Republicans are narrowing the Democrats’ advantage in voter registration, and enjoyed a second consecutive election of impressive results in 2024 as Palm Beach County became solidly purple after years as a bastion of Democratic blue.
The county Republican Party begins the next two-year election cycle with an almost entirely new slate of leaders.
And the new Republican chairman, Carl Cascio, has an ambitious goal for his two-year term: overtaking the Democrats in voter registration.
“I’d like to be in the majority. That’s my goal. If not, very, very close,” he said in a telephone interview, but acknowledging that “as you get closer to the goal, those last few steps are usually the hardest.”
Republicans have momentum in the county — which President-elect Donald Trump narrowly lost this year and Gov. Ron DeSantis narrowly won in 2022 — but Cascio faces some obstacles.
Despite doing well in the presidential and gubernatorial races, and being the home territory of Trump, the governing organization for the Palm Beach County Republican Party is divided.
And November’s victories were tempered by some difficult losses.
Voting
Cascio isn’t avoiding controversy, advocating some election law changes that are favored by many Republicans, but not all.
Most notably, he’d like to return to the way voting was handled decades ago, when there was one Election Day.
Ideally, he said he’d like to do away with mail voting for anyone who doesn’t have a legitimate reason to get a mail ballot. He’d also eliminate the days of in-person early voting in the days leading up to Election Day.
Trump has advocated similar positions, falsely claiming the current system leads to voter fraud. Trump also has called on Republicans to take advantage of the ability to vote by mail and vote early.
Advance voting in Florida
Voters have embraced advance voting.
Statewide, almost 49% of voters this year used in-person early voting, and almost 46% of Palm Beach County voters voted early. Mail ballots were used by 27% of voters statewide and 31% in Palm Beach County.
Florida Republicans have capitalized on advance voting to fuel decades of wins. And this year, Palm Beach County Supervisor of Elections Wendy Sartory Link said, more than half of the county’s registered Republicans used early voting and about a quarter more voted by mail. “To cut that down would seem to be contrary to what your Republican base has shown they want,” Link said.
If the Legislature and governor won’t eliminate early voting, Cascio said he’d like to see it greatly scaled back. The big South Florida counties including Palm Beach, used the full maximum allowable number of early voting days, 14, for this year’s election. “I don’t think we need that many days. I think we could whittle it down to maybe a couple,” Cascio said.
And if the Legislature doesn’t end the ability of anyone to vote by mail without citing a reason, he said voters should be required to have their signatures notarized. Currently signatures are evaluated at the elections office, and if there’s any apparent discrepancy, the unopened ballot is referred to the three-member elections Canvassing Board for a decision. The Canvassing Board is chaired by a judge, usually joined by a county commissioner and the supervisor of elections. Its deliberations are in public.
Cascio said widespread mail voting raises “integrity issues with verification of signatures” and too many decisions are made by Link’s staff before they get to the board level.
To make a one-day-only election day work, Cascio said national elections could be made a national holiday. Perhaps, he said, people who can’t get off work could cite that as a reason for an absentee ballot.
Election integrity
Cascio said “election integrity” is one of his top priorities.
At the top of the list, he said, is getting answers about what he said are 3,000 vote-by-mail ballots that were issued without the applicant providing the legally required state driver license or state ID number, or the last four digits of a Social Security number.
Link said a document purporting to show 3,000 mail ballot applications that didn’t have the required information is not what Cascio and others claim. Link said a vendor that provides information to political parties, candidates and political committees statewide that they use to target their efforts to reach people with mail ballots had a column heading with a Y or N. It appeared as those listed as N did not provide the required ID information.
Actually Link said, “the ‘N’ doesn’t mean ‘no.’ The ‘N’ means ‘null’” because the identification numbers had already been supplied and checked.
She said ballots didn’t go out without applicants supplying the required numbers. “That’s not accurate.”
Cascio said he “had a good rapport” with Link during the recent elections but he said he’s “concerned about Palm Beach County and our SOE and making sure that they’re doing what they’re supposed to do.”
He said, “I think we can make our voting system in Palm Beach County one that everybody has confidence is working properly, but that remains to be seen.”
Link was a Republican when she was appointed supervisor of elections in 2018 by Gov. Ron DeSantis. She became a Democrat when she became a candidate for the job, and won in 2020 and was reelected this year.
