He endorsed Florida's Jared Moskowitz for Congress in 2022. Now he’s challenging him for reelection.

Robert Weinroth was a Democratic county commissioner until a Republican defeated him in 2022. Now, he’s repudiated his old party, registered as a Republican, and is running for Congress “to stop the radical Democrats.”

His target: U.S. Rep. Jared Moskowitz, a Democrat serving his first term representing a Broward-Palm Beach county district — the very same Moskowitz who Weinroth endorsed in the last election.

Weinroth isn’t alone. Six Republicans say they’re running for their party’s nomination to take on Moskowitz; six months ago there were no challengers. And the roster is in flux. In recent days, one more candidate entered the race and one dropped out.

Three — Steven Chess, Joe Kaufman and Carla Spalding — have experience in congressional races. Among them, they’ve run — and lost — nine campaigns for Congress.

“I believe Jared Moskowitz is beatable,” Kaufman said via text message.

Weinroth called it an “opportunity” in a phone interview. “It’s going to be a very heavy lift.”

Real prospects?

If anything, “heavy lift” might be understating the challenge.

Kevin Wagner, a political scientist at Florida Atlantic University, said the 23rd Congressional District is “very challenging for a Republican to win. Not impossible. Nothing’s impossible. But challenging.”

Moskowitz’s chances at reelection are seen as so high that the contest doesn’t even make the lists of races to watch from the independent, nonpartisan analysts at Inside Elections and Sabato’s Crystal Ball at the University of Virginia Center for Politics. Both have other Florida congressional districts on lists of districts that could switch parties, but not the 23rd.

The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee and the National Republican Congressional Committee, the party organizations devoted solely to increasing their respective sides’ numbers in the House, are focusing their attention elsewhere in Florida — on U.S. Reps. Anna Paulina Luna, a Pinellas County Republican; Maria Elvira Salazar, a Miami-Dade Republican, and Darren Soto, a Central Florida Democrat — not on the Moskowitz race.

Inside Elections was watching the 23rd District for much of 2023, but shifted it to “solid Democratic” from “likely Democratic” in September, writing, “Flipping this seat would be a reach for Republicans, and the NRCC doesn’t even have the district on their target list.

Joe Budd, the state Republican committeeman from Palm Beach County and the candidate who lost to Moskowitz in 2022, said incumbency is an advantage for Moskowitz, like the home-field advantage in a football game.

“I’ve always thought the incumbent got 2 points from being an incumbent. That makes it a harder race,” Budd said.

Trump factor

Many Democrats believe the all-but-certain nomination of former President Donald Trump as the Republican presidential candidate could help Democratic candidates lower down on the ballot in places like the 23rd District, which takes in northern Broward, and much of the coast extending south through most of Fort Lauderdale, plus part of southern Palm Beach county.

Budd does too.

He was an early supporter of Trump’s 2016 presidential candidacy and later founded a large South Florida political organization now known as Club 47 to support the former president, though he supported Gov. Ron DeSantis for the nomination this year.

Budd thinks Trump at the top of the ticket will boost turnout by Democrats in the 23rd District, helping Moskowitz and hurting the eventual Republican nominee.

“This is a district that there’s enough Democrats that don’t like him — fervently don’t like him — and it will be more of a motivating factor to come out and vote against him — not that they necessarily like Joe Biden,” Budd said.

Spalding hopes her support for Trump will help her in the Republican primary. “Our country, it’s being destroyed,” she said. “I know that Trump will make a difference. Also I know that I can make a difference.”

Trump and many of his most ardent supporters push false claims that he, not Biden, won the 2020 election.

Spalding said she doesn’t believe Biden was the legitimate winner of the presidency. “I don’t think he is,” she said. “Definitely there was cheating through the United States, and I believe he won — not Biden, but Trump. And he will win in 2024, no matter what they will do, he will still win.”

Kaufman said he has “doubts about the 2020 election, mainly because, in my opinion, certain states violated their own election laws. That said, I do not wish to dwell on the past. My concern is 2024” when, he argued, he and Trump will win.

Weinroth said he has doubts about Biden’s win. “There were problems with the election but I’m certainly not going to question the process.”

Pressed as to whether he thinks Biden is the legitimately elected president, Weinroth said “this is the way that we have elections, and the process worked and without getting into a lot of minutia, there’s a lot to be done to give people much more confidence in their votes being counted properly.”

Former Democrat

Weinroth is the only candidate who has won elections. But his path to becoming a Republican congressional candidate has been bumpy.

A lawyer, 71, and former owner of a medical supply company, he served one term as a Democrat on the Palm Beach County Commission. He went into the 2022 election with formidable advantages, including serving a term as county mayor and he had raised $417,000 for his campaign.

But in the Florida Republican red wave with DeSantis at the top of the ticket, Weinroth received 48.2% of the vote in his South County district. The Republican who defeated him, Marci Woodward, received 51.8% of the vote. She spent just $49,000.

Weinroth was a member of the Boca Raton City Council, a nonpartisan position, from 2014 to 2018 and unsuccessfully ran for Palm Beach County property appraiser in 2012.

In January 2023, voter records show, he changed his voter registration to Republican. And he opened a campaign account to raise money for a seat on the Palm Beach County School Board.

By year’s end, he abandoned that contest, and last month became a candidate for Congress.

Weinroth said he’d been a Democrat for some 20 years, but didn’t feel at home in the party, even though he was registered as one and endorsed Democrats for other offices.

“I just felt that the party had drifted so far to the left that I couldn’t continue as a Democrat. And the people who have watched me on the County Commission and on the City Council always looked at me as a right-leaning Democrat and sort of would wink at me and say, ‘We know you’re really a Republican and affiliate as a Democrat,’ but wink wink.”

