For Palm Beach Democrats, a steep uphill climb | Steve Bousquet

Florida Republicans are so powerful that if Florida Democrats are going to succeed in 2024, they have to get everything right — and all is not right in Palm Beach County.

In a local Democratic Party wracked by turmoil, state party Chair Nikki Fried took an extreme step and suspended county leader Mindy Koch March 4 for allegedly failing to comply with party rules, not adopting a budget, illegally removing members from the party for absenteeism and other supposed missteps.

“The cost of inaction is too high,” said Fried, who also suspended the county Democratic Party chairs in Miami-Dade and Franklin counties. “There’s too much at stake to ignore the challenges before us.”

But did Fried’s housecleaning make things better? Or worse?

Koch narrowly won the unpaid party job in 2022 and has been subject to vicious attacks from a small band of dissidents who use MAGA-style tactics from the left. Like Trump in 2020, they question the legitimacy of Koch’s one-vote victory, make personal attacks to destroy opponents’ credibility, and employ social media to demonize Koch, a feisty former grade-school teacher.

“This is a formula for chaos and for a Republican takeover of Palm Beach County
in November,” a group of 15 local Democrats warned Fried in a letter after Koch was suspended..

Refusing to capitulate to what critics call the MAGA-left faction in her party, Koch is fighting back. In a letter to party members who will decide her fate, she calls Fried’s suspensions “arbitrary and capricious” and said they will have “a lasting, chilling effect” on the party.

It rankles Koch’s people that one of the party’s loudest dissidents, Leslie Wimes, made an $1,800 in-kind donation to Fried’s campaign for governor.

The party Central Committee (sounds like the Politburo, doesn’t it?) must ratify the suspensions by a two-thirds vote of 120-or-so members at a special meeting on Sunday, March 24.

If the suspensions are upheld, all three counties must elect new chairs within 45 days.

That meeting will be on a Zoom call. To run a Zoom meeting of Democrats of a hundred people or more, with roll call votes that must be exactly right, will not be easy.

Fried’s highly public removals of three county chairmen had the look and feel of a public shaming, and it won’t soon be forgotten.

Koch and her supporters demanded that Fried lift a suspension they feel is unwarranted. Fried refused.

The Miami-Dade party’s leadership also protested Fried’s suspension of Chair Robert Dempster and said she misread the state party’s bylaws.

Other Palm Beach party members, such as the parliamentarian, argue that until the Palm Beach chairmanship is vacant, which it won’t be until the Central Committee votes to uphold Fried’s actions, Koch’s interim replacement, vice chairman Sean Rourk, has no authority to take the actions he’s taking.

Rourk intensified the turmoil when he dashed off an email Wednesday, flexing his muscle and threatening to punish anyone in the party who speaks to the press without his approval.

“No member, under any circumstance, is authorized to act as a spokesperson or make public comments to reporters without prior authorization from me,” Rourk wrote. “Any continued actions contrary to this protocol will be considered a violation of duty and will be subject to censure. We all share the responsibility of upholding the standards and reputation of our organization, and adherence to this protocol is paramount in achieving that goal.”

As the vice chair, or “acting chair,” as Rourk calls himself in other emails, he asked for passwords to the party’s social media accounts, handed the party’s part-time technology consultant a two-week notice and cancelled the party’s annual golf tournament. The event is a fundraiser that provides necessary seed money to keep the party afloat through the August primary.

By now, you’re wondering how all of this advances the Democrats’ goal of keeping Trump out of the White House and making sure President Joe Biden gets re-elected in November.

The answer is obvious: It doesn’t. Nor will this endless cycle of dysfunction ensure the success of local Democrats up and down the ballot, including restoring a Democratic majority to the county commission in a county that Gov. Ron DeSantis carried in 2022.

Fried’s decision to cancel the Democratic presidential preference primary produced a lot of second-guessing. Biden would have won it easily, and many more Democrats would have voted, helping down-ballot Democrats in city elections.

Then came the unprecedented suspensions.

This sorry state of affairs is why so many people in politics want nothing to do with local party organizations (in Palm Beach, the local Republican Party has its own serious problems, too).

Every hour that Palm Beach County Democrats spend on these sideshows is one less hour it spends registering voters and rebuilding a vote-by-mail program that was sabotaged by Republicans in Tallahassee.

If the nonsense doesn’t end fast, it could be a formula for electoral disaster for Democrats in November.

Steve Bousquet is Opinion Editor of the Sun Sentinel and a columnist in Tallahassee and Fort Lauderdale. Contact him at sbousquet@sunsentinel.com or (850) 567-2240 and follow him on X @stevebousquet.