What Has Happened to Nikki Fried?

A s the only Democrat to have won a statewide election in Florida since 2012, Nikki Fried was in possession of a solid case for why she — rather than, say, Charlie Crist — should be chosen as the party’s nominee for governor next year. And yet, according to a poll released yesterday, the voters do not seem to agree. Just over a year out, Fried is attracting the support of just 22 percent of Florida Democrats, while Crist is garnering more than half.

As a perennial candidate for public office, Crist may be a little better known. But, at this stage in the game, this presents a problem in and of itself. Fried, who serves in the state government as the elected agriculture commissioner, has her name featured on every gas station and concealed-carry permit in the state and is constantly featured on MSNBC; Crist, who now serves in the U.S. House of Representatives, is a party-switching has-been who lost his last two statewide bids. It is Fried, not Crist, who should be dominating the early days.

Had she chosen to become a sober critic of Governor DeSantis, she might be. Instead, she frittered away her advantages by choosing to attach herself to every grifter, hype artist, and snake-oil salesman who has come her way — to the point at which any reasonable observer must have wondered whether she was aiming her pitch at persuadable Floridians or the well-heeled Californians whose financial support she covets.

Last year, when Rebekah Jones began lying about the state’s COVID numbers — and libeling its employees into the bargain — Fried turned herself into a promoter. “Thank you, Rebekah Jones,” she tweeted the day after Jones was fired, “for not being afraid to speak out.” She followed up by reiterating the claim that the Florida Department of Health had “censored data and fired Dr. Rebekah Jones” (Jones is not a doctor but has occasionally pretended to be one); by asserting that Jones had been “fired by DOH for refusing to manipulate #COVID19 data”; by inviting Jones to a shadow cabinet meeting (the “cupboard,” she called it); and by boosting Jones’s lie that the police had behaved inappropriately when searching Jones’s house.

This was not the only conspiracy theory that Fried has elected to share. After 60 Minutes absurdly accused Governor DeSantis of having involved the grocery chain Publix in the state’s vaccination rollout because Publix had donated to his reelection campaign, Fried enthusiastically jumped on the story, writing, “Tonight @60Minutes is exposing the nation to @GovRonDeSantis’ failings & corruption during the pandemic.” Fried, of course, knew better — not least because her own PAC, Florida Consumers First, has also received large donations from the chain.

Having internalized these two stories, Fried begun alleging preposterous things about Florida, its leadership, and the party that currently dominates the state. Among the claims that Fried has proffered in the past month are that “Florida isn’t a free state”; that “Liberty in the Sunshine State is under assault”; that “Our Constitution is repeatedly battered by Republicans in the legislature & Governor Ron DeSantis”; and, having listed the recent bills that Ron DeSantis has signed, that “I’m not describing the leader of a communist country, I’m talking about Florida Governor Ron DeSantis.”

In all of these cases, Fried’s behavior has been inexcusable. It is one thing for politics-addled Twitter users outside of Florida to believe such nonsense — and Lord, a lot of them do — but it is another for the incumbent agriculture commissioner to do so. Had she wished to, Fried could have taken a quick walk over to the Department of Health, asked whether there was anything to Jones’s story, and discovered in a matter of minutes that there was not. She didn’t. Had she wanted to, Fried could have called up the state’s emergency-management director, Jared Moskowitz (a fellow Democrat), asked him about the integrity of 60 Minutes’s reporting, and been told what Moskowitz later told the press: that the story was “absolute malarkey.” She didn’t. Were she so minded, she could focus on her areas of political disagreement with Governor DeSantis and the GOP, instead of swallowing conspiracy theories whole as a pretext for making absurd claims about “fascism.” Alas, she is not so minded.

There is nothing wrong with an elected official — or anyone, for that matter — choosing to criticize her home state. On the contrary: It is the right of every American to say what the hell he wishes. But Fried hasn’t been criticizing Florida so much as she’s been actively and consciously lying about Florida in order to damage its reputation. The ludicrous claims that Rebekah Jones has leveled and that Nikki Fried has enthusiastically amplified are not aimed at inchoate shadows, but at a real person: Dr. Shamarial Roberson, the state’s first African-American deputy secretary of health. 60 Minutes’s reporting did not allege wrongdoing in the clouds, but from Ron DeSantis, the head of the Florida Division of Emergency Management (a progressive Democrat), and the mayors of several counties. And those Republicans Fried calls fascists? They sit with her in the cabinet.

Given how extraordinarily unsubtle she is about her own conflicts of interest, one might have expected Fried to have been a little more careful with her rhetoric — for, unlike with Ron DeSantis and Publix, there really are some serious questions about the connection of Fried’s politics to Fried’s income. As public records show, the majority of Fried’s wealth comes from her connections to a marijuana industry that, as agriculture commissioner, she has been charged with regulating. For now, at least, it is not clear that Fried has broken any laws. But she has certainly skirted the line — and done so in a manner that she would have wholeheartedly condemned in others.

Between 2018 and 2019, Fried’s net worth increased from $271,613 to $1,401,563 — almost entirely because her boyfriend, a marijuana investor and the former CEO of one of the largest marijuana companies in Florida, bought her a house. It took her more than a year to admit that, at the time she created a new Cannabis Office and Medical Marijuana Advisory Committee in the Florida Department of Agriculture and Consumer Affairs, she had a $200,000 ownership stake in publicly traded marijuana company Harvest Health and Recreation Inc. that she had not listed on the previous year’s disclosure forms. And, most oddly of all, she talks about the issue in her public capacity as if she were Florida’s marijuana outreach director, rather than a key regulator of the industry. Fried’s most prominent comment on the investigation into Matt Gaetz has been, “I hope it’s not true — for the marijuana industry.” At a recent press roundtable, she suggested that, as governor, she would consider vetoing all Florida bills — including the budget — unless marijuana were legalized. And, when she is not using it to spread conspiracy theories, her Twitter feed often resembles that of a hemp salesman’s. “Free the flower,” she wrote recently, apropos of nothing.

When, next year, Fried crashes and burns, some observers will ask how a figure who once seemed so promising could have become such a preposterous joke. As Harold MacMillan might have said, the answer is simple: Choices, dear boy. Choices.