Former President Donald Trump has strongly supported the candidacy of Republican Michael Barnett for the Palm Beach County Commission.
Barnett, “a highly respected individual, is doing an incredible job as Palm Beach County Commissioner,” Trump wrote in a social media post. “Michael Barnett has my complete and total endorsement – he is tough, smart and will not let you down!”
The show of support came Tuesday night, a day after Barnett met Trump at Mar-a-Lago, the Palm Beach club where the former president lives.
Barnett was appointed last year to fill a vacancy on the Palm Beach County Commission and will serve a full term in November. The race, which pits him against former Greenacres Mayor Joel Flores, is one of the county’s most competitive elections of 2024.
Barnett, a former chairman of the Palm Beach County Republican Party, was an early supporter of Trump, dating back to the days when most of the party establishment in Florida backed either former Gov. Jeb Bush or Sen. Marco Rubio for the 2016 Republican presidential nomination.
Trump, who often appeared at county party fundraisers at Mar-a-Lago, has been close ever since. Although Barnett stepped down as Republican Party chairman to focus on the County Commission, the two met to discuss the local political landscape.
“I’m excited and grateful that he’s brought it forward so forcefully,” Barnett said in a telephone interview Wednesday. “I’m very pleased to have the president’s endorsement and support. It’s an honor.”
Foiled assassination attempt
The meeting at Mar-a-Lago was planned before a would-be assassin was foiled at Trump International Golf Club near West Palm Beach, where the former president was playing on Sunday.
Barnett said he and Trump discussed the incident, which happened to take place in Barnett’s County Commission district. “I talked to him about my district, the race, how things are going in the county, the incident that happened at Trump International,” Barnett said.
“He looked cheerful. He didn’t seem upset at all. He said he was ready to continue this campaign. I don’t think there’s anything that would faze him, considering what he’s been through — two assassination attempts. He was very friendly and cheerful,” Barnett said.
Given what had happened the day before, Barnett said Trump was “very busy with a lot of phone calls and meetings.”
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“What can I do?”
While they were talking politics, Barnett said Trump asked him how he could help, and specifically if he wanted an endorsement.
“He’s always been a really good friend and supporter. He asked me, ‘What can I do to help?’ He said, ‘Can I support you?'” Barnett recalls. “I said I would absolutely love a show of support.”
Barnett said he didn’t go to Mar-a-Lago to ask for an endorsement. “I didn’t go there to ask for anything. It just happened that we had a lot to talk about,” he said. “He’s willing to help me, and I’m grateful for his support, and I’ll accept it.”
A day later, on Tuesday night, Trump posted several endorsements on Truth Social, including effusive praise for Barnett. “He’s working hard to grow the economy, cut taxes, reduce regulations, secure the border, stop immigrant crime, support our great law enforcement, protect our ever-beleaguered Second Amendment, and keep our community safe,” Trump wrote.
Plus or minus
The big question is: what impact will the show of support for Trump have?
Barnett said it would help. Flores said it would hurt.
“It’s a net positive from what I’ve seen. President Trump polls pretty well with Hispanics and NPAs. I walk around my district, I go door to door and I see a lot of Trump signs all over the district, whether it’s Greenacres or Palm Springs. There’s a lot of excitement for President Trump,” Barnett said.
Flores disagreed. “I personally think this is probably going to hurt him. This is a very Democratic district, and a lot of the NPAs are leaning that way,” Flores said in a phone interview Wednesday. “I don’t think this helps him in any way.”
The district
The district covers the central portion of Palm Beach County, including Palm Springs, Greenacres, Lake Clarke Shores, part of Lake Worth Beach, part of West Palm Beach, Cloud Lake, Glen Ridge, and parts of unaffiliated Palm Beach County.
Registered voters in District 3 are slightly more Democratic and less Republican than in Palm Beach County as a whole.
According to the latest figures from the Palm Beach County Supervisor of Elections Office, 40.5% of registered voters in District 3 are Democratic, 26.6% are Republican and 32.9% vote for no party/independent or minor party.
Democratic data analyst Matthew Isbell wrote in his newsletter last week that the District 3 area favored Biden over Trump in the 2020 election, 59.5% to 37.7%.
In the 2022 election, Democratic gubernatorial candidate Charlie Crist narrowly won District 3 over Governor Ron DeSantis, while DeSantis narrowly won the entire county.
When district boundaries were redrawn to reflect population changes revealed in the 2020 census, District 3 was reconfigured to make it more likely that voters would elect a Hispanic commissioner. Flores was part of that push for a more Hispanic-leaning district.
Demographically, the latest voter registration figures show that 34.2% of the county’s registered voters are Hispanic (compared to 13.6% countywide), 16.7% are black (13.5% countywide), and 40.1% are white (64.4% countywide). Ethnic designations are not required for people to register, so the figures are not accurate.
Candidates
Barnett was elected county Republican chairman five times. Trump also endorsed him the last time he ran for re-election as party leader, in December 2022, writing in a letter that Barnett “has been a true supporter of mine and a fighter in the MAGA movement since 2013.”
In 2023, DeSantis appointed Barnett to the County Commission, giving Republicans a one-vote majority on the seven-member commission.
The vacancy arose when DeSantis rewarded Democratic County Commissioner Dave Kerner — who had supported the Republican governor’s re-election — with a high-level appointment. DeSantis then appointed Barnett to fill the vacancy on the County Commission.
With Barnett’s appointment to the commission, Republicans retained four of the seven seats after winning early re-election for two of the three in 2022.
Flores, the Democratic candidate, is a former two-term mayor of Greenacres, a town in the district.
Haiti controversy
A hallmark of Barnett’s tenure as county Republican chair was his outreach to the Haitian-American community. He consistently argued that the community included many socially conservative voters who could be persuaded to vote Republican if candidates talked to voters.
In 2016, Barnett arranged for candidate Trump to meet with Haitian-Americans in Miami’s Little Haiti and made sure the visit was widely covered in Haitian community media. Barnett — and some Democrats — said those moves helped Trump and Republicans gain traction among Haitian-American voters in 2016.
Trump’s recent comments reinforcing false conspiracy theories that Haitians legally residing in Springfield, Ohio, are eating people’s pets have sparked a backlash in the Haitian-American community at large.
There is a significant, but not huge, Haitian community in District 3, Barnett and Flores said. It is home to Haitian churches and radio stations.
Flores said people in District Three were “very offended by the comments that (Trump) made about immigrants in the last debate, and the comment about cats and dogs,” Flores said. “I think it was a slap in the face what the former president said about our communities.”
Barnett said the controversy over Haitians in Springfield, Ohio, has not come up as he has walked door to door in the district since the presidential debate. “It hasn’t come up and nobody has mentioned it.”
Anthony Man can be reached at aman@sunsentinel.com and can be found @browardpolitics on Bluesky, Threads, Facebook, and Mastodon.
