Nikki Fried discusses women in politics, DeSantis-Trump relationship in North Florida Democratic Club talk

Nikki Fried.

Agriculture Commissioner and gubernatorial candidate Nikki Fried spoke during a meeting of the Democratic Club of North Florida Monday evening in a conversation framed around Women’s History Month.

Fried gave a prepared statement touching on her experience as a woman in politics. She then fielded questions from club members ranging from her work on environmental issues to her thoughts on the relationship between Gov. Ron DeSantis and Donald Trump.

Her campaign has had an eventful past month that involved leadership turnover and the hacking of her campaign Twitter account Saturday. Polling at the end of February has her just trailing U.S. Rep. Charlie Crist in the Democratic Primary but behind DeSantis by a large margin.

During Monday’s meeting, she told the panel that she was the first female Agricultural Commissioner and University of Florida Student Body President in 20 years. She said she knows Florida is ready for its first female Governor.

“Running in politics and being involved in politics is hard. Being a female in politics is even harder,” Fried said. “No offense to you men, but it’s time for us women to lead. We do it with grace. We don’t care about our egos. We want to lift everybody up. We want everybody to have a seat at the table.”

She also discussed some of her accomplishments as commissioner, like helping create Florida’s hemp industry. The new industry has had a $380 million economic impact and created 11,000 jobs since the state hemp program was launched in 2019. Fried reflected on meeting the female owner of a hemp store in Broward County while on the campaign trail.

“I opened up the doors for somebody like her to not only have a job, but the owner of the store, be an entrepreneur, and be a small business owner,” Fried said.

She also took shots at DeSantis during her remarks, but said attacking him alone is not enough to beat him.

“We can’t beat him just by talking about how bad he is. We all know that. We all know what he’s been doing to our state,” Fried said. “We need a qualified, accomplished, proven fighter to do this, and to make sure that we’re talking about what we are going to do.”

When asked whether DeSantis is just following the Trump train, Fried said has heard that the two butt heads behind closed doors because DeSantis hasn’t “kissed the ring”, which she said has the potential to harm him in the future if he runs for President.

“Trump, regardless of whether he runs or not, is going to want to anoint the next President. And so he is not going to want it to be DeSantis because he knows DeSantis doesn’t feel like he needs it,”  she said.

She also said she wants to reach out to start building dialogue with Trump supporters in the state because if she ignored Floridians, she would be “no better than DeSantis.”

“My goal is to not empower Trump, but to let those Trump supporters start to lay down their weapons, and start actually having conversations about things, and not so much of the aggression and the anger that we’re seeing in our state.”

However, she said she would not make life easy for Republican lawmakers if they are unwilling to work with her if elected, threatening to use the veto pen to keep them in Tallahassee for longer than 60 days.

“They’re going to be missing their family, they’re gonna be missing their jobs. And at the end of the day, they’re gonna realize that the things that they’re fighting against are stupid,” Fried said.