Mac Stipanovich: Nothing will become Nikki Fried in her political life like the leaving of it

Democrats will be hard pressed to keep FDACS blue, but Fried holds out hope.

Sen. Annette Taddeo dropped out of the Democratic gubernatorial primary, in effect setting up a runoff between front-runner Congressman Charlie Crist and still struggling Commissioner of Agriculture and Consumer Affairs Nikki Fried.

Taddeo saw an off-ramp that allowed her both to save face and offer a somewhat better prospect for success — a race for a Congressional seat held by a relatively weak Republican incumbent — and she wisely took it.

Fried, however, lacks options.

She has been running for Governor to no noticeable effect since the day she was sworn into office as Agriculture Commissioner three and a half years ago. At this point, she has very little face left to save and no viable place to hide, including a re-election bid. Defeat in the general election would be just as likely, if not more likely, against Senate President Wilton Simpson, the presumptive Republican nominee for Agriculture Commissioner, as it is against Crist. That being the case, she might as well be hanged as a lion running for Governor than hanged as a sheep trying to cling to an office in which she has shown no interest to date, or so the thinking seems to be among what passes for her brain trust.

So Fried presses on in the hyper-intense and often incompetent manner that has become her trademark. When she is not likening Gov. Ron DeSantis to Adolf Hitler, which even I, an invariable and intemperate critic of DeSantis, think is too much by several orders of magnitude, her campaign spokesperson is calling Rep. Anna Eskamani an “off-brand AOC” in an inexplicable and ill-advised attempt to demean Eskamani for her recent endorsement of Crist.

Inexplicable because AOC — progressive Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez from New York — is much more of a hero than a bête noire among those who might be expected to turn out to vote in a Democratic primary. And ill-advised because Eskamani is in her own right a celebrity in the Star Wars bar of metastasizing identity interests that is the left-wing of the Democratic Party in Florida, people whose votes Fried wants in the primary and could not do without in the General Election.

These blunders are not anomalous. They are emblematic. And their cumulative effect, when added to insipid messaging and anemic fundraising, is what one would expect: The handwriting is, and has been, on the wall for Fried.

The only remaining question is how she will exit the stage. There are two paths she can take: dignified restraint or scorched earth. Returning to the runoff analogy, there are historical precedents for both restraint and war to the knife here in Florida, and there is one gubernatorial election in my personal experience in which both paths were followed with strikingly different results that might be instructive today.

In 1986, the Republican gubernatorial primary ended in a runoff between Tampa Mayor Bob Martinez, who had 44% of the vote, and former Congressman Lou Frey, who had 25%. On the Democratic side, state Rep. Steve Pajcic led the field with 36% of the vote, followed by Attorney General Jim Smith with 31%.

The difference between being down 19 points on the one hand and five points on the other dictated the runoff strategies of the two campaigns. Frey believed dropping out would be a betrayal of his loyal supporters, so he soldiered on. But he knew he could not win the runoff and that Martinez might be able to win the general election if he was not damaged by pointless internecine warfare, so he avoided criticizing Martinez more than was absolutely necessary to keep up the appearances of an actual contest.

Martinez won the runoff 64% to 36%, a victory that gave him crucial momentum going into the general election, which he won in the first step toward what is today’s Republican hegemony in Florida. The fact is that Martinez could not have been elected without Frey’s restraint.

On the other hand, Smith went after Pajcic with hammer and tongs, savaging him at every turn. Pajcic reciprocated. It was a brutal brawl that Pajcic won by a little more than 1%. He limped into the general election bruised, bloodied, and doomed to defeat. The fact is that Martinez could not have been elected without Smith’s scorched earth campaign.

Fried is not 19 points behind Crist, but she is certainly more than five points back. What will she do? There is an increasing number of straws in the wind indicating that she is contemplating scorching the earth in a campaign she will not win. This would be a fatal blow to Democrat hopes of winning the race for Governor.

Crist may not win if Fried does a Frey, but he could. He cannot win if she does a Smith (and she might).

Let it not be so. To paraphrase Shakespeare’s line in Macbeth describing the dignity with which the Thane of Cawdor met death when he was executed for treason, let it be said that nothing became Nikki Fried in her political life like the leaving of it.