“Facts are stubborn things.”
Ken Welch keeps that line at the top of his Facebook page. He repeats it in his reels and on Instagram. John Adams said it first, in 1770, defending the British soldiers charged in the Boston Massacre.
I believe it will be Welch’s political epitaph.
This is the most crucial week of the St. Petersburg Mayor’s race. On Saturday, the city marks two years since Hurricane Helene. Milton’s anniversary follows on Oct. 9. Against that remembrance, the Pinellas Supervisor of Elections sends out vote-by-mail ballots on Tuesday, and they begin landing in mailboxes a few days later.
In the neighborhoods hit hardest by the storms, there will be gatherings this week and hard conversations about how little has changed. In Riviera Bay, Shore Acres, Bahama Shores, and plenty of other neighborhoods, homes still sit abandoned. RVs are still parked in driveways because the houses behind them haven’t been rebuilt and the families have nowhere else to live.
In her Tampa Bay Times story on how Welch plans to spend the final months of his first term, Colleen Wright asked the Mayor about his legacy. Welch said he’d want to be remembered for hurricane response and recovery after the back-to-back storms of 2024.
Well, Mayor Welch, I guarantee you one thing. You will be remembered for the city’s hurricane response and recovery. Just not the way you think.
The most striking strategic decision of Welch’s re-election campaign is this: Since Charlie Crist entered the race, through the debates, in his mail, and in his interviews, Welch has said the same thing over and over. He is running on his record.
He seems oblivious to what has happened around him. Nothing in his campaign acknowledges that nearly 80% of the city just voted for someone else in the Primary.
I believe there was a path for Ken Welch. If he had owned his administration’s shortcomings, fired some of his staff, and promised that what happened after the storms would never happen again, just enough voters might have granted him grace to put him in a competitive position.
Instead, his campaign is in the final level of Tetris, when the pieces fall faster than the player can turn them and the board spirals out of control.
Since the Primary, Welch has raised next to nothing. His campaign and his political committee combined for less than $4,300 in the most recent reporting period. He has less than $25,000 on hand between the two accounts. That’s not enough to cover the consultant and staff invoices he had been paying month to month.
Meanwhile, Crist is raising money from every corner of the city. He took in more than $45,000 over the same period and has nearly $400,000 in the bank. People with a stake in the city’s future are placing their bets on the candidate they expect to win.
The string of endorsements for Crist also tells a story.
On one side, he has conservatives like former City Council member Ed Montanari. Former rivals Kevin Batdorf and Maria Scruggs, who ran against him in the Primary, have come aboard. City Council Chair Lisset Hanewicz is with him, which matters because she rarely wades into races. So is Mike Harting, a fiercely independent voice on City Council.
And in what has to be the most personal repudiation of Welch’s leadership, Crist won the backing of Cedric Gordon and Al White, two prominent leaders in the city’s Black community.
If you know anything about political strategy, you know it’s only going to get worse for Welch.
More endorsements are probably coming. The Times endorsed Crist and Brandi Gabbard in the Primary while sharply criticizing Welch, so expect the paper’s editorial board to weigh in again for Crist. Crist’s fundraising shows no sign of slowing. If anything, it may be accelerating as donors who sat on the sidelines make their final decisions.
Unfortunately, Welch reminds me of the old warning: Beware the drowning man.
That is why I wrote last week urging the City Council and city staff to slow down whatever they legally can. Crist won’t be sworn in until January, but change begins on Nov. 4.
In the meantime, I need to warn some people to be careful.
As Wright reported, Welch said it was “ludicrous” to suggest his decision on Commerce Park was influenced by Ark Invest steering $98,000 toward a political committee backing Crist’s campaign.
Actually, that is exactly why Ken Welch did it.
Welch and his chief of staff, Doyle Walsh, are going out of their way to punish people who don’t give to Welch’s re-election, or who give to Crist.
Take a moment and read Wright’s full paragraph on Welch’s dealings with Ark. Welch told her his administration is “actively still working with Ark” to find the firm a second location. An Ark official refuted that. A city spokesperson then clarified that the city had not reached out to Ark.
That is an outright lie by the Welch administration.
That one paragraph should be its own story in the Tampa Bay Times. I’m glad they found it. If any other politician lied about his dealings with a company like Ark after a political donation, it would be a major scandal. It should be one for Ken Welch.
After all, facts are stubborn things.
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Ed. note: Michelle Todd Schorsch is the Chair of St. Pete Shines, a political committee backing Crist for St. Petersburg Mayor. Todd Schorsch is married to Peter Schorsch, the publisher of Florida Politics.