The Florida Democratic Party has been grappling with a series of hurdles in recent months, including losing two costly Congressional special elections and seeing some high-profile members unexpectedly exit the party.
Florida Democrats have been struggling with rising tensions and intraparty fighting since the 2024 election cycle, Politico reported on Wednesday. The report comes after former Florida state Senate Democratic leader Jason Pizzo, who was once viewed as a potential gubernatorial candidate, announced in April that he was registering as an unaffiliated voter and stepping down from his leadership role.
Pizzo said at the time that the Florida Democratic Party was “dead.” He added that he thought his state’s political system was akin to the “infighting, power struggles, corruption and decline of civic virtue that pervaded and eventually ushered in the fall of Rome.”
Pizzo’s office referred the Daily Caller News Foundation to his prior comments on why he left the party, when reached for comment.
“It’s a sign of larger problems we all know about,” one Democratic political organizer told Politico about Pizzo leaving the state’s Democratic Party. “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.”
One anonymous Florida Democrat told Politico that the state’s Democratic Party is “such a goddamn shitshow.”
“What Democratic Party?” another anonymous Florida Democrat asked the outlet.
Pizzo’s departure from the party comes after two Florida state representatives, Hillary Cassel and Susan Valdés, announced in December 2024 that they were switching to the Republican Party, one month after winning reelection as Democrats. The pair of defections expanded the Florida GOP’s supermajority in the Florida House of Representatives 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, told Politico he realized 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.”
The Democratic Party lost two special elections in Florida in early April, despite the party’s candidates massively outraising their GOP opponents.
Florida was long considered a swing state and was viewed as being competitive in presidential election cycles as recently as 2020. However, after years of trending rightward, it is now considered to be a deep red state.
In the 2024 presidential election, Trump carried the Sunshine State by 13 percentage points, receiving 56.1% of the vote to former Vice President Kamala Harris’ 43%. Trump’s performance in Florida marked the best performance of any Republican presidential candidate in the state since 1988.
In 2020, the president won Florida by a significantly smaller margin, notching 51.2% of the vote to former President Joe Biden’s 47.9%. Meanwhile in 2016, Trump had barely carried the state over failed Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton, securing 48.6% of the vote compared to Clinton’s 47.4%.
Florida Democrats were also dealt a blow in the down-ballot races during the 2024 election cycle as voters rejected two ballot initiatives the party had heavily backed, Florida Amendment 3 and Florida Amendment 4. Amendment 3 would have legalized recreational marijuana in the state and Amendment 4 would have legalized abortion until fetal viability, usually defined around 24 weeks of pregnancy.
Political analyst Susan MacManus told WUSF in a November 2024 interview that the state’s Democrats suffered significant losses in the 2024 election cycle because the party prioritized issues that did not connect with many Floridians.
The Florida Democratic Party did not respond to the DCNF’s request for comment.
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