Ben Diamond might not have defeated Ken Welch, but …

St. Petersburg Mayor Ken Welch, as an incumbent who made history as the city’s first Black Mayor, will be hard to defeat.

But it’s not impossible.

A combination of unfavorable views regarding his first term in office and rapidly changing political demographics sets up a potentially competitive contest … if the right candidate were to join the race.

To be clear, at this point, a Republican still cannot win a citywide election. But the writing is on the wall for Democrats looking at blue St. Pete as a sort of last bastion of liberal hopes and dreams.

The latest voter registration numbers in Florida show an ever-growing gap between Republicans and Democrats, favoring the GOP by 54,000 votes since just the beginning of August.

Democrats have been hemorrhaging voters since the COVID pandemic, leaving the Florida GOP lapping the party at ever-increasing rates.

It’s so clear that I actually agree with Gov. Ron DeSantis on one issue: Florida should have a mid-decade redistricting.

Groan all you like, but the state has changed too much over the first five years of this decade to NOT redraw maps. Counties that were purple are now red. Heck, counties that were blue are now red; looking at you Hillsborough. Congressional districts that were not competitive for Republicans are now in play.

Add to those changing demographics the changes to election laws in recent years, and candidates and their campaigns are largely flying blind in terms of what the electorate in their district actually looks like heading into the 2026 cycle.

That’s just as true, if not more, in St. Pete.

First, we don’t know what we don’t know, and that’s always a huge challenge for strategists.

Second, performance data from previous mayoral elections is now basically useless (though there’s a slight caveat, more on that in a moment). Previous mayoral elections, including Welch’s, took place in off-years. This one will take place in a Midterm year, when turnout will be different and bigger, even if it won’t match a Presidential Election cycle.

That means the electorate that first voted Welch into office in 2021 will not be the same electorate he faces in 2026. That doesn’t spell bad news for the incumbent Mayor, but it does emphasize the challenge at play.

Perhaps most importantly, St. Pete, like the state, is bleeding active Democratic voters. In 2020 there were nearly 205,000 registered voters. Turnout in the Joe Biden vs. Donald Trump race reached 78%, with Biden claiming more than 97,000 votes compared to less than 59,000 for Trump.

Just four years later, there were about nearly 28,000 fewer registered voters, despite citywide population growth. The margin between Trump and Kamala Harris was far smaller, at just shy of 85,000 votes for Harris to more than 57,000 for Trump.

That means Republican turnout remained statistically consistent while Democratic performance saw significant drop-off.

Lastly, and I’ll delve into this in more detail in a future post, St. Pete’s demographics are changing, even if the population has become relatively static. Ask anyone who has lived in St. Pete for a significant amount of time about the changes they’re seeing as they drive around town and you’ll hear some consistencies: Trailer parks are being converted into tony apartments and one-story homes are being bulldozed to make room for waterfront McMansions.

What that means for St. Pete is clear: Within a decade, the Democratic advantage over Republicans in the city will likely be down to single digits.

Republicans hoping to challenge Welch next year, take note. That includes former Sen. Jeff Brandes, who, unless he wants to dump millions of his own money into a race, can’t win.

Likewise for Robert Blackmon. He has matured as a community leader and person, and I predict he will one day be Mayor of St. Petersburg. But now is not the time.

At this point, Welch can only be defeated by another Democrat, and there’s no doubt in my mind that was Ben Diamond’s calculus when he floated his trial balloon.

For whatever reason though, Diamond’s polling numbers show he wasn’t the person to defeat Welch.

And here’s where the history of St. Pete electing Mayors is still relevant. Ever since David Fischer was elected as the city’s first strong Mayor, there has been a consistent template. Two White candidates split the northeast and west St. Pete vote while one overwhelmingly dominates the Black community vote.

That was the difference-maker. We saw it with Fischer. We saw it with Rick Baker. We saw it with Bill Foster. To some extent, we saw it with Rick Kriseman, though Baker still maintained some strong allegiances within the Black community.

Enter Welch. He upended that formula, consolidating the Democratic vote and causing the preferred candidate of Northeast St. Pete to lose for the first time in 30 years.

So while the Black vote has historically been the tie-breaker, the disappearance of so many Democratic voters has increased the GOP’s voting power, even if not fully giving them an advantage.

That’s bad news for Welch, who has led an anti-development, pro-DEI administration and is increasingly held in disdain among moderate and GOP voters.

Likely, that’s what Diamond’s internal polling showed: the Ken Welch Paradox. That is, he’s probably viewed unfavorably, with numbers likely upside down after last year’s devastating hurricanes. But he still probably leads in other re-election polling because he’s being ballot-tested against right-leaning candidates, such as Brandes and Blackmon.

Instead, the formula for defeating Welch is to run at him from both the right AND the left. The race needs a Democrat who can hit him on his weak defense of the city against the DeSantis administration (just Wednesday it was reported that the Welch administration meekly dropped the words “diversity” and “equity” from the names of city departments), but who also makes GOP voters comfortable enough to support them.

Diamond likely realized he could neither out-Democrat Welch nor consolidate the moderate or GOP vote.

But Diamond’s retreat has made Welch even more arrogant, and that won’t do him any favors. I’m hearing from other media outlets that his administration is less communicative than ever. For example, Welch declined to be interviewed by the Tampa Bay Business Journal for a story that was nothing but positive for the city.

The story highlighted how St. Pete has gone from its long-held status as “God’s waiting room,” a reference to the days of it being a sleepy retirement town, to a mecca for Generation Z and Millennials. That’s the type of earned media elected officials jump at, yet Welch declined, offering instead a canned statement that amounted to a missed opportunity to hype his city, and himself.

In his defense, it’s still entirely possible that Welch will escape without facing a real challenge in 2026. The only candidate in the race so far has never won an election despite trying several times. But the city’s rapidly changing demographics and the switch to Midterm Election years presents a lane for the right candidate — if one will step up.

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