Palm Beach County election showdown: Democratic mayor vs. DeSantis-appointed Republican

A high stakes political race is shaping up in central Palm Beach County.

Joel Flores, the Democratic mayor of Greenacres, said Tuesday he is running for Palm Beach County Commission.

He’s running against Michael Barnett, the Republican appointed to the County Commission early this year by Gov. Ron DeSantis.

There are multiple political subtexts at play:

• Just last week, Barnett resigned as chairman of the County Republican Party – just six months after Republicans had extraordinarily successful results in Palm Beach County and just five months after he was elected to a two-year term to lead the party’s 2024 efforts.

• DeSantis’ appointment of Barnett flipped the County Commission from Democratic control to Republican. The vacancy Barnett filled came after DeSantis appointed the previous county commissioner – a Democrat who had endorsed DeSantis for re-election last year – to a high level state government job.

• The winner will show the increasing diversity of Palm Beach County. The territory in question, District 3 in the central part of the county, has a much higher percentage of Hispanic registered voters than any of the other six County Commission districts.

Flores is Hispanic; Barnett is Black.

Mindy Koch, chair of the Palm Beach County Democratic Party, said she was confident her party would win the district in 2024. Kevin Neal, interim chair of the Palm Beach County Republican Party, could not be reached for comment via email, voice mail or text.

Barnett

Barnett was elected in December to a fifth, two-year term as chairman of the county Republican Party. But he’s in a far different situation than he was late last year, leading to his decision to step down as party chairman. He told party leaders about his decision on April 24.

“The governor appointed me to this position on the County Commission. And that changed the circumstances. People of District 3 and the county need to understand that my loyalties are not divided, period,” Barnett said Monday. “The party deserves someone who could devote full-time energy to the job. And I’ve decided to devote my full-time energy to serving in my new role as county commissioner.”

Barnett isn’t leaving the party, however. He said he’s running as a Republican.

(That’s a contrast to a previous DeSantis appointee. In 2019, DeSantis suspended the previously elected Democratic supervisor of elections and appointed Wendy Sartory Link, then a Republican, to fill the vacancy. Link later became a Democrat and won election to the job in 2020.)

Barnett, a lawyer, is a longtime Palm Beach County resident who used to live in Boca Raton and moved to Greenacres in the district on March 31.

Barnett told the party’s executive committee on April 24 that he was resigning. He said he stayed in the party job to give it a start on its annual fundraising efforts and through municipal elections in March.

“I wanted to make sure to stay long enough to keep the party on good financial footing, to make sure that we had the municipal elections behind us. But also to step aside with enough time to leave the next chairman with an opportunity to get situated.”

He said Republicans won more than half of the local government races it was involved with this year.

A finance report filed with the Supervisor of Elections Office showed the party took in $654,025 in contributions in the first three months of 2023. Its first quarter spending was $414,012.

Most of the spending was for the party’s big, annual fundraising dinner, Lincoln Day, which is held at Mar-a-Lago, former President Donald Trump’s resort and home in Palm Beach.

The quarterly report showed the county Republican Party paid Mar-a-Lago $238,936 for event banquet costs. A vendor was paid $26,628 for event sound, video, lighting, and another vendor was paid $13,924 for printing the Lincoln Day program.

Flores

Flores was first elected mayor of Greenacres in 2017 and was reelected without opposition in 2020.

He’s a 14-year Army veteran who served in Operation Enduring Freedom in Afghanistan. Since then, he has worked as a vice president of small business initiatives at the Palm Beach North Chamber of Commerce and at Palm Beach State College. He’s currently a wealth management adviser.

“While I am a Democrat, I am also very down the middle. I’m very conservative and fiscally responsible. I’m a wealth management adviser. I am pro-business. I get that. I own my own firm. I’m a business owner,” he said.

Koch said Flores is a “spectacular candidate… As the mayor he’s got a better finger on the pulse than most people do.”

Flores participated in the push to get the County Commission to create a heavily Hispanic district when district boundaries were redrawn to reflect population changes uncovered in the 2020 Census.

The district

The district’s registered voters are 42.5% Democratic, 23.1% Republican, 32.4% no party affiliation/independent and 2% affiliated with minor parties. District 3’s registered voters are somewhat more Democratic and less Republican than Palm Beach County as a whole.

Citing the 2022 results, Barnett said the race is winnable. DeSantis received 49.2% of the vote in the district to 50.8% for Democratic nominee Charlie Crist. (Countywide, DeSantis received 51.2% to Crist’s 48.3%. Statewide, DeSantis received 59.4% to 40.0% for Crist.)

The district covers the central part of Palm Beach County, including Palm Springs, Greenacres, Lake Clarke Shores, part of Lake Worth Beach, part of West Palm Beach, Cloud Lake, Glen Ridge and parts of unincorporated Palm Beach County. Previous commissioners in roughly the same territory were Republican Warren Newell and Democrats Shelley Vana and Dave Kerner.

Kerner was the elected Democrat who generated a lot of attention – and anger from Democrats – last year when he endorsed DeSantis for re-election. In January, DeSantis named him executive director of the Florida Department of Highway Safety and Motor Vehicles.

Demographically, the latest voter registration figures show 32.7% of the district’s registered voters are Hispanic (compared to 13.5% countywide), 16.5% Black (14.3% countywide) and 41.2% white (63.4% countywide). Ethnicity designations aren’t required for people registering, so the figures are not precise.

“When you look at the amount of Hispanics in the district, I firmly believe that this is a prime district to be under Hispanic leadership from the Democratic Party,” Flores said.

More politics

Other elements shaping the contest include:

• By giving Kerner the state job and appointing Barnett, DeSantis gave Republicans a majority on the seven-member County Commission. In the 2022 elections, Republicans won two commission seats that had previously been held by Democrats.

• Before the Kerner resignation and Barnett appointment, Republican Brandon Roland Cabrera had filed paperwork to run for the County Commission seat. In March, he withdrew from the County Commission and filed paperwork to instead challenge state Rep. Katherine Waldron, D-Wellington.

• Neal, the party vice chairman, is taking over as acting chairman until the party elects a new leader.

The party is divided and could see a contest.

In December, Barnett faced three challengers. He received 154 votes, or 56% of the Republican committeemen and committeewomen from throughout the county. The other three candidates received a combined total of 120 votes.

Barnett had some important allies supporting his re-election as party chair: former President Donald Trump, a Palm Beach resident, and U.S. Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla. Barnett was an early supporter of Trump when many Republican leaders supported Rubio or former Gov. Jeb Bush for the 2016 presidential nomination.

Neal was one of Barnett’s challengers in December. After finishing second, with 50 votes, he ran for vice chair and defeated Tami Donnally, a close ally of Barnett’s who had served in the job since 2014.

Neal then ran for vice chair, defeating the previous vice chair and Barnett ally.

Anthony Man can be reached at aman@sunsentinel.com, on Twitter @browardpolitics and on Post.news/@browardpolitics.