Florida Agriculture Commissioner Nikki Fried was supposed to be the anointed savior of her state’s perennially underperforming and sclerotic Democratic Party. Instead, she is being replaced by a two-time election loser because it turns out she is not very good at politics.
Fried is trailing professional weather vane Rep. Charlie Crist in polls by nearly 30 percentage points. She is well on her way to losing on Tuesday night in embarrassing fashion. Despite being the only Democrat to win statewide in 2018, Fried has become an afterthought for Florida Democratic voters. Matt Dixon and Gary Fineout at Politico detail how Crist has pushed past Fried despite her “aggressively dogging DeSantis” on his handling of the pandemic and focus on culture war topics.
Part of the problem with that otherwise ingenious strategy is that DeSantis’s pandemic response and his culture war issues are extremely popular. Florida was one of the top states in inbound migration during the pandemic, and Republicans surpassed Democrats in voter registration during that time. DeSantis’s pandemic response was so well-received that Democratic politicians flocked to the state for their own vacations. Combine that with how well DeSantis picked his cultural battles, earning the support of independents and even Democrats, and Fried was waging a losing battle.
More than any of that, Fried is just laughably bad at politics. She compared DeSantis to Adolf Hitler, earning a denunciation from the Anti-Defamation League in the process. She got bowled over on Twitter by gun control activist David Hogg, broadcasting her spinelessness on the internet for everyone to see. In case there are any doubts about how robotic and inauthentic a politician she is, you simply need to watch her explain why she chose to run for governor.
I’m sorry but Nikki Fried is just excruciating to watch pic.twitter.com/ixgTiLX8cY
— Nate Hochman (@njhochman) July 22, 2022
Remember her focus on the pandemic? In her efforts to show that DeSantis actually handled the pandemic poorly, she turned to conspiracy theorists. She treated Rebekah Jones, the phony whistleblower who lied about Florida’s COVID-19 data, as a martyr. She bought into the media attack on DeSantis for prioritizing vaccines for the elderly, who were most at risk from COVID-19. In essence, Fried turned herself into an unhinged left-wing Twitter personality and decided that people wanted that in a governor.
Fried was the only Democrat to win statewide in 2018. Along with Alex Sink, she is one of only two Democrats to win any statewide constitutional office this century. That’s certainly an accomplishment, but her run for governor has shown she is out of her depth, a political victim of the Peter Principle. The increased scrutiny on her has shown her to be weak, prone to conspiracy theories, and out of touch with voters. She was supposed to save Florida Democrats from the state’s rightward lurch. Instead, she turned out to be just another red-state Democratic mediocrity.
