Florida Democrats are on the offensive, and Florida Democratic Party Chair Nikki Fried (D) affirms that Democrats will have significant gains across the country in 2024. However, Florida GOP Chairman Christian Ziegler (R) argues that this won’t be the case. In an interview with News Nation, Ziegler expressed that “Florida Democrats continue to fail” despite Fried’s comments.
During an interview with MSNBC, Fried argued that Florida Governor Ron DeSantis (R) has led Florida into an “economic downturn.” She went on to share that Florida is currently experiencing the “highest inflation in the country,” a “property insurance crisis” and a teacher shortage. However, despite the claims, statistics show that Florida has only grown redder since the 2016 election, and in 2022, Governor DeSantis overwhelmingly won his reelection effort.
When asked about the $1 million effort towards voter registration that Fried has highlighted, Ziegler disregarded the effort.
“Last cycle, they had a $2 million campaign towards voter registration, and they actually lost, I think it was about 140,000 registered voters on the Democrat’s side, so throwing money at this is not gonna work, any other efforts towards voter registration is not gonna work until they actually go to the root of the problem, and the root of the problem is that the Democrat party is pushing in an extreme agenda,” Ziegler argued.
Because of this, “voters are turned off, and they’re fleeing the Democrat party.” “People are not buying the extreme agenda pushed by the Democrat party,” Ziegler continued, explaining that this has translated to an over 800,000 registration gain in favor of the Republican party.
Ziegler reiterated that Democrats need to tackle “the root of the problem” instead of targeting Governor DeSantis as being too “extreme” of a governor. Ziegler went on to cite that Democrats had claimed DeSantis would not win reelection, and DeSantis not only won reelection, but he won it by over a million votes.
