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The Florida Republican Party voted Monday to replace Christian Ziegler as its chairman amid a rape allegation and controversy over the nature of the accusations.
The party announced that its vice chairman, Evan Power, had become its new leader.
According to allegations in a Sarasota Police Department search warrant affidavit, Ziegler and his wife, conservative activist Bridget Ziegler, planned to have a sexual encounter with a woman on Oct. 2, but the woman said she canceled after Bridget Ziegler backed out and that Christian Ziegler showed up at her home anyway and raped her. According to the affidavit, Bridget Ziegler told police that she and her husband had previously had a consensual three-way sexual encounter with the woman.
Christian Ziegler has not been charged and has denied any wrongdoing.
The story has dripped with hypocrisy. Bridget Ziegler is a member of the Sarasota County School Board and co-founded Moms for Liberty, a right-wing group of education activists known for its anti-LGBTQ bigotry (like portraying LGBTQ people as sex predators).
And under Christian Ziegler’s leadership, the Florida GOP backed a lot of the anti-LGBTQ policies that Moms for Liberty advocated for. Bridget Ziegler left the group shortly after its 2021 founding.
So Florida Republicans seemed to be in for a multipronged PR disaster if they kept Christian Ziegler in charge.
In December, the Florida GOP voted to strip him of his power and reduce his salary to $1. And the Sarasota School Board voted to ask Bridget Ziegler to resign (a request she declined). After those steps failed, the Florida GOP just gave Christian Ziegler the boot instead.
It seems state Republican parties are having a rough go at things these days.
As my colleague Steve Benen wrote Monday, the Michigan GOP is showing new signs of unraveling after members voted to oust their chairwoman — and she refused to accept the results. The Georgia Republican Party looked fractured by infighting near the end of last year, thanks to pro-Trump forces inciting public fury against less-Trumpian figures. And Arizona’s Republican Party recently begged the Republican National Committee for funds after blowing through cash — wads of which were spent fueling Trump’s false claims about the 2020 presidential election.