Nikki Fried likes to be an insider. To get there, she’s running for governor as an outsider
TAMPA
In spring 2003, the culture wars came to the University of Florida.
A local radio station, KISS-105.3, refused to broadcast from a carnival run by the Pride Student Union, a group of LGBTQ students. The group was outraged.
In stepped UF Student Body President Nikki Fried.
Then a 25-year-old graduate student, Fried cut off all student-funded advertising from the station’s airwaves.
The next week, the station apologized, promising to broadcast at future Pride-related events. The Pride Student Union accepted the apology and thanked Fried, who, in turn, restored the station’s sponsorships.
Reminiscing on a July day in Tampa nearly two decades later, Fried, 44, smiled.
“See?” Fried mused to her staffers. “I’ve been this way my whole life.”
It’s the kind of story any campaign would be proud to tell. Our candidate, even at a formative age, even when relatively few were watching, stood tall.
Fried’s campaign to become the first woman elected governor of Florida focuses on her as an outsider.
The operation’s slogan is “Something New for Florida” — a clear contrast with political fixture Charlie Crist, her Democratic primary opponent. Fried’s candidacy offers something fresh, her campaign insists: Before she became agriculture commissioner in 2018, she’d never held elected public office.
But examine Fried’s life closely enough, and it’s hard to see her as an outsider. Fried, a lifelong striver and meticulous planner, wants to be on the inside. And she believes the way to get there is by consensus.
“I like to break the system from the inside out, and make a difference once I get in there,” Fried said.
Consider the radio station story one more time. She took the funding away, but she gave it back, too.
FRIED RISES THROUGH THE RANKS AT UF
Lawton Chiles, the former governor of Florida and a UF alum, once called his races for state Legislature “minor league” compared to the “hardball” campaigns that consumed student government in Gainesville.
The daughter of a conservative attorney and a liberal stay-at-home mother turned teacher, Fried was attracted to politics because it gave her a chance to bridge divides. But she wasn’t prepared for the environment
Chiles described: She remembers wearing Birkenstocks and a Grateful Dead T-shirt to her first student senate meeting. Others wore blue blazers and bow ties.
In interviews, Fried and her contemporaries described the scene as cutthroat, an old boys’ network with a direct pipeline into the upper echelons of
Florida politics. A woman hadn’t been elected student body president in more than a decade. It was the kind of arena that taught a budding political junkie to build the right kind of connections and anticipate the moves of opponents.
“If I wanted to rise through the ranks, I was going to have to just be smarter. Be more tactical,” Fried said. “Work harder. Be everywhere I needed to be. Make myself known.”
Eventually, Fried found her place — and her allies. She led the student senate by 1999, and began to plan a run for the student presidency.
Like the Florida Legislature, UF student leadership at the time was highly choreographed and hierarchical. As she moved into law school, Fried’s path to the top remained obstructed. She ran instead for the leading judicial post in student government. She won.
It wasn’t until 2002, when she was headed into her last year of UF law school, that Fried gained the support of enough campus groups to contend for the presidency.
The wait came with a lesson, said Josh Aubuchon, a fellow UF leader who had sided with
Fried’s opponent in the race.
“You learn about timing, and timing is everything in politics,” said Aubuchon, a lobbyist in Tallahassee.
Fried won with about 52% of the vote. However, she went into office with a
legislative minority — almost certainly the kind of divided government she’d find herself in should she be elected governor.
She quickly brought opponents into the fold. She appointed Aubuchon to be her student lobbying director, where he represented the students at the university’s faculty senate.
“It would have been very easy for her to say, ‘You supported my opponent, I got nothing for you,’ “Aubuchon said. “But she didn’t.”
Joel Howell, Fried’s vice president, said the Gainesville campus was a tense place for some students of color in the wake of 9/11. In one of her first major public appearances as president, Fried had to speak at the university’s one-year commemoration of the attacks.
Fried told the crowd that the anniversary was an opportunity for the campus to come together. She still regularly wears a heart-shaped red, white and blue crystal-studded pin her mother gave her before her speech.
The conciliatory approach paid political dividends. At the fall student senate elections, Fried’s Ignite Party won every available seat.
A LONELY PLACE FOR DEMOCRATS
For years, the Florida Capitol in Tallahassee was a comfortable place for Fried. After graduating from UF and spending a few years practicing as a public defender and foreclosure attorney, she roamed its halls as a lobbyist. She specialized in marijuana policy and foster care, areas that netted her productive working relationships — and unlikely friendships — with Republican legislators.
She reportedly befriended Matt Gaetz, the controversial Panhandle congressman, and in 2016 campaigned for Manny Diaz, then a legislator, who is today Gov. Ron DeSantis’ education commissioner. (Fried tweeted in July that the reports of her friendship with Gaetz are a “lie.” A campaign spokesperson said she made an hour’s worth of campaign calls for Diaz to further a lobbying client’s interests.)
