Florida Democrats Crow About Flipping R+10 State House District, Dunk On DeSantis for Blowing That Race and His Own
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Florida Democrats have had a rough time the past few years, perhaps most notably in Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ 20-point trouncing of Charlie Crist in 2022. But the party got a much-coveted morale boost Tuesday, as a Central Florida House District was flipped in a special election as DeSantis and his Republican allies trudged back from snowy Iowa in defeat.
Democrat Tom Keen, an entrepreneur in the aerospace industry, defeated Republican Erika Booth, an Osceola County School Board member, in a special election for House District 35. The previous holder of that seat, former State Rep. Fred Hawkins, was a long time fixture in Osceola County Republican circles before he resigned last summer to become president of South Florida State College.
As governor, DeSantis had the power to set the date for the special election, and he chose Tuesday, January 16, one day after Monday’s Iowa caucuses. Both Democrats and Republicans grumbled about the date, ten days into Florida’s 2024 legislative session, meaning the eventual winner would miss the chance to attend important meetings and introduce bills — and Democrats accused him of setting the date so late to avoid a potential loss embarrassing the governor before Iowans got to vote.
That turned out to be a prescient accusation, but it was far from obvious last year.
For years, the Florida Republican Party (RPOF) has benefitted from a growing voter registration advantage that helped propel them into victories. Hawkins won his last re-election bid in 2022 for the HD35 seat with a 10-point margin after President Joe Biden won the district by 5 points in 2020.
As NBC News national politics reporter Matt Dixon detailed in his recently-released book (affiliate link), Swamp Monsters: Trump vs. DeSantis―the Greatest Show on Earth (or at Least in Florida), the “wins have been consistently piling up, with no end in sight” for Florida Republicans for decades, due to their voter registration work.
As Dixon wrote, the 2008 Barack Obama victory in Florida over John McCain was aided by the Democrats’ “roughly 700,000-person registration advantage,” but the Democrats’ numbers continued to fall over the years, dropping to “just a 457,728-person registration advantage” in 2014, when Rick Scott squeaked by Crist in a narrow 0.2% win, to evolving into “a roughly 300,000-person voter registration advantage” for the GOP in DeSantis’ last election.
That Republican voter advantage, coupled with high-profile losses like Crist’s, have made it an uphill climb for Florida Democrats to get support from national left-leaning donors — and even some of their own in-state mega donors.
Florida Democratic Party Chair Nikki Fried has been determined to reverse that perception, and the Democrats managed to direct both enough funds and boots on the ground into the district so they could get Keen over the finish line.
According to a deep-dive on the race by Florida Politics reporter Jacob Ogles, Keen’s campaign was “significantly” out-raised and out-spent by Booth’s, with the Republican collecting “nearly $323,000” and spending “about $260,000” (through the Jan. 11 reports), compared to the Democrat raising “about $121,000” and spending $104,000.
But The Florida House Democratic Campaign Committee (FHDCC) swooped in, dropping over $541,000 in this special election, “far more than the $207,000 spent in the same time by the Florida House Republican Campaign Committee,” reported Ogles.
Multiple elected Democrats pitched in, joining door knocking and phone banking efforts — including State Rep. Anna Eskamani, State Rep. Fentrice Driskell, former State Rep. (and current state senate candidate) Carlos Guillermo Smith, Congressman Maxwell Frost, and others — flooding their social media feeds with posts encouraging their followers to join them in volunteering or donating to Keen’s campaign and to turn out the vote.
Meanwhile, RPOF was reeling from a messy defenestration of their chairman, Christian Ziegler, after a stunning scandal involving rape accusations by a woman who claimed she had previously had a three-way with Ziegler and his wife, Moms for Liberty founder Bridget Ziegler. Ziegler is currently facing criminal investigations for rape and video voyeurism (because allegedly he videoed both a prior encounter and the incident that sparked the rape accusation). The RPOF executive board voted to suspend Ziegler’s powers back in December, he was formally ousted January 8, and Evan Power elected to take over as chair.
That left a little more than a week for Power to take the reins over the Republicans’ get-out-the-vote efforts in HD35. And DeSantis’ campaign had dragged up to Iowa a contingent of GOP legislators and party officials — plus, controversially, a number of Florida state employees and the governor’s appointed agency heads.
With DeSantis’ team and so many other Florida Republicans freezing their toes off in Monday’s -45 degree wind chill only to watch their guy lose every single one of Iowa’s 99 counties, there wasn’t the same marquee-name manpower for the Republicans.
In the end, the Republican disarray left them unable to overcome the Democrats’ organization and energy. Unofficial results Tuesday night had Keen at 51.3% and Booth at 48.7%, a comfortable margin.
Unsurprisingly, Florida Democrats were ecstatic at Keen’s victory.
Party Chair Fried touted how the party had “organized for months” to take back HD35, telling Mediaite that they had a true “grassroots GOTV effort with 150 volunteers,” and “on Election Day alone, we made 50,000 calls to voters and knocked on over 4,000 doors this past weekend.”
Keen’s win was the first time Democrats had flipped a legislative seat since 2018, Fried added, and they were proud of being able “to secure our first victory for 2024…despite a turnout disadvantage and being outspent 5:1.”
“This is the first step to chipping away at the supermajority in the Republican legislature and taking back Florida,” she declared.
Eskamani called the election “an awesome example of what Florida Democrats can accomplish when we work together,” and credited the “collaborative effort” between Democrats “at every level,” including so many other locals who “stepped in to help however we could too.”
Smith — who is undoubtedly encouraged for his own state senate race this year by Keen’s win — praised the newly-elected representative for running “a great campaign focused on real issues.” He also took a swipe at DeSantis, telling Mediaite that the HD35 voters had “sent a clear message that they are tired of the legislature putting the governor’s political ambitions over the needs of hard working Floridians struggling to afford our state.”
Numerous political reporters and commentators described the win as a stunning reversal of Florida Democrats’ recent political doldrums, as well as noting the Iowa factor.
Orlando Sentinel columnist Scott Maxwell posted on The Platform Formerly Known as Twitter a thread saying that he couldn’t remember any other “serious surprise victory” by Florida Democrats since Speaker-designate Chris Dorworth (R) was felled by first-time candidate Mike Clelland (D) in 2012 — and noting that a PAC connected to a registered Republican sent misleading text messages to Democrats attacking Keen with false claims he supported DeSantis’ Parental Rights in Education bill (dubbed the “Don’t Say Gay” bill by its critics).
In a follow up column Wednesday, Maxwell ascribed the Democrats’ win to focusing on issues like abortion rights and Florida’s skyrocketing property insurance rates, while the Republicans “fume about Disney, drag queens & rainbow flags.”
The Messenger’s Marc Caputo and NBC News’ Dixon both noted the distraction effect Iowa may have had.
For the record, while all those Republicans who could have helped Booth were fighting off hypothermia up in Iowa, the weather throughout Central Florida was mild on Monday, with temperatures ranging from the mid-60s to low-70s. I worked from home with the windows open all afternoon.
