Moments after Hillsborough County Democrats selected Chris Mitchell to become their new chair last week, the 26-year-old business consultant addressed the internecine warfare that has plagued the local party for years.
“For way too long this party, it's been divided,” he said before a rare full house at the group’s monthly meeting site, the Hillsborough Children’s Board in Ybor City. “Some groups feel like they haven’t gotten enough attention. Well, that ends today as well. We’re going to be united.”
His election comes a little over a month after the Hillsborough Democrats suffered one of its worst election nights in recent history. The county hardly stood out, however; Nov. 2 was a night of futility for Democrats across the Bay area, the state and the nation.
And that includes Pinellas County, where last Thursday Democrats selected Mark Hanisee to succeed Ramsey McLaughlan to lead their Democratic Executive Committee (DEC). In his remarks, Hanisee praised the GOP and said the Dems need to learn from their post-defeat strategy in 2008. “They immediately went into the war room, analyzed what they did right, analyzed what they did wrong, reconfigured their party, went out and rebuilt their party, and they went out and raised money, and they recruited candidates, and they went out and hit us hard.”
This article appears in Dec 9-15, 2010.