Nikki Fried Is So, So Bad at This

A ll engaging dramas need a fool for the whetstone, and so, in its infinite jest, Nature has sent America the gift of Nicole “Nikki” Fried, the most inadequate, embarrassing, and downright befuddling political candidate the great state of Florida has seen in a long while.

Fried’s gubernatorial-campaign slogan declares that she represents “Something New,” and about that much she is correct. In the last month alone, Fried has compared sitting governor Ron DeSantis to Adolf Hitler and a Communist dictator; she has implied that the northern part of the state is an extended trailer park, of the sort that will be easily swayed by suggestive selfies; and she has rewritten the story of the 2018 gubernatorial election to make herself its hero. Were he to have proffered Fried some professional advice, Walter Mitty himself might have urged her to calm down.

Quite why Fried, the state’s agriculture commissioner, wishes to be in politics remains as unclear now as it was in 2018. She has no policy expertise, she has an unfortunate predilection for conspiracy theorists, and, beyond her vague insistence that she would be better at the job than DeSantis, she is able to point to no personal achievements or qualities that might recommend her to the post. In this great big world of ours, the only civic issue that truly seems to rile Fried up is the one that she worked on before she was elected to public office: the legalization and dissemination of marijuana. Beyond that, it’s all sound and fury, signifying nothing.

As Fried’s fundraising fortunes have declined, that fury has increased. To the presumable astonishment of the many exiles and refugees in Miami and beyond, Fried has begun bastardizing Solzhenitsyn in her criticisms of Governor DeSantis. In May, Fried likened DeSantis to “the leader of a communist country,” and contended that “Florida isn’t a free state.” In January, she submitted that “DeSantis is doing everything he can to become a dictator,” before quipping that “he’s already half of that word there” and publishing a photo of the governor in front of a sack of potatoes. Last week, in a fit of pique, she went all the way. “I’m a student of history, too. I saw the rise of Hitler,” she said on the Florida Roundup podcast. “Are you comparing DeSantis to Hitler?” her interlocutor asked. “In a lot of ways, yes,” she replied.

Expanding upon her case, Fried explained with a straight face that she is alarmed by DeSantis’s plan to make Florida the 23rd U.S. state with a civilian state guard: The governor may say that he wishes to use such a body to improve the state’s hurricane-response capabilities, she claimed, but he really wants to use it to “make fear and to instill that, to blame people for what is happening in their lives, blaming certain parts of our society and culture, and that’s exactly what Hitler did to the Jews back during World War II.”

Naturally.

On Sunday, Fried repeated this charge, describing DeSantis as “a danger to our state, our country, and yes, the world.” For this, Fried earned a rare rebuke from the Anti-Defamation League of Florida, which reminded the candidate that “while public officials may have disagreements over policies, comparisons to the Holocaust and Nazism are inappropriate, offensive, and trivialize this unique tragedy in human history.”

At times, Fried gives off the impression that her conception of the state in which she lives has been gleaned entirely from second-rate cartoons. In December, she boasted that her campaign was not just going “to dominate Ron DeSantis in South Florida,” but would also do “just fine in North Florida, too.” In support of this contention, Fried published a photograph of herself standing in front of a pick-up truck wearing a white tank top and a red, white, and blue Budweiser hat. Presumably, the photographs of her wrestling alligators, shot-gunning beers, and shooting holes in speed-limit signs failed to come out as she had hoped.

Fried has made a habit of overstating her electoral appeal. “DeSantis didn’t crack 50 percent in 2018,” she exclaimed last week. “We did. And we’ll do it again.” In the narrowest sense, she was correct: She won her current office with 50.04 percent of the vote, and DeSantis won his with 49.6 percent of the vote. But the context she omitted renders the claim meaningless: Unlike Fried — who had only one opponent, and was thus guaranteed to hit 50 percent if she won — DeSantis ran in a four-way race, and while that four-way race was indeed close, DeSantis’s margin of victory (.4 percentage points) was still five times the size of Fried’s (.08 percentage points).

Next time? Next time, it won’t be so close.