Wed. Oct 30th, 2024

Central Florida Democratic U.S. Rep. Darren Soto speaking via Zoom on Oct. 29, 2024. (Screenshot)

Since taking over as chair of the Florida Democratic Party in early 2023, Nikki Fried has kept up a cheerful bonhomie despite the growing expansion of Republican voting registration, with the GOP now enjoying a more than 1 million lead over Democrats.

So even though the GOP after a week of early voting has built up a nearly 600,000 lead in vote-by-mail and early voting, she maintained her optimistic attitude Tuesday while addressing participants in a Zoom conference call, a week before Election Day.

Screenshot of Zoom call with FDP Chair Nikki Fried on June 26, 2024.

“Many of you are looking at the early vote returns and are quick to count us out, but to that I say, Florida is still in play,” Fried insisted.

“Let’s read between the lines: Over 5 million Floridians have already voted, with many likely Democrats planning to vote over the next week and over a million NPAs in the door already, and, if the trend continues, we expect to see them breaking by at least 50-65% because voters are rejecting extremism.”

As of Tuesday morning, 2,318,648 Republicans had voted already, either via mail-in-ballot or at an early-voting location. A total of 1,725,933 Democrats had voted – giving the GOP a 592,715 lead. An additional 1,097,334 non-party-affiliated or third-party members had voted.

Fried and the Florida Democratic Party have set a goal of breaking the Florida Republican supermajority status in both chambers of the Florida Legislature.

Samuel Santiago Vilchez via LinkedIn

Central Florida

Samuel Santiago Vilchez is Orange County Democratic Party chair and a member of the Democratic National Committee. He noted at least 23 voting precincts in Orange County where former presidential candidate Nikki Haley received at least 35% of the Republican primary election in March.

That was after Haley had dropped out of the race, leaving Trump the only active candidate on the ballot at the time. A lot of those precincts overlap with competitive state House seats, and the Democrats are targeting them, Vilchez said.

“We’re looking forward to getting rid of the supermajority, and a lot of that goes through Central Florida. We have seven seats who were won by President Biden in 2020, and that we’re looking to flip between Orange, Seminole, and Osceola counties,” he said.

“We’re looking to do that because it matters. The composition of our Florida Legislature matters to the future we’re trying to build in Florida, so that we can once and for all stop the Democratic backsliding in this state.”

Vilchez added that the party has found that a lot of undecided voters in some of those House districts are Hispanic, which has led to a closing message that “our party and our candidate actually stand with the Hispanic community, while the other side is calling us garbage.”

Central Florida Democratic U.S. Rep. Darren Soto made history when he became the first Puerto Rican elected to Congress from Florida in 2016. He seized on comments made at a Donald Trump rally in New York City on Sunday by comedian Tony Hinchcliffe, who called Puerto Rico a “floating island of garbage in the middle of the ocean right now.”

“This election is all about R-E-S-P-E-C-T. It’s about respect,” Soto said on the call. “We have seen a ‘floating island of garbage.’ Seriously? Do you know how pissed people are across Florida? There are nearly 1.2 million Puerto Ricans in this state. The Puerto Rican community is awake and we are voting.”

Margin of victory

Soto and others on the call pushed hard to make the case for Floridians to choose Kamala Harris over Donald Trump, although surveys consistently taken by pollsters over the past month suggest it’s not a question whether the former president will win the state for the third straight time, but by how many votes. The RealClearPolitics average of the most recent public opinion surveys in Florida show Trump up by more than 8 points – 52%-43.6%.

State Rep. Marie Paule Woodson. (Credit: Florida House)

Democratic state House Rep. Marie Woodson, a Haitian-American who represents a district that includes parts of both Miami-Dade and Broward counties, said the presidential election is personal to her — a reference to comments about Haitians in Springfield, Ohio, made by Trump last month. “And I hope that it’s personal to every single Haitian who lives in this United States of America and every Puerto Rican,” she added.

Regarding what is considered the only competitive congressional election in Florida, the Pinellas County Congressional District 13 contest between Republican incumbent Anna Paulina Luna and Democratic challenger Whitney Fox, Fried was asked about a recent increase in financial contributions made by the conservative Club for Growth PAC in Luna’s race.

“What that tells me is that Whitney Fox is going to win on Tuesday night,” Fried said. A St. Pete Polls survey released last week showed the race tied, despite the overwhelming GOP voter registration lead there. “We have been putting a lot of work on the ground in Pinellas and the surrounding areas, making sure that we are door knocking and phone banking in turning out the votes there.”

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