Florida GOP officials slam state chair Gruters, Republican leadership
The Republican Party of Florida is taking heat from current and former county GOP leaders for what they claim is a pattern of ignoring and stonewalling local parties.
A former state committeeman from Lafayette County claims the party repeatedly held up requests for information on the party’s annual audit.
An Escambia County GOP vice chair resigned out of frustration because he said he was prevented from joining the Trump campaign.
And a Brevard state committeewoman claims dozens of party members were disqualified from voting the day before a membership election.
Their main complaint is that the state party ignores local party committees, dictates which candidates can run in local races and has
a stranglehold on fundraising.
“County parties are allowed to use out-of-date bylaws,” wrote Alan Levy, the former GOP state committeeman for Lafayette County, in a letter to fellow members of a group he founded, the Florida Freedom Caucus. “Although lacking the minimum required membership, county parties are still permitted to operate. … Our finances are hidden. Our membership is hidden. Our website carries little information.”
“Up is down, and down is up,” Levy wrote.
Their public criticism comes amid reports of infighting and troubles behind the scenes between Gov. Ron DeSantis and state GOP chair Joe Gruters, including the governor’s push for a pay cut for Gruters and his efforts to have his own people in high-ranking positions within the party.
In response to the criticisms, the Republican Party of Florida issued a statement sayin, “It is against [our] policy to comment on internal party matters.”
Bill Fetke, the former Escambia GOP vice chair, said the direction of the state party is “mind-boggling,” and he criticized Gruters directly.
“Gruters told all local [county GOP committees] to stay away from this organization,” Fetke said of the Trump re-election campaign, for which he now serves as Escambia chair. “In our last two campaigns, the state [GOP] provided little to no help. During the campaign in 2016, we didn’t get signs saying ‘Trump’ until two weeks before the election. Some weren’t delivered until 10 o’clock the night before the election.”
Each county Republican Executive Committee, or REC, includes a state committeeman and committeewoman elected countywide, as opposed to chairs, vice-chairs and other party leadership voted on by members.
Kay Durden, who resigned last month as Lafayette
County state committeewoman after having been involved with the party “since the Goldwater days” in the early 1960s, said their roles have been reduced to “window dressing” by the party leadership.
“We had power back then,” Durden said. “We made decisions. People running for office came to the REC, introduced themselves, and we would vet them on whether they were good Republicans and good people. Now it’s a situation where it’s out of control.”
Durden said the state party controls all fundraising, which she said is a major problem when Gruters and former chair Blaise Ingoglia are legislators and barred from raising money during the session. Many candidates in local races are also “hand-picked” by state leadership, she said.
“We were like the icing on the cake,” she said. “Why bother going to all the meetings? … Sometimes they say, ‘This is the guy running for this and this office. Now get on board.’”
After decades of serving as a state committeewoman, including a stint in Duval County, Durden resigned in December ahead of a move north to live with her children.
“I gave it up, it was too much,” she said. “It gave me an easy out, but I hate not being here to keep the fight going.”
Cheryl Lankes, a current state committeewoman for Brevard County, said she ran for her position “because I felt like the party had excluded regular voters, and I wanted to find a way to get them back in the loop. … But they tend to isolate grassroots people like myself.”
In a letter to Levy, Lankes wrote the state GOP “has failed to lay out a plan for the upcoming election. There’s no timeline of events leading to President Trump’s reelection. The too few individuals in place to organize our counties are substandard, and our REC’s are so small and aged they cannot effectively compete with Democrats.”
Lankes claims that 50 Brevard GOP members had
their membership revoked the day before the leadership election in which Rick Lacey was re-elected as chair. A grievance was filed with the state party, and “Chairman Gruters promised to follow up. … We never heard another word about it.”
Lacey did not respond to a request for comment.
Lankes’ claim was part of a Florida Bar grievance that Levy filed on Dec. 31, which contended state GOP counsel Ben Gibson had “ethical failures in judgment and behavior in violation of the rules of conduct.” Levy wrote that grievances “that favor inter-party allies are given attention while those against allies are ignored.”
Florida Bar counsel William Wilhelm dismissed the grievance on Tuesday, stating the matters were not in the Bar’s purview.
Levy, who had launched an unsuccessful bid for state chair against Gruters in 2017, has also been critical of the $1 million in charges on the state party American Express card in the first three months of 2019. He claims Gibson has stonewalled his attempts to look into the spending and Gibson asked him to sign a restrictive non-disclosure agreement, or NDA.
Levy said the NDA was far too broad, with “unspecified financial penalties,” and covered “far more party information than required for a very limited review of expenditures (most of which was already public).”
In response, Gibson said, “Mr. Levy’s complaint against me was swiftly dismissed by The Bar.”
In an interview Tuesday, Levy said, “This is about them trying to find a handful of people that the legislators can control, and screw everybody else. They don’t need the party members. They don’t need the public.”
“I’m not trying to hurt the president,” Levy said. “I’m not trying to hurt the governor. He’s not a bad guy. He turned out to be pretty good. But he’s surrounded by skunks.”