Publicly Weinroth endorsed Nikki Fried, now the state Democratic Party chair, for the party’s 2022 gubernatorial nomination. He said he voted for DeSantis in 2022 and Trump in 2020.

Budd said Weinroth’s party switch would be a problem for Republican primary voters. “Weinroth’s weakness is going to be just his recent conversion from a Democrat."

And Kaufman plans to draw attention to Weinroth’s Democratic record. “I am proud to be the only Jewish Republican in the race. There is someone else posing as one, but you don’t just go one day talking up ‘climate change’ and endorsing Democrat leader Nikki Fried for governor against Ron DeSantis and then act like you are the biggest conservative. I have been a Conservative Republican my entire life,” Kaufman said via text.

Returning candidates

Kaufman and Spalding have both run repeatedly against U.S. Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, the senior Democrat in the Florida congressional delegation who represents a Broward district adjacent to Moskowitz’s.

Kaufman, 53, is a counter-terrorism researcher, writer and lecturer who lives in Broward and said he and his family are in the process of moving to Palm Beach County.

He has run four times, losing to Wasserman Schultz in 2018, 2016 and 2014. In 2012, he lost the Republican congressional primary. He also unsuccessfully ran for state House of Representatives in 1990 and 2000.

Kaufman heads the Joe Kaufman Security Initiative, which warns about “militant Islamic groups” and impact of antisemitic bigotry.

Kaufman spearheaded an effort that led to the cancellation last month of a Muslim organization’s planned conference at the Marriott Coral Springs Hotel and Convention Center. He said the sponsoring coalition was promoting Hamas, terrorism and antisemitism. The South Florida Muslim Federation, a coalition of about 30 mosques and Islamic groups, told The Associated Press that it was told by the hotel that the conference was canceled because of security concerns after it received calls demanding that it not host the group.

Spalding, 55, lost to Wasserman Schultz in 2022 and 2020. In 2018, she lost the Republican congressional primary to Kaufman. In 2016, she was a no party affiliation candidate in a district that included part of northern Palm Beach County and finished with 3% of the vote.

Spalding lived in Palm Beach County for years, moved to Broward for a time and said she is now living in Boca Raton, where she works as a nurse and teaches nursing.

“What I want and my community wants is for me to be in Congress, and this is the best opportunity that we have to be in Congress. We need the House and not just a slim House,” Spalding said.

Chess, 75, has also run before.

In 2022, he was one of seven Republican candidates in the 23rd district. With 8.5% of the vote, Chess finished in fifth place in the Republican primary that Budd won.

The retired Fort Lauderdale chiropractor said his top concern was “fiat currency,” something Investopedia describes as money backed by the government that issues it, not by a physical commodity such as goals. “There is nothing backing up your dollar other than the faith and credit of the United States. It’s unacceptable,” Chess warned in 2022.

Moderate or radical

In Washington, Moskowitz has aggressively pushed the Democratic side in political investigations run by the Republican majority, and has verbally sparred with some of the GOP’s top members.

He has also positioned himself as a centrist, willing to work with Republicans. One result: He has the closest rating of any Florida Democrat in Progressive Punch scores, and was the only state Democrat who got an “F” from the group.

The Republicans are portraying him as a woke, radical progressive.

Weinroth’s website, for example, levels a range of inaccurate accusations, including a claim that the incumbent supports allowing abortion until birth “for any reason at all,” sex change operations for minors, open borders and “weakening the military.”

Moskowitz has been an prominent advocate for gun regulations.

He is a graduate of Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, where 17 people were killed in the Feb. 14, 2018, massacre. Moskowitz was a state representative at the time and was a leader in passing the state gun-safety law enacted in the aftermath of the Parkland shooting. It includes a so-called red-flag law making it easier for law enforcement to seize weapons from people suspected of being dangerous.

Weinroth’s view is different. “More guns mean less crime,” he states on his website. He said he opposes red-flag laws.

Spalding also said Moskowitz is captive to an untraditional, leftist ideology.

Glimmer of hope for Republicans

The partisan voting index from the nonpartisan Cook Political Report rates the district as D plus 5, which means it performed 5 points more Democratic than the nation during the past two presidential contests — making it one of the closer districts in the state.

And Republicans take solace in the 2022 results, which was closer than many expected — and the closest congressional contest in Florida.

Moskowitz won with 51.6% of the vote, 4.8 percentage points higher than Budd.

DeSantis won the territory in the 23rd District by about 1 percentage point, Democrats and Republicans said — far less than his 19.4 point statewide victory.

DeSantis energized Republicans in 2022 while Charlie Crist at the top of the Democratic ticket did not draw his party’s voters to the polls.

“You had a strong Republican turnout in 2023, and that reflected a bit of a sea change in some of the traditional Democratic areas of the state, including Palm Beach County, and to a lesser extent Broward County. The question we really don’t know an answer to is was that the sign of a long-term change or was that a one-cycle event,” Wagner said.

More candidates

Candidates have until April 26 to qualify for the Aug. 20 primary ballot.

Two other Republican candidates besides Chess, Spalding and Weinroth, have filed statements of candidacy with the Federal Election Commission. Rafael A. Ortiz, of Davie, filed on Sept. 6 and Joe Thelusca, 47, of Boca Raton, filed on Aug. 16.

Kaufman hadn’t yet filed campaign paperwork as of mid-afternoon Friday, but said he’s in the race. A seventh Republican, Gary Barve, filed with the FEC in October and on Wednesday terminated his campaign after earlier posting on Facebook he was dropping out.

Budd, who isn’t running, said there could be more. “Who knows who else will decide to throw their hat in the ring.”

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