Tiger Bay Straw Poll: Richardson Trounces Danko; Derek Barrs and Lauren Ramirez Take Schools, Alfin Hangs On

In a Flagler Tea Party straw poll 12 years ago, Scott Westbrook won big for judge, Ray Stevens for sheriff, and Stacia Warren for state attorney. None of them actually won when it counted. R.J. Larizza was just sworn in for his fifth term as state attorney, though Warren went on to win a circuit judgeship in a subsequent election. The poll was wrong on most other counts.




A straw poll by the then-extant Chamber of Commerce was remarkably more accurate, since the crowd its meet-and-greet drew was less partisan, correctly predicting wins for Bob Cuff, Milissa Holland and Nick Klufas in Palm Coast, Rick Staly for sheriff, Kaiti Lenhart for supervisor of elections, Charlie Ericksen, Dave Sullivan and Donald O’Brien for County Commission, Colleen Conklin for school board, and even most judges’ races. Two years later, a similar chamber straw poll picked the winner in 10 of 14 races.

In a much smaller straw poll limited to 53 voters in the Republican Executive Committee two years ago, Leann Pennington shocked Joe Mullins (although, really, he was probably the only one shocked) by taking 77 percent of the vote. She went on to shock him with actual Election Day wattage, taking nearly 70 percent of the vote.

So straw polls can have immense limitations just as they can sometimes be quite indicative of what’s ahead regardless of how irrelevant some candidates stridently claim them to be, as Palm Coast City Council member Ed Danko did before Thursday’s straw poll at the Flagler Tiger Bay meet and greet. Danko found the poll to be inappropriate and cited it as the reason why he was a no-show.




He was also the night’s biggest local loser, almost matching Mullins’s poor showing two years ago: with 219 votes cast, Pam Richardson beat him 160 to 59, taking 73 percent of the vote. Only a couple of incumbents’ federal races (Rick Scott and Mike Waltz) topped Richardson’s percentage in all the polled races, barely.

In the races for County Commission, incumbent Andy Dance, who has yet to lose an election in a decade and a half on the School Board or the County Commission, had 63 percent to challenger Fernando Melendez’s 37 percent. Dance’s team at the meet and greet included Nancy Dance, his mother, also undefeated in her years as a School Board member. Melendez and Dance are both Republicans. They are facing off in the Aug. 20 primary. Since no one else filed to run, that will be an open primary, so those registered Democrats, independent and from minor parties will be eligible to vote. The winner will be decided on Aug. 20.

Notably, neither Dance nor Melendez have taken the low road of fielding a write-in candidate, as is the case in the two other County Commission races, Danko’s among them, which are now closed primaries even though only Republican candidates are in the running (the unserious write-ins aside. See: “The Write-In Fraud“).

Former Flagler Beach City Commissioner Kim Carney, who barely lost her last County Commission race to Dave Sullivan, barely won the straw poll with 47 percent of the vote to Nick Klufas’s 44.5 percent, with Bill Clark in third, his 8.5 percent likely eroding Klufas’s tally more than Carney’s.




In the two School Board races, Derek Barrs was the decisive winner over Janie Ruddy, 70-30 (Ruddy did not attend the meet-and-greet and was said to be on a previously scheduled vacation), while Lauren Ramirez commandingly beat Vincent Sullivan, 66-34. Those are non-partisan races open to all voters, so they’re free of write-in scheming, though that may end this year depending on how voters decide Amendment 1. If 60 percent of voters approve, school board elections will be partisan starting in 2026.

Palm Coast elections remain ostensibly non-partisan. The straw poll drew 221 votes, with incumbent Mayor David Alfin pulling it off in a five-way race with 76 votes, or 34 percent, with Mike Norris second, at 28 percent. Peter Johnson–this time joining other candidates in suit and tie–was third with 16 percent, then Cornelia Manfre at 11 percent, and Alan Lowe, the erstwhile sovereign citizen, one point behind. He did not show for the meet-and-greet. (Somebody scribbled “vote for me” on the flip side of his name plate, at his empty table.) All the other candidates did.

The District 1 race had Ty Miller and Kathy Austrino essentially tied at 36 percent, with Shara Brodsky a distant third at 17 percent and Jeffrey Seib at 11 percent. The districts are irrelevant to voters: these are at-large elections, so Palm Coast voters vote for all their council members regardless of district.

In District 3, Andrew Werner won ahead of Ray Stevens, 44-30, with Dana Stancel in third at 26 percent.




In the Aug. 20 primary, if any of Palm Coast’s candidates win with more than 50 percent, the candidate is elected. But if none does so, then the top two candidates will have to contest a run-off at the general election on Nov. 5.

With Sen. Travis Hutson and Rep. Paul Renner both term-limited, their seats have open elections. House Rep. Tom Leek is running for Huston’s seat and won the straw poll with a comfortable 57 percent over Gerry James (18 percent) and David Shoar, the former St. Johns County sheriff. Leek’s conservative credentials are difficult to question with a straight face. He was Renner’s right-hand man. But in a surprising move for a former law enforcement chief, Shoar’s campaign has been deluging voters with the most obnoxious if often hilarious ads of the season (so far anyway), fabricating Leek into a Trump-having, Biden-allied ultra-liberal. It does not appear to be having an effect in Flagler, though Shoar’s base is in St. Johns, all of which is in Senate District 7, while Leek’s base is in Volusia, only a sliver of which is in the district. The rest of the district is made up of Putnam and all of Flagler.

In the House race, Darryl Boyer beat Sam Greco with 61 percent of the straw poll vote to 22, with valiant Democrat Adam Morley polling at 17. Morley has been running for the House seat since 2015. He said this would be his last race if he doesn’t pull it off, figuring that if he cannot win an open seat, he should call it a day.

Sen. Rick Scott took 76 percent of the vote, Waltz 74. Curiously, Tiger Bay opted not to poll voters on the Biden-Trump race, perhaps out of mercy–for voters, or for the candidates.




The straw poll was conducted under the eyes of Supervisor of Elections Kaiti Lenhart using computer tablets commonly used in mock elections in schools. No actual election equipment was used. The supervisor and her staff occupied a separate room at the Community Center as part of their voter outreach, registering voters or changing voter registrations on request, voter outreach being an integral part of the office’s mission. The straw poll was a Tiger Bay product, merely supervised by Lenhart. The full results are below.

The Tiger Bay event itself was attended by about 300 people, with the crowd in the earlier part of the evening so thick at the Palm Coast Community Center’s largest hall that it was difficult to navigate between the rows of tables. In keeping with Tiger Bay’s principles, the atmosphere was civil, even jovial, throughout, even as opponents found themselves within handshake distance with the way the tables had been arranged. It was local politics and politicking at its best.

WNZF broadcast live from the center, with David Ayres, the ever-ebullient Flagler Broadcasting president and host of Free For All Fridays, anchoring an evening’s worth of interviews with every candidate there, while residents got to face their candidates and ask them questions. Some candidates were more sought out than others, though as with straw polls, that did not necessarily indicate surefire popularity. But it was not nothing, either.

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