After she won a longshot campaign for agriculture commissioner in 2018, Fried returned to
Tallahassee. But as the only statewide elected Democrat, Fried found that her corner office came with fewer allies.
In February, Fried strode to the public comment podium to address a state Senate committee chaired by Diaz that was taking up a 15-week abortion ban.
“Some of you I’ve known for 20-plus years. I know this is not something that you want to do,” Fried said, trying to make a personal appeal. “You were forced into this situation today.”
Some of the GOP lawmakers were baffled by the appeal. Sen. Kelli Stargel, R-Lakeland, the bill’s sponsor, had proudly championed anti-abortion legislation in the past. Every Republican in the Senate voted for the 15week ban, and the bill became law.
It’s not unusual for the head of the Florida Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services to seem somewhat irrelevant. The office doesn’t come with the bully pulpit of the governor, or the legal power of the attorney general. The average voter probably recognizes Fried best by the name on Florida’s gas pumps.
Fried finds ways to relish her us-against-theworld lot in life. Above her desk in Tallahassee, she’s hung a framed New Yorker cover from November
2018 depicting women of color standing on the outside of a room full of white men, about to enter. The women are drawn in sharp relief, while the men are given hazy outlines. It reminds her that her 2018 win was part of a larger sweep, as progressive women across the country gained clout.
But as agriculture commissioner, Fried has governed more like UF Student Body President Nikki Fried than someone propelled to power by the progressive grassroots. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez she is not.
She kept key career department staffers who’d been appointed by Republicans — a move she said was necessary because of her 4,600-person agency’s broad scope. The Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services is responsible for everything from inspecting consumable products to making sure theme park rides are safe.
“The things that we do inside the department are not partisan,” Fried said. “They’re really here to do good for the people of our state.”
Sometimes her independent streak can get her into trouble. On the day she announced her department was suing the Biden administration on behalf of gun-buying medical marijuana patients, Annette Taddeo, who was then Fried’s opponent in the governor’s race, derisively tweeted, “I’ve never sued the Biden administration.”
Howell, Fried’s vice president at UF, said she has always been this way.
“The first thing that she does is she tries to gather everybody together,” Howell said. “Sometimes it can be cumbersome, sometimes it can be messy, sometimes you get some negative press. But I think it’s a valid approach to democracy.”
HER BIGGEST TEST YET?
A question hangs over Fried’s campaign, the same one that nagged at her during the years she spent waiting to run for the UF student presidency. What if this isn’t her time?
Unlike her opponent, Crist, a former governor who led as a Republican and is as close to a household name as one can get in Florida Democratic politics, Fried doesn’t have decades of relationships to fall back on. Crist first ran for statewide office in
1998, while Fried was still in college. He’s earned the lion’s share of endorsements, and fundraising dollars, in what has so far been a quiet primary.
With just weeks until election day, there are signs Fried’s campaign is lagging: Crist has outraised her nearly three to one this year. In this sprawling state, where expensive television advertisements are a key stage for politicians, money is paramount.
Fried’s campaign has been quick to point out Crist’s political liabilities. As governor, he appointed three of the conservative judges on the Florida Supreme Court. He’s shifted from conservative to progressive positions on numerous issues, including same-sex marriage. And if he loses this race, it will be his fourth statewide defeat.
Fried believes she can beat DeSantis — a popular incumbent governor who raised more money during one week of July than Fried has her entire campaign — because, she believes, she makes him personally uncomfortable.
In her run for governor, Fried has become a bellicose anti-DeSantis voice on social media. In various tweets, she’s called him “dictator Karen” for opposing marijuana legalization and said he is an “a--hole.”
“He’s going to be prone to making mistakes,” Fried told the Tampa Bay Times editorial board in July. “He’s not going to know what to do with me.”
But Fried has her own vulnerabilities.
There’s the political: Her connections to Republicans like Diaz, Gaetz and Attorney General Ashley Moody — an old UF friend to whom she donated money in 2017 — may dampen progressive enthusiasm for her campaign. She has faced an ethics complaint for failing to accurately fill out her financial disclosure paperwork.
“Floridians would have a hard time pointing to a single thing Nikki Fried has done as agriculture commissioner,” the Republican National Committee said in a July press release.
Then there’s the personal: In the summer of 2020, police responded to a messy Fort Lauderdale altercation between Fried and her then-fiancé, Jake Bergmann. No charges were filed. When Fried aides tried to confront their boss about her fiancé’s behavior, she distanced herself from them, Politico reported at the time. Fried and Bergmann are no longer together.
And then there was this: Earlier this year, Fried tweeted that no sex tape of hers exists. It was an attempt, according to her campaign, to dispel a nasty personal rumor. But it may have raised more questions from the average voter than it answered.
Fried has less than a month to convince voters she’s truly got something new to offer Florida.
Her first television ad, which hit airwaves this week, shows the candidate striding through a grassy field filled with nameless, faceless suited mannequins. The dull masculine figures stand for the state’s 46 past governors.
