How to become chair of the Florida Democratic Party

So, I have been asked by several members how one becomes chair of the Florida Democratic Party. I am going to try to explain the process as succinctly as possible in this entry today. Wish me luck.

The first step to becoming chair of the Florida Democratic Party (FDP) is to become qualified.

First you must be a registered Democrat.

Secondly you have to be a voting member of your local Democratic Executive Committee (DEC). Every county can have a DEC for a person to join, this is done either by election in your precinct during the Democratic Primary or by appointment by your county's DEC, or the state party's, Chair.

Then, you must be elected to one of the qualified officer positions. Each DEC will have at least 6 officers: Chair, Vice-Chair, State Committeeman, State Committeewoman, Secretary and treasurer. Sometimes a DEC has more, rarely does it have less. Of these 6 officers, 4 are able to run for party offices on the statewide level: the Chair, the Vice-Chair and the State Committeepeople. You are probably familiar with the roles of Chair and Vice Chair from other organizations that you have been associated with in the past, the role of the State Committeepeople is to serve on the State Executive Committee which helps provide direction to the state party, they are the liaisons from the county DEC to the State Party, and vice-versa.

So, for instance in Leon County the DEC Chair Scott Maddox, the Vice-Chair Monica O'Neil, the State Committeewoman Roxane Dow and State Committeeman Jon Ausman are all eligible to be chair of the FDP. If there is someone else in Leon County who wanted to be chair that person would have to convince one of those four people to resign and then get elected to their post. This is what the current FDP Chair (Scott Maddox) did several years ago. If your county will not support you then you must move to another county where you have the support to get yourself appointed and elected into one of their key post.

Once you are qualified at the local level you must go before the State Executive Committee (SEC). There they will vote and the qualified person who gets the most votes will win. There isn't a primary process, it is a simple plurality of votes. The trick to this part of the process is that the SEC is not a one person one vote organization, it is a lot like the electoral college. Each State Executive Committee member has a weighted vote based of the percentage and performance of the local democrats in their county compared to the total number and performance of democrats statewide. So small rural counties get one vote for each of their state committee people and large democratic counties get much larger weighted votes. 36 of the 67 counties are allocated 3 or fewer votes per state committeeperson. The rest fall somewhere between 4 and 62 votes each. To give you an idea of where the votes fall check out this list of some of the larger counties state committee people's votes weight:

Alachua 09
Seminole 10
Sarasota 11
Lee 12
Leon 12
Pasco 12
Polk 14
Brevard 15
Volusia 16
Duval 25
Orange 25
Pinellas 29
Hillsborough 31
Palm Beach 42
Miami Dade 53
Broward 62

So each of those counties has two state commiteepeople with that number of votes each. There are also a few other people with votes on the SEC. Each Federal representative gets four votes, the house and senate leaders get 20 votes as does our senator Bill Nelson. There are other allotments for each of our statewide elected cabinet positions, but currently we don't have any, plus a few chair appointments and automatic appointments for friends of the FDP and caucus leadership each get 1 vote.

There are 1131 Votes out there, and the State Committeepeople from the large counties that I listed represent well over half (816 to be exact, or a little over 70%). Some of the smaller counties won't come to the election because the weighted vote from Voulsia through Broward counties alone represent over 50% of the vote, and if they join together then they are unbeatable.

But this may not happen this time. Currently the State Executive Committee will be meeting on May 7th in Orlando to elect a new state party chair. There are four people who are running, and each of them bring varied county support. Rep. Karen Thurman has a lot of support out of central and north Florida. FDP Vice Chair is the state committeewoman from Broward, and with her state committeeman have more votes than any other single person on the state committee. Jeff Ryan the director of the House Victory campaign for the FDP, has the committed support of the Leon County State Committee People and of the many elected officials who he has helped to obtain their seat, but he has not yet qualified as one of the four positions that allow a person to run for chair, and the last person who has expressed interest in running is Doug Courtney the former Chair of the Democratic Small County Coalition. The large counties have split their support among these four people which makes each vote more valuable.

Hopefully this will provide you with some insight into the election process of the FDP Chair. You can now see why no one can predict who will be elected as chair on the 7th.

Also worth noting ~ this weighted vote system is also the way that the at-large delegates to the National Convention in the Presidential Election Cycle are elected. So if, in three years, you want to be a delegate to the DNCC it is worth building a relationship with the larger counties now.