After rough year, Orange County GOP prepares to elect chairman

Roiled by an alleged charity scam, a racist Facebook post and Parkland conspiracy theories, Orange County’s Republican leadership had a pretty embarrassing year even before the election.

But after Democrats flipped three Orange County state House seats and two County Commission seats last month, the county GOP is going into its leadership elections Thursday at its lowest ebb in years. And now, some of its more vocal members say fresh blood is needed.

“Our strategy and game plan have to change,” said Randy Ross, the Orange County Trump campaign chair in 2016. “If all you do is sit back and complain and don’t get involved, you’re part of the problem.”

Ross, who unsuccessfully challenged longtime Orange County Republican Executive Committee chair Lew Oliver in 2016 and fell short in a bid for vice chair after Oliver resigned in June, said he will challenge current chairman Charles Hart during Thursday’s leadership elections in Orlando.

His platform, he says, is to try to make the party more diverse in an increasingly changing community and end what he called the internal “Tonya Harding politics” behind the scenes.

And after what happened in 2018, he said, quoting President Trump, “What have we got to lose?”

Between the 2016 and 2018 general elections, the number of registered Republicans in Orange County dropped from 214,341 to 212,267, the only county party in Central Florida to see any decline. Meanwhile, Democrats saw a 3 percent increase in registrations in Orange to 342,934 and non-party affiliated voters saw an 11 percent jump to 244,090.

While Orange had been trending Democratic over the past 30 years, Republicans still had considerable success in winning swing districts for the state House and County Commission.

But this year, despite Republican success in statewide elections for governor and U.S. Senate, the trends finally caught up with the GOP.

Democrats Joy Goff-Marcil and Anna Eskamani won Republican-held House seats in Districts 30 and 47, which include Maitland and Winter Park.

In the County Commission, while officially nonpartisan, Democrats Marya Uribe and Maribel Gomez Cordero both defeated Republican opponents, joining newly elected Mayor Jerry Demings in flipping the board to Democratic for the first time in decades.

The biggest surprise, however, was in western Orange County, where Democrat Geraldine Thompson won a state House