Opinion: Land of the Chads, Act II

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A standoff between the Democratic National Committee and party officials in Florida shows no signs of abating. So once again, the Sunshine State may find itself adding tumult to a presidential election.

On Monday, top Florida Democrats announced that they would follow a Republican-led plan to conduct the state’s presidential primary on Jan. 29. That’s a week before national Democratic rules allow all but four states --- Iowa, Nevada, New Hampshire and South Carolina --- to hold such contests. The DNC has threatened to punish the Florida party if it embraced the early primary; one step could be a dramatic cut in the state’s number of convention delegates. But now, Florida Democrats have basically dared the national party to put up or shut up.

The Times’ Peter Wallsten listened in Monday as Florida’s senior Democrat, Sen. Bill Nelson, conceded that the dispute could get ugly.

‘This thing could be a total mess unless we find a way out,’ Nelson said.

He also said the state party had considered yielding to the DNC by designating the Jan. 29 primary as non-binding for Democrats --- making it a purely symbolic test of candidate strength while using a caucus that would be held in February to handle the actual allotment of delegates. But in the end, Nelson said, state party officials didn’t like the prospect of having their fellow Democrats troop to voting booths to cast ballots that didn’t count.

Imagine that? In Florida, of all places ...

-- Don Frederick