In the aftermath of Election 2012, it seems most county REC chairs hailing from the largest “super counties” are not running for reelection.
First was Sid Dinerstein, the longtime Palm Beach County Chair, who announced shortly after election day that he would not seek another term.
Art Wood in Hillsborough and JJ Beyrouti in Pinellas are also bowing out. We’ve heard the Miami-Dade Chair Ben Powell will not seek a full term. Most recently, Richard DeNapoli in Broward also announced he’s not seeking another term.
It’s well known that the RPOF structure doesn’t lend itself well to large counties. A chair in a large county with a couple hundred members has essentially the same title, support, and authority as a Chair from a county with only a handful of members and a small population. Chairs in large counties truly have thankless jobs…organizing events and helping candidates for free, and have little support from the RPOF. That might explain how poorly the GOP fared in most of these larger counties.
NOTE: As one of our commenters pointed out, Sarasota County Chairman Joe Gruters is running again. We don’t place the size of Sarasota in the same league as the “super counties.”
I also think a lot of these people maybe feed up with what happen at the national. I also think that if some major issues are not address with in the next year, a lot of people will be leaving the GOP.
I totally agree with SRQ Tad as to his assessment. The GOP has changed it’s stripes years ago and is no longer beholden to our Constitutional form of Government, that the Founders spoke about and it has for the most part shot itself in the foot in the past 20 years. I hope it does not continue this self destructive practice and begins to see that “We the People” have memories of what the GOP was like and what it was supposed to be.
Also, in a county of 400,000, an REC/Republican club membership somewhere around 1000 and an additional group of approximately 700 regular party members volunteering this past election cycle, Joe Gruters, chair of Sarasota County, who IS running again, in a county that took all but 1 race for the Republicans (even WE couldn’t save Mack), has made it clear he has those organizational and people skills.
Yes, Joe Gruters is running again, and he is a great Chair. (We just didn’t place Sarasota in the “large” county realm. More mid-sized compared to the Super Counties of Hillsborough, Pinellas, Miami, Broward, Palm Beach, Orange, Duval. (We’ll amend the piece above.)
The size of the county has nothing to do with it. Organizational and people skills do. The GOP has been run by Neo cons for years and THAT is why Mitt Romney lost. It’s time to go back to being the party of liberty and free enterprize. No more wars with out a congressional declaration, no more Keynesian economics; no more corporate welfare and/or crony capitalism; no more using the power of the Federal Gvmnt to dictate lifestyle; no more being the same as the Democrats with the only difference being who gets to spend money that doesn’t exost on which unconstitutional “program”.