The head of Florida’s Democratic Party is a failed gubernatorial candidate (who flamed out in spectacular fashion), and universally acknowledged to be a bear of very little brains. How and who the geniuses responsible for deciding that Nikki Fried, former state agriculture commissioner, was the sharpest shiv available to lead the comeback they desperately needed speaks volumes for the state of the Democratic Party in the state.

In two words: clueless and abysmal.

Great job with Newsom's debate prep. 👍

— Bohemio of the Reeeeing Twenties (@El__Bohemio) December 1, 2023

You hate to see it.

I kid, I kid – it’s pretty terrific.

As far as comebacks go, FLDems are going to have to bring a bulldozer in to move away the tonnage of GOP voter registrations the RPOF (Republican Party of FL) has shoveled atop the moldering remnants of former blue dominion. SO much so, that Ms Fried’s frantic claws poking through the Earth will look like the zombie reaching out of the primordial muck on Chiller Theatre’s opening.

The scope of the change is simply enormous, the numbers have swung that badly.

And all in the space of less than 10 years.

I don’t believe she is the asset (emphasis on the first syllable) Dems require – having neither the intellectual heft nor personal charisma to overcome the intellectual deficit – to engineer and bring about a party renaissance.

But don’t let the party girl “Make lemons out of lemonade” vibe fool you.

She’s a tough customer, mindless party hack, and cold-blooded strategic thinker.

The celebratory tweet (below) she sent just the other day is STILL cheering a loss, but one where the gap narrowed to an 8+ point drubbing.

Well, okay – not strategic thinker, but she’s cold-blooded af. Particularly when she’s going in against members of her own party, willingly doing the bidding of her masters in the DNC and the White House. Fried loves her current gig, you see, and she’ll stop at pretty much nothing to make sure she keeps it.

As part of her party chair powers, she gets to preside over the FL Dem convention which, according to their rulebook, determines which Democrats make it onto the FL Dem Primary Ballot in a presidential election year. Now, there are a number of names you’ve heard before vying for a primary shot on the Donk side – perpetual ozone layer candidate Marianne Williamson and stanky Cenk Uyger for instance – who were close to the requisite petition numbers and geared up to campaign here.

But a funny thing happened on the way to the Sunshine State – FL Dems invalidated all their tickets without so much as a credit issued. The first thing the state party did at the end of October during their big get together was change the rules a smidge.

…Under Florida law, the state party decides who makes the presidential primary ballot. And the Florida Democratic Party decided that only people nominated and approved at its Oct. 29 convention would make the ballot. Only Biden supporters were at the convention and nominated him.

The deadline for the party to submit those names to the state: Thursday, about 30 days after the state convention.

YAY! WE NOMINATE THE GREAT POTATUS!

We just officially put President @JoeBiden on the ballot in Florida.

FOUR 👏 MORE 👏 YEARS 👏 pic.twitter.com/RDzc0UL5hg

— Florida Democrats (@FlaDems) October 29, 2023

And there was much rejoicing.

30 days later, when the names had to be officially submitted to the state, there were a lot of pissed off folks because only ONE name made “the primary” ballot – in effect cancelling the whole thing.

Florida Democrats won’t vote in the presidential primary because only President Joe Biden qualified for the ballot, effectively canceling the March 19 vote and outraging three of the little-known Democrats challenging him.

The campaigns of Marianne Williamson, Dean Phillips and Cenk Uygur are all considering a lawsuit that accuses the Florida Democratic Party of unfairly rigging the process with hard-to-understand rules.

…“This is being done to protect Biden because he’s an incredibly weak candidate,” Uygur said. “Florida is the only place where this is happening and when only Joe Biden is on the ballot and they’re keeping all the other candidates off the ballot, it’s super-clear what they’re doing.”

Even big blue newspapers in SO FL have their noses out of joint at the high-handedness, some going so far as to postulate it’s Biden’s extraordinary vulnerability fueling the wagon circling.

