Jason Pizzo turns fire on Nikki Fried, Dems in scathing exit interview

Former Senate Minority Leader Jason Pizzo has plenty to say about Democrats in Florida in the wake of his snap decision to renounce not just Caucus leadership but the party itself.

And his problems start at the top of the party, in the form of Democratic Chair Nikki Fried, who he blasted during an interview with WLRN as an ineffective, failed politician who flamed out in a race against Charlie Crist three years ago.

“We’re headed at the state level by somebody who probably wasn’t feeling confident that they’d win reelection in their own seat and said, ‘you know what, if I’m going to go out, I might as well go out with a bang. So let me run for Governor.’ That didn’t end well,” he said about the former Agriculture Commissioner who took issue with his “temper tantrum” on the Senate floor last week.

But Fried is only part of Pizzo’s problem with his former party.

“I know there’s a large clutch of angry or shocked people at my decision. Most of them though, the loudest voices, are ones that are just pissed they can’t hit me up for money this year and next year,” Pizzo said, before bemoaning raising big bucks for the flatlined Florida Democratic Party even though he knew there was no point.

“I fundraised over $5 million for the Senate Democratic Caucus in a declining condition and status of the Democratic Party as a whole. I was very honest in my assertion that I didn’t think we were going to pick up any seats, which I think is a win based on declining Democratic registrations compared to the delta of Republicans,” he said. “I was lambasted for that, but it turned out to be true, and on the House side, they lost members.”

Ultimately, Pizzo doesn’t even see the FDP as functional.

“There is no party, okay? If they wanna characterize it as quitting or leaving whatever — there is no party. There’s a bunch of sort of disjointed ideas, no clear path of leadership whatsoever,” he said, calling his former running mates a “bunch of autonomous children in the room at this point that feel impossible to coalesce.”

While the language is stronger, it aligns with Pizzo’s original announcement, given on the Senate floor last week, in which he called the Democratic Party in Florida “dead.”