The Empty Chairs of Tallahassee’s Brave Warriors
There is an art to the political vanishing act. Usually, it takes behind-the-scenes whispering, an “urgent family commitment,” or a calendar conflict manufactured by a highly paid consultant. But this past Friday at the Tiger Bay Club of Tampa, the Republican candidates for the Florida State Senate skipped subtlety entirely. They simply chose the Casper the Friendly Ghost approach to campaigning.
The occasion was a post-luncheon candidate forum for the Hillsborough County Senate seats. Now, if you know anything about Tiger Bay, you know it isn’t a den of radical, pitchfork-wielding subversives. It’s an engaged, politically mixed, highly professional crowd that, if it leans any way at all, tends to skew toward a business-friendly, center-right sensibility. It is exactly the kind of room where traditional Republicans used to show up, shake hands, eat their chicken piccata, and comfortably defend their records.
Yet, when the forum began, the Republican side of the stage possessed all the energy and presence of an empty storage unit.
Senator Nick DiCeglie (District 18) was nowhere to be found. Senate Majority Leader Jim Boyd (District 20) apparently had far more pressing engagements. And Josie Tomkow (District 14), the former State Representative looking to reclaim a red seat after a chaotic special election cycle, was similarly missing in action.
It was a magnificent display of collective stage fright. And honestly, who can blame them? Facing a room full of Hillsborough County homeowners and taxpayers right now requires a level of courage that modern Tallahassee politicians simply aren’t equipped with. When your legislative record reads like a systematic war on the wallets and self-governance of local citizens, a live, unscripted microphone is considered a severe workplace hazard.
Now consider what these three would have had to explain to the crowd if they had actually occupied those empty chairs.
First, they would have had to address the raging, unchecked dumpster fire that is the Florida homeowner’s insurance market. For years, the supermajority in Tallahassee has told us that if we just gave the insurance conglomerates everything they wanted, the market would magically correct itself. DiCeglie, Tomkow, and Boyd all voted for sweeping “reforms” that made it exponentially harder for everyday homeowners to sue multi-billion-dollar insurance companies for acting in bad faith. They stripped away the requirement for insurance companies to pay a policyholder’s attorney fees when the company wrongfully denied or underpaid a claim.
They promised us this corporate handout would lower our premiums, and we were told the market would stabilize.
Instead, Florida homeowners got a front-row seat to an economic horror show. Premiums didn’t drop; they soared into the stratosphere, leaving residents paying the highest property insurance rates in the nation. Companies pocketed the legal protections, took our money, and in many cases, packed up and left the state anyway.
The irony is particularly delicious when it comes to Senator Jim Boyd, who, in a twist that screams for a satirical screenplay, is an insurance executive in his private life. Imagine the sheer, unadulterated awkwardness of Senator Boyd trying to explain to a room of small business owners why his legislative remedies have resulted in their insurance bills doubling, while the safety net of Citizens Property Insurance bulges at the seams.
It takes an extraordinary amount of nerve to tell a homeowner whose monthly escrow payment has eclipsed their actual mortgage that the system is working exactly as intended. It’s much easier to just stay in the locker room.
But the insurance disaster was only part of what made those chairs look so appealingly empty. If they had shown up, they would also have had to answer for their obsessive devotion to “legislative preemption”—the fancy Tallahassee term for stripping local cities and counties of their right to govern themselves.
Over the past few seasons, this trio has acted like a regulatory wrecking ball to local communities. When Hillsborough County tried to protect working families from predatory rent hikes and sudden evictions with basic tenant protections, they voted to crush it from Tallahassee. When local municipalities tried to shield their own urban tree canopies from rogue developers, they overrode them. When local governments attempted to ensure that taxpayer-funded local contractors were paid a living wage or given basic workplace protections against extreme Florida heat, the state outlawed it by decree.
It is a bizarre, deeply hypocritical philosophy: Small government for me, but absolute micromanagement for thee. They genuinely seem to believe that a bureaucrat sitting in an office in Leon County knows how to manage a zoning dispute on Bruce B. Downs Boulevard or a rental dispute in Brandon better than the people who actually live, work, and pay taxes here.
When politicians refuse to enter the public square, it isn’t a scheduling conflict—it’s a confession. It is a tacit admission that their policies cannot survive the harsh disinfectant of public scrutiny. And they are betting that if they stay quiet enough, long enough, the gerrymandered district maps and the straight-ticket party voters will carry them across the finish line anyway. They are treating the voters of Hillsborough not as employers to be answered to, but as an administrative inconvenience to be avoided until after November.
By leaving their chairs empty, the Republican ticket didn’t just snub an organization; they insulted the intelligence of this entire community. If you are too terrified to defend your record over lunch in front of a polite crowd, you have absolutely no business demanding the authority to vote on our behalf in the state capitol. The ghosts belong in the haunted houses, not the Senate floor.
