Vice Chair Lonnie Weinberg at May Lunch

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Our May lunch was a study in contrasts.

On the one hand, things should be great for Republicans in Palm Beach County as we have closed the registration gap to less than 10,000 (9708 as of 5/28 or D+1.1). At the time of the November 2024 election the difference was about 40,000, and Trump almost won the county, falling only 5676 votes short.

Additionally, the Legislature has passed and the Governor has signed a redistricting plan that should favor Republicans in 4 more seats assuming the court challenges are repulsed. These new maps have major changes in our backyard, with CD20, 22, and 23 all looking very different. Although Lois Frankel is in a better position, with her district (now called 23) more Democrat than it was, Jared Moskewitz, Debby Wasserman Schultz, Frederica Wilson and whoever runs in CD20 have challenging races and one of them is likely to lose their seat.

So what’s not to like?

We just had a special election for House District 87 to replace Mike Caruso. By most measures, our candidate Jon Maples should have had an easy win, but he lost by 801 votes out of 33447 cast, or roughly 49 to 51%. Jon had lots of money – more than is usually spent on House races, and a team that went door to door all over the district. His mailings were prodigious and it would have been hard to not know what he stood for or that there was an election in which to vote. This district is currently R+14, with 47856 Reps, 31899 Dems, and 35325 other. Jon won election day and in early voting, but was swamped 8468 to 5366 in Vote-by-Mail. So what happened?

Our speaker, GOP Vice Chair Lonnie Weinberg discussed some of this. We didn’t turn out the vote he said. Republican turnout was 12% when it should have been 30-40%. Given that the overall turnout in the election was 29% (historically very high for a special election), Lonnie has a point. The real issue though wasn’t that our turnout was light (it usually is for these specials) but the Democrat turnout was phenomenal. They saw this election as a way to gain some momentum for November and really pushed out their vote for Emily Gregory, particularly in VBM. Holding on to the seat will be harder of course as the turnout with Congressional and Governor races in the fall driving the turnout, and R+14 SHOULD be impossible to overcome. Gregory is going to try though and as a resident of the district, I’ve received more mail from her than I ever did from Mike Caruso or Rick Roth. She also is doing monthly town halls.

Coming to Lonnie’s assistance in answering the question “so what did the REC not do and how will you fix it in November?”, we heard from county Chairman Carl Cascio who was in the audience. Jon’s mistake was that he reached out to NPAs” said Carl. They all turned out to be Dems at heart. “He should have focused on local issues” said Carl, who will be our speaker next month. “What local issues are they?” he was asked. “You’ll have to wait until next month to hear about those” he said. While it could be true that HD87 NPAs lean left, they only make up 30% of the district. It has been my experience that NPAs typically vote in percentage of their neighbors and don’t typically swing an election.

In any case, the Republican Party should be worried about this result, and we need a much better plan going forward to get out the vote. Sid Dinerstein, also in the audience, added “and we should stop trying to unseat sitting Republicans and fighting with each other!”.

Later in the meeting we heard from Annalise Hernandez, daughter of our club members Ralph and Dorcas Hernandez. She was the winner of one of our Anne Roberts Scholarships this year and the check was presented to her early as she is starting school soon and will miss our June meeting. Annalise plans to study political science at Florida Atlantic, and will be an intern in the Office of the President at FAU.