Flagler Tiger Bay Prepares for Largest Candidate Meet-and-Greet of Primary, Waving Off Fret Over Straw Poll

As of Monday some 40 local and state candidates had confirmed attendance at Thursday’s Tiger Bay Meet and Greet, what is expected to be the largest election gathering of the sort for Flagler County and Palm Coast politics ahead of the Aug. 20 primary. The three-hour free event starting at 5 p.m. Thursday at the Palm Coast Community Center will include a voter-registration drive organized by the Supervisor of Elections’ office, and a straw poll. It’ll concluded between 8 and 8:30 p.m., in time for the televised Biden-Trump presidential debate at 9 p.m.




Straw polls have been a customary part of similar events conducted in two or three previous election cycles. The then-extant Tea Party held one in 2012, the then-Chamber of Commerce did one in 2016 and in 2018, the latter one administered by Supervisor of Elections Kaiti Lenhart. The poll took a hiatus during the Covid election of 2020. No large-scale meet-and-greet was hosted in 2022, but the Republican Executive Committee held its own straw  poll that year.

The polls are by definition unscientific, often wrong, at times dependent on whoever’s campaign can turn out the most swipers, but always entertaining and occasionally telling: Neither Triger Bay nor previous hosts have pretended that the polls were too much more than gimmicks serving as a means of bumping up attendance, since anyone going to the meet-and-greet may participate.

Nevertheless, inclusion of the straw poll, which is to be conducted by the supervisor’s office on tablets that have nothing to do with the electoral system, caused a minor hiccup when one candidate–Ed Danko, the first-term Palm Coast City Council member running for a County Commission seat–declined attendance, calling the poll inappropriate. One other candidate, Darryl Boyer, who is running for a state House seat, had considered declining, but said this week that he will attend. Danko’s reaction appears isolated.




Tiger Bay is a non-profit, non-partisan organization that prizes civility, its own neutrality, civic engagement and political awareness, not necessarily in that order.  In recent years it was responsible for presenting the most ambitious and well-attended candidate forums. It is still considering holding one this year, perhaps ahead of the general election if not sooner.

“So it’s not a candidate forum,” Tiger Bay President Jay Scherr said of Thursday’s event.  “Individual tables, the general public can come and engage, ask good questions, learn from each of the candidates what their positions are, challenge them, learn from them, educate themselves so they can make better decisions about who they want to lead, and shape the future of our community.” He continued: “This is about voter education, and we wanted to be able to create an environment where the public could come where not only could they engage with the candidates who are on the ballot, but also have a chance to learn, to be able to to meet other individuals from the community as well. We can only accommodate but so many people at our monthly luncheons.”

The Tiger Bay event recreates the former Chamber’s “hobnob” before it and the Tea Party’s fair-like meet-and-greet events before that, though without the Tea Party’s overt partisanship. Those Tea Party events were known to draw the largest number of candidates and the largest crowds in the party’s heyday more than a decade ago, but it then slipped offstage and the larger meet-and-greet events’ planning was locally replaced by more neutral organizations.




For Lenhart and the Supervisor of Elections Office,  “it’s a voter outreach event, and it’s a unique opportunity for our candidates to interact with the public. There may not be another type of event like this. It’s free for the candidates. It’s free for the public. So obviously, we’re going to be there for voter outreach to help people register to vote, change their party affiliation if they want to, request a vote-by-mail ballot and answer questions about the election. We’ll also be handing out sample ballots, which are going to be ready [Tuesday] since we’ve gotten the ballot certification from the state for state federal candidates.”

Danko, with characteristic overstatements, criticized Tiger Bay for including what he called a “straw poll circus side show.”

“By allowing this unscientific, statistically invalid, and meaningless poll to be conducted by the Flagler Supervisor of Election’s office, Tiger Bay has put candidates in the awkward position of having to stack a phony straw poll with their supporters, instead of meeting and greeting undecided voters,” Danko said in a written statement. “Undoubtingly, this sham straw pole will be reported on by some media as being fact, which clearly it is not. While this straw poll may not be illegal, in my view involving the SOE’s office gives the appearance of possibly being unethical, and thus I have chosen not to attend this event.”

Local media have been careful not to report straw polls as “fact,” while readers and others have generally known to put such polls in perspective, even before more scientific polling’s validity eroded sharply starting in 2016.




Lenhart said it is a mistake to conflate her office with the poll. The Supervisor of Elections’ office is at the Tiger Bay event for outreach. “The straw poll really is a function of the Tiger Bay Club,” Lenhart said. “My my role in it really is just to provide an online balloting system, the same one that we use for our school elections for a mock election. For the high schools, we do the homecoming election–king and queen for the homecoming at FPC–and the superlative elections, and then their class officers’ elections within the high schools. So that’s the platform that we’ll be using. We’re not bringing voting equipment. I would never bring voting equipment to an outreach event. That would violate our internal security procedures, and our chain of custody requirements for the equipment.”

Collier, Polk, Osceola, Orange, Hernando, Pinellas and Volusia counties are all doing straw polls this year from Lenhart quick gleaning. If there is an expending of public resources at the Tiger Bay event, and it is modest, it is a function of the office, since SEO offices are responsible for extensive public outreach wherever potential voters are. Still, Lenhart said, “the perception of it is a concern for me. And we’ll see how this event goes to gauge whether or not this office will participate in straw polling in the future.”

Scherr defended Tiger Bay’s approach. “Each candidate has to make their own decision if they choose not to participate in an event of this nature because of a straw poll,” he said. “That’s their choice. I personally feel that this is a great opportunity to meet and engage with people who you wouldn’t necessarily be around on a regular basis. So I view this as a positive opportunity to get a fair–get a tremendous amount of visibility, to be able to speak and be interviewed on the radio and by all the other local media.” Scherr added: “If I were running for a position, straw poll or not, this is not an opportunity that I would not want to participate in.”

Jake Scully, who served for four years as one of the founding members of Flagler Tiger Bay, said some of his proudest moments with the organization involved the political forums and meet-and-greets like Thursday’s.