TALLAHASSEE, Fla. — Despite historic losses on election night, Florida Democratic Party Chairwoman Nikki Fried said Thursday she’s not going anywhere. She pledged to run for another four-year term despite some calls for her resignation.
For Republicans, Nov. 5 brought a slew of victories. Trump turned a 2020 Florida win margin of 3.4 points into more than 13. The GOP kept its U.S. Senate and House seats. The party also kept its supermajorities in the legislature and flipped Miami-Dade County for the first time since the late 1980s. But Fried said it could have been worse.
"I think that a lot of it was national narrative, national conversation,” Fried said during our more than 30-minute interview.
Fried, who was tapped in 2023 to finish the term of predecessor Manny Diaz, said the state party faced a confluence of issues, such as weak voter registration, a lack of real financial investment from the national party, and a message that covered everything from abortion access to affordability. It didn’t resonate, especially with independents.
“We believed that those independents were going to break heavily for Democrats in this cycle, and they didn’t," Fried said. "I mean, they went very heavy to Donald Trump on really two issues. It was 'the economy stupid,' which is always the No. 1 issue. And for whatever reason, which we're going to be spending a lot of time looking at why, people didn't believe that Democrats were going to solve those issues for them. Then there were concerns with the border, even though we all knew that there was a bipartisan border bill that Donald Trump tanked because he wanted to be able to use it in this election cycle. For good or bad, the vice president was blamed for not handling the situation at the border. Nothing that she was going to say was going to make people feel or believe that she had a plan going forward.”
Fried recently penned an op-ed about all this for the Miami Herald. In it, she acknowledges the missed messaging but said things could have been worse and that Florida Democrats “held the line.” That’s as her executive director posted this: “Not sugarcoating it — we got our as*es kicked.”
At the end of the day, we lost the election," Fried said. "We spent over a billion dollars in this in this campaign, but we lost Congress, we lost the Senate, we lost the White House. You haven't seen true investments back into the state parties, which was Obama's number one criticism of himself after he left the White House. He didn't do enough to build the infrastructure on the ground.”
Since the election night failures, a blame game has erupted in the party nationally and in the Sunshine State. The former head of the Florida Harris Campaign has called on state Democrats to “fix their sh*t.” Others have said they’re leaving the party as long as Fried remains at the helm.
“I’m sticking around," Fried said. "I'm in this for the long haul, to fix this party and to continue building on it. But we don't have time for finger-pointing because it has gotten us into a situation where every two years we change chairs, and what has that done for us? We are rebuilding every two years and never going to have a foundation to build upon. There's work to be done, but if we scratch everything and start over, then 2026 will be an absolute bloodbath for this party. We have to stop that cycle.”
Fried confirmed she would seek a new four-year term as chair. She vowed to improve voter registration, find ways to encourage donors to invest in Florida and recapture independent voters with improved messaging.
“We’ve got to keep fighting," Fried said. "You get knocked down once you got to get back up. We have a lot of work to do. This cannot be 'the Florida Democratic Party goes at this alone.' We need everybody to feel invested in the rebuild, and if we start pointing fingers at each other and not looking, that will not be helpful. Everybody can get onto Twitter, and everybody can get onto social media and have their two cents. The real work is here on the ground every single day.”
Speaking of the future, Fried also said she could still run for higher office. She ran for governor in 2022 but failed to secure the party nomination, losing out to U.S. Rep. Charlie Crist, who previously served as a Republican governor before becoming an independent and then a Democrat. Fried said she would be waiting for the right moment.
"If the opportunity arises where I believe that we are back at a place where the state is ready for balance and is ready for us to kind of change course, I'm not closing the door on future elections," she said. "But I'm also not naive. I'm not going to go up to a buzzsaw.”
A state report says hundreds of frail elderly nursing home residents were stacked side by side, head to toe in a small church with no working air conditioning or refrigerator during Hurricane Helene.
