Democratic Chair in MAGA-Friendly Palm Beach Resigns in Protest
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The chair of the Democratic Party in deep-red Palm Beach County, Florida, announced she was resigning Wednesday after claiming she was the victim of “vicious personal attacks” from members of her own party.
Mindy Koch said she and her staff were inundated with nasty comments from a “small minority” of Democratic Executive Committee members, something she described as akin to “MAGA tactics” used by Donald Trump, himself a Palm Beach resident.
The resignation comes just weeks after Koch was reinstated to the post by the state’s Democratic Party. That alone wasn’t enough to keep Koch on board, however, and she chose to instead go out with a bang in a letter to the statewide party chair—and failed 2022 governor candidate—Nikki Fried.
“I have no other choice but to resign as Chair of the Palm Beach Democratic Party effective today,” she wrote. “My hope is that in doing so I can expose this subversive, cancerous element with documented past ties to right-wing publications that are trying so hard to destroy the party from within.”
Koch, a 70-year-old whose Facebook profile picture is her cheesing alongside Joe Biden, said the harassment from party-mates “made it impossible to fulfill our mission to elect Democrats.”
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Koch claimed that her political rivals have aligned with right-wing publications to hold back Democrats in Florida, which has taken a sharp right turn under Gov. Ron DeSantis’ leadership after decades of being arguably the most-sought-after swing state.
“The ongoing internal battles with those who want to bring the party down have certainly impacted the DEC financially,” Koch wrote, “but I leave knowing that the clean audit validates my leadership.”
Koch won the chair post in 2022 by a single vote, and had been embroiled in internal controversy with her own party ever since. That included her being suspended by Fried in March—along with two other local Democratic leaders in Florida—as part of “an overall strategy to get our local parties back on track.”
Maria Cole, the Democratic committeewoman in Palm Beach who lost to Koch by that single vote, rebutted Koch’s fiery claims from this week in an interview with the South Florida Sun-Sentinel. She said there was no corrosive element within the party and insinuated that Koch wasn’t telling the whole story.
“There’s no nefarious group of people that is out to destroy her,” she told the Sentinel. “There is no Trumpian type of mentality among people. This is not about personality. This is not a personal attack.”
While Koch’s resignation is effective immediately, it doesn’t appear to be ready to give up politics all together. She announced Thursday that she was running for election to the Palm Beach County School Board.
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She told the Sentinel that she feels she can “make a difference” there and that she has a solution for Florida’s incessant banning of books under DeSantis, saying she’d like to start up a book club of parents that read texts in full before determining whether they should be removed from libraries or not.
A former teacher in Palm Beach and Broward counties, Koch holds a bachelor’s degree in special education, a master’s degree in gifted student education, and a doctorate in leadership and curriculum, the Sentinel reported.
“I’ve always wanted to be on the School Board,” she told the paper. “I’ve got all that experience in education, and I’d love to share it.”
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