…But it’s the principle of cancelling a presidential primary with other candidates still in the field that’s paramount here. It is arrogant and wrong.

“The intentional disenfranchisement of voters runs counter to everything for which our Democratic Party and country stand,” said U.S. Rep. Dean Phillips, D-Minn., the insurgent Biden challenger who might have drawn enough votes to embarrass the incumbent president.

…It’s not unprecedented, the party points out, for primaries to be cancelled when a strong incumbent president is seeking re-election. But that has happened only when there has been negligible intra-party opposition or none. Williamson, who has run before, isn’t exactly negligible. She polled at 12% in an NBC survey last month and 13% at Fox News. Phillips, a later entrant, scored 6% in the first Quinnipiac polls since his announcement. Uygur scored 2%.

That points to a landslide of around 80% for Biden if the primary were held. That would be impressive, usually. But Democrats seem to be afraid that anything less than 100% would be seen as weakness and stimulate even more national dissatisfaction with the prospect of a rematch between Biden and Trump. In an Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Research poll in August, 75% said Biden should not run again; 69% said Trump shouldn’t.

Not a good look, especially for a party so averse to election-rigging claims.

Now here’s where I become concerned about someone low-life enough to pull a blatantly undemocratic – but technically legal – stunt like Fried just did. Should the party prevail if the other candidates launch lawsuits, or the legislature chooses not to (or learns it can’t) act, and the Democratic presidential primary is canceled officially, my worry is not so much local elections suffering for a lack of blue voters.

…If the party can’t find a way to reverse it, the Legislature could. It meets Jan. 9, in plenty of time to revise the applicable election law.

The law at one time required the secretary of state to list all known candidates on the Florida primary ballot except for those who declared in writing that they weren’t running. The announced purpose was to give the voters a broad choice. The unstated but apparent intent was to have Florida exclude the weaker candidates against Sen. Edmund Muskie, D-Maine, for the 1972 nomination. The plan backfired when George Wallace of Alabama won the Florida primary.

The Legislature could use that law as a model, requiring all avowed candidates to be on the ballot regardless of the desire of party leaders to grease the skids for someone else.

…The law also municipalities the option to have their March city elections at the same time, but the concept needs rethinking. Isolating cities from regular state and national elections in November is supposed to keep them from being overshadowed by larger issues, but it also makes for very light participation. Now, thanks to a bad decision by Florida Democrats, municipal elections in 2024 will draw a disproportionate Republican turnout. What were they thinking?

My concern becomes corrupting our closed primary process in favor of Trump – the Dems preferred candidate – by torpedoing our hugely popular governor, Ron DeSantis. Follow along here.

If the Dem primary is officially kaput, that means every last FL Dem has nothing and no one to vote for, and no reason to maintain their registration for the primary. What’s to stop them from switching their party affiliation to Republican to be able to vote in OUR primary and knock RDS out of contention for all those delegates, the ones he almost assuredly would have in hand?

There’s plenty of time to do so if the Dem primary remains done for.

I hate to sound paranoid…but I’m paranoid.

I’ve seen this happen up here in miniature, where the opposition is so intense, a phantom candidate registers just to whack out the local primaries.

What if Democrats were able to pull this off on a massive scale? It’s legal. There’s not a damn thing anyone could do about it but bitch.

I don’t want to give Fried credit for anything so brilliantly underhanded, but neither am I going to believe there is anything too far outside the pale for this gang of thieves, either.

I sure hope someone in Tallahassee is looking at this really, REALLY hard.

BEEGE UPDATE: I just want to add after talking to some of all you all in the comments about Trump being “so far ahead” in the polls in FL it won’t matter, OR that the Dems are far more frightened of Trump than RDS. Well, this should certainly worry you, too. After everything they’ve pulled on Trump, fiddling with the primary like THIS would be legal and if it turned out to be a close one, enough Dem votes could very well swing it away from Trump. FL is a big, fat prize, and they would love to mess it up for whomever it designated Enemy No 1.