“I’ll beat Ron DeSantis, and be a governor you can finally be proud of,” Fried proclaims.
Fried wants people to know she’s not a member of the boys club. She also wants it known that she intends to join it.
Crist wasn’t afraid to at times buck his party — gently — on key populist issues.
He publicly supported a woman’s right to an abortion when he ran for office in 1992. He publicly acknowledged climate change. He was also willing to take on utilities and insurance companies, traditionally major campaign donors to GOP candidates.
In 1997, he sued Florida Power Corp. (which eventually morphed into Duke Energy) over a proposed $88 million rate increase, which contributed to the company refunding customers instead. The next year, he filed a bill in the Legislature to allow customers to choose their electricity provider.
Florida Power Corp. accused him of trying to “capitalize on statewide publicity in his campaign to unseat current U.S. Sen. Bob Graham.” Lobbyists in Tallahassee mocked him by handing out a mock “prospectus” seeking investors in “The Charlie Crist Publicity Futures Fund.”
When he was elected governor in 2006, Crist incurred the wrath of insurance companies when he called a special session in 2007 to address a property insurance crisis caused by a wave of hurricanes in 2004 and 2005.
The state, much as it is today, was seeing record homeowners insurance rate increases and companies shedding policies.
Crist was not a detailoriented policy wonk like his predecessor, Gov. Jeb Bush, said Kevin McCarty, Florida’s insurance commissioner from 2003 to 2016.
But Crist understood the big picture — the need to lower rates — and he was willing to challenge GOP orthodoxy and the interests of the insurance companies, McCarty said. The 2007 legislation was anything but free-market: It had the government absorb more risk for hurricane damage so insurers could lower rates, and it expanded the state-run Citizens Property Insurance to make it a competitor to private insurers.
“I think it was a courageous call,” McCarty, a Republican and selfdescribed “free-market guy,” said. “State Farm [in 2009] threatened to leave the state, and Charlie said, ‘Good riddance.’ ”
Rates overall went down the next two years, State Farm ended up staying, and the market stabilized for about a decade.
‘CONSISTENTLY INCONSISTENT’ ON ABORTION
At other key times, however, Crist would avoid hot-button topics or change his positions.
When the debate over stem cells was raging, he took a middle-of-theroad position that would offend no one. During the debate over the fate of Terri Schiavo, the St. Petersburg woman who was in a persistent vegetative state, Crist, as attorney general, kept quiet despite opposing the Legislature’s controversial bill requiring judges to keep her alive.
And while running for the GOP nomination for governor in 2006, he shifted to a more conservative stance on abortion, saying he was “pro-life.” In explaining his stance, he’s been “consistently inconsistent,” defining the terms “pro-life” and “prochoice” in his own way, according to the website Politifact.
Fried has seized on Crist’s inconsistencies on abortion, calling herself the only candidate who has been prochoice their entire life. She pointed out that Crist appointed Charles Canady — who had sponsored the partialbirth abortion ban in Congress in the 1990s — to the Florida Supreme Court. The court is likely to hear a challenge to Florida’s new 15-week abortion ban; Crist recently said he regretted appointing Canady and said he would not vote to keep Canady on the court.
But Crist has won over a diverse coalition in the primary that includes state Rep. Anna Eskamani, D-Orlando, one of the Legislature’s most prominent Democrats and a former senior director for Planned Parenthood of Southwest and Central Florida.
Notably, two organizations dedicated to electing pro-choice women, Ruth’s List and EMILY’s List, have not endorsed either candidate in the primary.
Eskamani said that Crist, despite being a former Republican, has a stronger history on consumer issues than Fried, a former corporate lobbyist who in 2019 angered environmentalists for supporting utilities such as Florida Power & Light and Duke Energy Florida that were asking the state to sharply lower or eliminate energy conservation goals. In Congress, Crist was a consistent supporter of reproductive rights, she added.
Eskamani said Crist won her over by frequently asking her advice and absorbing some of her policy recommendations. She said she also noticed his diverse coalition of local Central Florida supporters that included people who had known Crist for a long time.
“It’s really hard to find politicians that 10, 20 years later, you still like them,” she said. “That alone says something about his character.”
‘A GOVERNOR THEY CAN LIKE’
In the primary, Crist has avoided criticizing Fried, saying the race is mostly a referendum on DeSantis, whom he’s called a bully and “not the most pleasant person in the world.”
“I think people like having a governor that they can like,” Crist told the Tampa Bay Times’ editorial board last month.
DeSantis, backed by billionaires and a national profile, has more money on hand than Scott did and is more popular with his base than Scott was in 2014.
Regardless of how
Crist fares, some believe he’s not going away.
“People ask me, do you think Charlie’s done if he doesn’t win? I don’t,” said Schale, his former adviser. “He’s the phoenix in the ashes. He’s going to bounce back. He’s going to find some outlet.”