county’s executive committee, said he learned the Democratic Party of Florida was “far worse than I expected and far more dysfunctional and grim than what I had reported from the outside looking in.”
He called it an “organization run entirely by ego and grift and not with the interests of the good-hearted and hardworking party faithful who are the donors and the volunteers, who are the backbone of the party.” (Corben had previously called for Fried and state Sen. Shevrin Jones, the Miami-Dade Democratic Executive Committee chair, to resign, making many similar claims. In response, Jones called for party infighting to end.)
Corben added: “Is it worse than RPOF? Certainly not. But they win.”
National battle turned local — and bitter
Florida Democrats are having the same disagreements happening nationally between progressives and centrists, with Pizzo, a former homicide prosecutor of Sunny Isles Beach, solidly occupying the middle lane. Many concede Republicans have been able to gain the upper hand with Hispanics by labeling Democrats as “socialists” — a terrifying word to voters in South Florida’s diaspora community and their families, many of whom fled left-wing authoritarianism in their home countries.
Steve Schale, a veteran Democratic strategist who helped former President Barack Obama win Florida twice, described the state electorate as “center-right” and moderate on social issues, with voters who tend to want lower taxes and “reasonable” immigration policy.
“This all comes down to a basic math question,” he said. “If you are not where the voter is, you have to do one of two things: Change the makeup of the electorate and register people, or you have to get to ideologically where the voters are.”
Top Democratic lawmakers were panicking and discussing the last election and 2026 in October, Pizzo said. They got on an emergency Zoom call to talk about how dire the forthcoming election was looking and what they could do.
At one point in the meeting, Pizzo let the group know he was prepared to launch a run for governor and self-fund a good chunk of it using his vast personal wealth. “I have plans for ‘26 and I have $25 million ready to go,” Pizzo recalled saying in the meeting. By his estimation, Democrats would need as much as $170 million to run competitively in Florida. He figured the person at the top of the ticket and others running statewide would help trickle down fundraising cash to other races and to the state party.
Pizzo now thinks the real reason some Democrats are mad about his exit is because other donors are likely to see that giving money to Florida Democrats is a bad investment.
As for Fried, she brushed off Pizzo’s departure. “He wasn’t a participant in the rebuilding of this party,” she said. Asked specifically about the self-funding comments, she replied: “Anyone can make empty promises. Good leaders follow through, even if there’s nothing in it for them.”
Her statement after Pizzo’s public exit, which she referred to as a “temper tantrum,” was more blunt. Fried called Pizzo “ineffective,” “unpopular,” and praised his departure as “one of the best things to happen to the party in years” because it would make them more united.
Reading off his phone, Pizzo shared that he texted Fried his disagreements about the party’s public statements. One referred to DeSantis as a “mob boss,” which he told her was offensive to Italian Americans. Pizzo also noted that she wrongly attributed the office of state attorney general, which is part of the executive branch, as being part of the judicial branch.
In another instance, he took issue with the Florida Democratic Party for calling a bill on illegal immigration “extreme” because he said it unseriously dealt with the issue given that it didn’t have major employment restrictions.
Asked about the specific allegations, Fried said she was “not going to get into a tit for tat with someone who no longer represents our party’s values,” calling it a “ridiculous game” to “justify his bad political decisions.” She accused Pizzo of “pointing fingers to distract from the party’s anger at him for abandoning us.”
“This is a historic moment,” she said. “We are focused on rebuilding the party and working to elect Democrats who are willing to stay in the fight, come up with solutions to Florida’s out-of-control affordability crisis, defend our veterans and protect programs like Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid.”
But several Democrats said they were sad the party had lost Pizzo, including Lauren Book, the former state Senate Democratic leader.
“It’s unfortunate that it happened in the way that it did,” Book said. “Because I think that we have to look at: Why are we losing the members that we’re losing? And look inward.” Other Pizzo defenders note he cut checks to the state party and to candidates for years, and that members were not only happy to elect him leader but take his money.
Those who defend the state party’s strategy say it’s about honoring its principles. Sarah Henry, who recently finished her term as vice chair for the Seminole County Democratic Party and narrowly lost a 2024 bid for state House, insisted the party was “united and pissed off” and said the reason for Democrats to run in tough seats was to give voters a choice, and to put their opponents on the spot to say whether they agreed with Trump or DeSantis.
“It’s not like we are all running because it’s the most fun thing we have ever done,” she said. “It’s because we believe deeply in equity, justice and protecting our democracy.”
What comes next?
In the days leading up to his exit, Pizzo angered members of the Legislature’s Black caucus with comments he made on the floor and clashed with Democratic state Sen. Carlos Guillermo Smith of Orlando over a bill about guns on campus during a committee meeting. Pizzo said he has since had discussions with Black caucus members and agreed he had been an “asshole” to Guillermo-Smith and apologized to him.
Many were upset that Pizzo didn’t give them a heads up about the party switch — or how he did it.
“If you wanted to switch parties, switch parties, but there’s no reason to come out and demean the people that really were there for you,” said Scott Evans, state committee person for the Pembroke Pines Democratic Club.
“You’re the leader. So why didn’t you get them to follow you? Why didn’t you come up with solutions? Why didn’t you lead instead of just give up? You don’t do that as a leader,” chimed in Lourdes Diaz, president for the group. “That’s what hurts me the most, that he’s not taking responsibility that people don’t want to follow him.”
Asked to respond, Pizzo noted that every state Senate Democrat had kept their seat in 2024 and said Democrats had supported legislation that passed this past session while avoiding socially divisive issues.
He admits he’s still considering a run for governor but is focusing on his family and resting for now. He rejects the idea that he’d be a spoiler, pointing to split ticket voting in his district, where Trump won by around 3 points and he won reelection by 16 points. He predicted no Democrat would catch fire by later this year but indicated that if he were to be wrong then he’d reconsider his options.
Isa Domínguez contributed to this report.
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