The Florida Democratic Party is facing significant internal and external challenges, marked by a series of election defeats, the departure of prominent members, and escalating tensions within the party ranks.
Recent reports and actions suggest a deep struggle for the party in a state increasingly trending deeper red.
According to reports, the Florida Democrats have grappled with rising tensions and intraparty fighting since the 2024 election cycle. This internal strife comes alongside tangible setbacks, including losing two costly Congressional special elections in early April, despite Democratic candidates reportedly outraising their Republican opponents.
A notable blow to the party came in April when former Florida State Senate Democratic leader Jason Pizzo announced that he would leave the party to register as an unaffiliated voter and resign from his leadership role.
Pizzo, once seen as a potential gubernatorial candidate, offered a grim assessment of the party’s state, declaring it “dead.” He further characterized the state’s political system as akin to the “infighting, power struggles, corruption and decline of civic virtue that pervaded and eventually ushered in the fall of Rome.”
Pizzo’s exit appears to be viewed by some within the party as indicative of broader issues.
One Democratic political organizer was quoted as saying Pizzo leaving is “a sign of larger problems we all know about,” adding that the party “is in shambles and has been in shambles for I don’t know how many years.”
The organizer expressed frustration, stating, “At this point, we have been doing the same thing for 30 years and there’s just nothing happening.” Other anonymous Florida Democrats reportedly described the party in stark terms, with one calling it “such a goddamn shitshow,” and another questioning its very existence: “What Democratic Party?”
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The challenges extend beyond Pizzo’s departure. In December 2024, state representatives Hillary Cassel and Susan Valdés, who had just won reelection as Democrats the previous month, announced they were switching to the Republican Party.
These defections further solidified the Florida GOP’s supermajority in the Florida House of Representatives, expanding their hold to 86 seats compared to the Democrats’ 34.
Miami filmmaker Billy Corben, who exited the party in 2024 after serving on the Miami-Dade County Democratic executive committee, stated he found the party “far worse than I expected and far more dysfunctional and grim than what I had reported from the outside looking in.”
Florida’s political landscape has shifted significantly in recent years. Once considered a crucial swing state, particularly competitive in presidential cycles as recently as 2020, it is now widely viewed as a deep red state after years of trending rightward.
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This trend was underscored in the 2024 presidential election, where Donald Trump carried the state by 13 percentage points, receiving 56.1% of the vote compared to former Vice President Kamala Harris’ 43%. This marked the best performance by a Republican presidential candidate in Florida since 1988. For comparison, Trump won Florida by narrower margins in 2020 against Joe Biden (51.2% to 47.9%) and in 2016 against Hillary Clinton (48.6% to 47.4%).
Down-ballot results in the 2024 cycle also presented difficulties for Florida Democrats. Voters rejected two ballot initiatives heavily supported by the party: Amendment 3, which would have legalized recreational marijuana, and Amendment 4, which aimed to legalize abortion until fetal viability, typically around 24 weeks of pregnancy.
Political analyst Susan MacManus suggested in a November 2024 interview that the party’s losses in the 2024 cycle stemmed from prioritizing issues that did not resonate with many Floridians.
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“If there is any state that shows the idea (that) one size-fits-all (advertising) does not work, you are sitting in it,” she said.
She added that Democrats’ assumptions about identity politics or voters of certain religion, race, ethnicity, gender, voting as a monolithic block is not a winning strategy.
“When you look at how different racial groups voted, you can see they are equally split,” MacManus said at the time. “The stereotypes were all those solid blocs of voters were (theirs). They (voters) did not turn out that way at all because the blocs themselves splintered.”
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