5 hours ago
6
A top Florida Democrat issued a scathing seven-word rebuke as he announced his surprise departure from the Democratic Party.
State Senator Jason Pizzo, the Democratic minority leader, made a dramatic announcement on the Senate floor Thursday that he is changing his voter registration to “no party affiliation”: a common registration in Florida for independent voters.
“Here’s the issue,” Pizzo told fellow lawmakers. “The Democratic Party in Florida is dead.”
Pizzo stated that the party needed new leadership but other top state officials didn’t want him to be it.
“There are good people that can resuscitate it. But they don’t want it to be me. That’s not convenient. That’s not cool,” he added.
After the Senate adjourned, the Democratic caucus convened and unanimously elected state Senator Lori Berman as the new minority leader of the Florida House.
Pizzo said the Democratic party his late father volunteered for in the 1960s “is not the party today.” He added that the modern party “craves and screams anarchy and then demands amnesty.”
He continued: “I think stripping myself of a title of a party designation allows me to run free and clear, clean and transparent and help many, many more.”
Pizzo indicated that he did not defect to the Republicans because the party has “a lot of problems.”
Writing on X later on Thursday, he said: “I won’t punch down. Wishing everyone well.”
It marks another blow for Florida's embattled Democratic party, which has 1.2 million fewer members than the Republicans, and no incumbents holding statewide elected office.
Instead, Pizzo has long been rumored to be weighing a gubernatorial run in Florida next year. He told Politico earlier this week that he wouldn’t make a decision about the race until September.
In January, the lawmaker said he would not mount a campaign for governor as an independent, according to the Florida Phoenix. When probed whether he would run for governor as an independent candidate, Pizzo did not shut the door.
Pizzo became the third state lawmaker to leave the party this year after former state House Democrats, Hillary Cassel and Susan Valdés, defected to the Republicans in January.
Pizzo’s decision comes the same day that former GOP Florida Representative David Jolly announced that he had registered to become a Democrat, according to Politico.
Jolly previously said he is “very close” to announcing a run for governor in 2026, and that he would be “committed to doing my part as a Florida Democrat.”
Florida Representative Byron Donalds has pitched himself as Donald Trump’s governor pick, and First Lady Casey DeSantis, the wife of incumbent Governor Ron DeSantis, has been a rumored candidate.