“I’m going to give her the benefit of the doubt that she’s going to clean up what needs to be cleaned up,” he said. “She’s an attorney, she’s a smart lady. I know she’ll be able to understand where there were problems, and I’m hopeful that she will address those problem areas.”
Jay Goldfarb, who has been active in the county Republican Party for decades, said many Republicans have complete confidence in Link. An organization he helped lead, the Lincoln Reagan Committee included Link in its voter guides, along with Sheriff Ric Bradshaw, another Democrat.
“We were recommending people who were proper for the office,” he said.
Goldfarb said Republicans who understand how elections are supposed to operate “absolutely” have confidence in Link. “She’s done a stellar job.”
Priorities
Cascio said priorities include raising money; finding candidates for local offices in 2025 city, town and village elections; and outreach to a broader swath of voters.
He said the party’s candidate committee is meeting with local government candidates who support fiscally prudent, efficient government and won’t “give the developers everything that they want.”
Ultimately, he said, getting such people elected would help overthrow the “good old boy system where everybody, the people that are in charge, make the deals and then their friends are the ones that benefit rather than spreading out the wealth.”
Republicans will step up efforts to reach Hispanic, Haitian and other Black voters, he said. “Republicans have a golden opportunity and we really need to take advantage of that because we’ve been handed an opportunity where one party obviously is missing the message.”
Wins, losses
Palm Beach County Republicans had impressive results this year in contests for the state House of Representatives, including defeating a Democratic incumbent, the party suffered some losses.
Republicans badly wanted the State Attorney’s Office. Democrat Alexcia Cox received 49.2% of the vote to 48.4% for Republican Sam Stern. Adam Farkas, running with no party affiliation, received 2.4%.
Appointed Republican Palm Beach County Commissioner Michael Barnett was defeated by Joel Flores, a former Greenacres mayor. The result gave Democrats a commission majority.
And Vice President Kamala Harris finished ahead of Trump in the county by 0.76%.
Casino said he didn’t yet have an analysis of the losses. “I’m not going to judge anything until I look at the numbers and study” what worked and didn’t.”
Internal differences
Many local Democratic and Republican parties, regardless of how well or poorly they perform, experience infighting. Palm Beach County Republicans are no exception.
Cascio won the job on the first ballot when committeemen and committeewomen voted. He received 102 votes and two other candidates received a combined 101 votes.
After the vote, both Cascio and Goldfarb said, a large contingent of committeemen and committeewomen left the meeting.
“It’s a split party,” Goldfarb said.
The Lincoln Reagan Committee, funded by many longtime leading county Republicans who were dissatisfied with the way the county party was operating, organized voter outreach efforts and stood up two county field offices, Goldfarb said.
Nevertheless, Cascio described himself as “a people person” who would have an open-door policy. “I know Kevin (Neal, the previous chairman) had a different way of doing it. … He had a group of people around him and those people had his ear.”
He said he plans to communicate with party members. “It’s like any interpersonal relationship if you don’t communicate you run the risk of building up mistrust and misinformation gets out about what your ideas are and what your goals are.”
New leaders
Neal was elected chairman in 2023 when longtime chairman Barnett resigned after DeSantis appointed him to fill a vacancy on the County Commission. He resisted an effort to oust him earlier this year, but didn’t run for a full two-year term after the November elections.
Cascio unsuccessfully ran for state representative in 1994. He returned to the political world in 2019, becoming a Republican precinct committeeman and serving as the Neal-appointed party general counsel.
Cascio, 60, was born and raised in Miami and his family moved to Palm Beach County in 1988. He’s a lawyer in solo practice, largely doing probate and estate planning work, real estate work and commercial litigation. He now lives in unincorporated Palm Beach Gardens.
Cascio said he wanted to take on the job to “make a difference, to improve the Republican Party.”
“I thought we had made some good progress and it would make sense to have someone that was familiar with what was happening, that knew the ropes and that had built up I think a good loyalty amongst the hardworking members,” he said.
The new vice chairman is Jason Kulp, who ran in the August primary for the post of state Republican committeeman, but lost. The new secretary, Katina Maxwell, was unopposed. Also unopposed was Treasurer Jane Pike, who was elected to a sixth two-year term.
Republican primary voters in August elected State Committeeman Joe LaFauci and State Committeewoman Jodi Schwartz.
Anthony Man can be reached at aman@sunsentinel.com and can be found @browardpolitics on Bluesky, Threads, Facebook and Mastodon.