It is RINO Primary Year!

Op-ed by Cheryl Atkins, FNR is Citizen Driven Media

As Florida News Report prepares our second Primary Voter Guide to Constitutional Candidates, we need help from you about your local candidates! Please email FloridaNewsReport@gmail.com leads you have so we can follow up.

What makes a Republican a RINO?

After the 2020 presidential election was stolen, I thought I had a good grasp on the Florida political lay of the land…. boy, was I wrong! I was so confident in our majority-elected Republican legislature, that I was sure some of the news coverage in 2021 of our legislature was fake - the same fake news that attacked my beloved President Trump from the day he came down the escalator to announce he was running for president.

But some of the criticism of the Florida legislators was coming from people I respected and who worked within the political machine. I can admit… it was a little scary seeking out information that might shake up my beliefs…. because within every cell in my body, I was convinced if we could just elect more Republicans, America would be saved.

What I woke up to was a flawed belief and it all started in Tallahassee.

It started with learning that both the Florida Senate President and the Florida House Speaker are both chosen years in advance… YEARS… in advance. Someone e-mailed me a Tampa Bay Times article titled “Term Limits push Florida lawmakers to secure leaders years in advance”. The article was published in 2019. An excerpt reads:

This week, GOP senators rallied support around Sen. Kathleen Passidomo, R-Naples, to become Senate president for the 2023 and 2024 legislative sessions, assuming Republicans hold their majority over the next two election cycles. In the House, Republicans know who their speakers will be through 2026.

The process of picking the leaders of the two chambers years in advance is highly unusual, observers say, and yet another byproduct of term limits, which voters added to the state Constitution in 1992.

The selection process is so bizarre that lawmakers sometimes lobby for House speaker before they’ve even been elected to office.

Read that again: In 2019, the Republican Party had their choices for Florida House Speaker and Senate President picked through 2026.

How is the Republican Party so sure their picks will still be in office?

It was unsettling, but I decided to push forward and joined my county Republican Party to get involved…. and until then, I had no idea the schism in our party existed until I sat through my first meeting in the spring of 2021. I noticed that my application for membership didn’t get hung up like the other two people who I met - who were just like me - getting involved locally. We all filled out our paperwork at the same time. It would only be a matter of months before I saw clearly what the reason was.

More and more people started attending the monthly meetings, standing up and giving their introduction and why they were getting involved…. and they had Trump gear on and worried for their grown children and their grandkids - because they knew that if a party could brazenly steal an election, they could be capable of anything. I was so relieved when the Election Integrity Committee gave their monthly update on their progress with our county Supervisor of Elections - who is a democrat. They had determined that Mark Zuckerberg had “donated” money to our county. GREAT WORK, GUYS! They also announced that the Florida chairman of the Republican party had been appointed to the national Election Integrity Committee and I felt proud that Florida was getting it RIGHT.

2022 Was the Year of Reckoning

We had an AMAZING candidate challenging our sad sack congressman and I was all in…. and shockingly the county meetings were even divided over this election! Half the room was vitriolic against this great MAGA candidate. It was so bad, I honestly thought two eighty year olds were going to take each other down to the floor ten minutes into our meeting.

My guy seemed to be completely frozen out by the county party leadership - they were clearly 100% in for the incumbent, even though he voted for gun control, missed a quarter of the votes he should have cast - I mean he wasn’t doing anything we sent him up to Washington to do - the things he promised in every ad when he was campaigning in 2020 and that is how he secured by 2020 vote. He was MAGA, MAGA, MAGA, BABY! He got up to Washington and became MIA, MIA, MIA, BABY! Gone. Absent. We needed the guy he SAID he was.

So the new candidate seemed a great alternative and he was attacked by Republicans, not democrats? There seemed to be a lot of confusion in the county party about endorsements for primary races, what the rules were and who gets to interpret the rules. Man, this was beginning to be a drag.

And of course my MAGA guy lost. I think half the reason he lost was most Republicans thought the election was in November. I got bombarded with mail from the incumbent, but there was never a “Vote for Me - Dipshit of the Year - On Tuesday Whatever the date of the primary is.” Not one piece of mail urging me to vote with the date provided.

It was after the primary that our county party went into full campaign mode. Candidates were panhandling for money, volunteers to make phone calls, and campaign walkers to cover neighborhoods with political flyers.

WOW. Imagine if this had occurred prior to the primary. My MAGA, MAGA, MAGA guy could have won.

On November 4th, 2022, someone in my county party forwarded a substack article:

It wasn’t just the article that was like waking up from a bad dream, to a worse reality - it was also the comments that I ended up checking every single day for a week from other MAGA people around the state dealing with the same thing I was. It wasn’t comforting to know I wasn’t alone… IT WAS SCARY! This was statewide.

We had a hellava problem with RINOs -beloved by half the members in the county party - I was just then learning about the Florida Republican Establishment which I had previously thought was only a Washington problem.

And then the part two of the article was published:

After reading about this third component of the Florida Republican party, my first thought was “this is set up like a business… with two subsidiaries — RINOs and Enablers.” None of the three could exist without the other two.

I had wrongly believed that there was the party and peppered within the party, there were RINOs.

And that brings us to 2024.

The question is how is the Florida Republican Establishment going to continue to promote, campaign, and support RINO candidates and what are they going to do about Candidate Trump?

They certainly are not waving the Republican flag over the presidential candidates who will be voted on in two months as the presidential nominee from Florida.

There is ZERO information about the upcoming MARCH 19TH presidential primary on the Florida GOP website.

ZERO.

And that is the score I would give the Florida republican party - a big ZERO.