With the goals of “defending our rights and protecting our wallets,” Chad Klitzman has entered the contest for a Broward County seat in the Florida Senate.
“The state is becoming unrecognizable,” Klitzman said Monday in a phone interview. “We need to be living in a state that’s affordable, a state that’s inclusive. That’s the place that I grew up in and it’s looking less like that every day. … I just couldn’t stand on the sidelines as we watch our democracy get eroded, women’s right to choose (and) rights for the LGBT community get eroded.
“I felt I just had to jump in,” he said.
Klitzman said more than a year ago he was considering running for the Senate seat in southern and western Broward district in which he was raised and lived almost his entire life. He filed paperwork on Oct. 26 allowing him to raise and spend money as a candidate, and plans a campaign announcement on Wednesday.
Klitzman is 29. If elected, he’d be the youngest member of the Florida Senate, one of the few Jewish senators and among two or three openly LGBTQ senators, depending on the results in other 2024 elections.
He has some political experience. In 2020, he came exceedingly close to winning a countywide Democratic primary for Broward Supervisor of Elections, performing far better than several political veterans who also ran. Joe Scott won the primary and is now elections supervisor; Klitzman fell short by 0.3% of the vote.
In the territory that makes up Senate District 35, Klitzman did better than his countywide performance. He was the top vote-getter, finishing 3.5% of the vote ahead of the next candidate.
State Sen. Lauren Book, the Senate Democratic leader, currently represents District 35. Term limits prevent Book from running again.
Already in the race are former Broward County Commissioner Barbara Sharief, who has won several elections in the District 35 territory and lost a contentious 2022 contest to Book, and first-time candidate Rodney Jacobs Jr.
All three are Democrats running in an area in which the primary winner is the heavy favorite to win and go to Tallahassee — and serve as a member of the minority party in the Republican-controlled state Senate.
Geography, demographics
The 35th District is the southwest quarter of the county, mostly south of Interstate 595 and west of Florida’s Turnpike.
It also includes territory around the hockey arena in Sunrise formerly known as the BB&T Center and the Sawgrass Mills shopping mall, along with vast unpopulated territory in the Everglades. The district includes all or parts of Cooper City, Davie, Hollywood, Miramar, Pembroke Pines, Sunrise and Southwest Ranches and Weston.
The Democratic primary electorate in the 35th District is roughly evenly divided among Black, Hispanic and white voters.
Klitzman is a white, Jewish man. Sharief is a Black, Muslim woman. Jacobs also is Black.
Black and Jewish voters are the most loyal constituencies that make up the Democratic Party coalition, and both are crucial to winning.
“I think the fact that you have two Black candidates and a Jewish gay candidate in the race reflects the diversity of our district, and we should celebrate that,” he said. “This is a very diverse district. I think this makes it a really exciting opportunity to build a coalition of support.”
As LGBTQ Floridians have faced an increasingly hostile political climate in recent years, Klitzman said “it is so critical that we have representation up there.”
He said he’s long seen himself marrying and raising a family in Broward County. “I can’t continue living in this state without doing anything about these issues that are going to affect me in an incredibly personal way.”
Klitzman has been a leader in the Broward County Democratic Jewish Caucus. “There are a lot of Jewish voters in this district. I know that folks want to see someone in this district who is definitively pro-Israel, will combat antisemitism whenever it crops up,” he said.
Almost every issue, he said, relates to the themes of defending rights and protecting wallets. Examples are high property insurance premiums and abortion rights. And he said he’d be vigilant about issues relating to “erosion of our democracy (and) making it harder for people to vote.”
Candidate
A graduate of Cypress Bay High School in Weston, Klitzman was president of Kids Voting Broward, a countywide voting initiative for young people, and served as the student ambassador to the Broward League of Cities.
During college and law school he had jobs in federal agencies. In 2014, he interned at the White House during President Barack Obama’s administration.
Klitzman is a capital markets lawyer, working on initial public offerings, mergers and corporate governance in the Miami office of the international law firm White & Case.
He also wrote the screenplay for the Netflix movie “Candy Jar,” a story of two highly competitive high school debaters, which is streaming on Netflix.
In 2009, he and another ninth grader at Cypress Bay High School in Weston won a prize from cable network C-SPAN for their video “Bailout or Failout” about problems in the nation’s financial system. The year before they won an award for their “No Child Left Behind: Mistake or Big Break?” documentary about education.
Campaign
During the 2020 primary for supervisor of elections, Klitzman was a prodigious fundraiser and mobilized a strong volunteer corps.
Klitzman said he expects to raise at least the $500,000 he said it would take to run an effective Senate primary campaign.
He said money isn’t the only factor. “What’s also important is having a clear message. If you go on some other folks’ websites, it might be a little bit difficult to discern why they’re running,” he said.
Sharief has spent heavily in recent elections and has the resources to do so again.
In a 2021 special congressional primary, she put in $803,500 of her own money. In the 2022 state Senate contest, she put in $630,000 of her own money (and received contributions of $39,800 from others).
The financial disclosure Sharief filed in connection with the 2022 election showed she had a net worth of $6.4 million as of Dec. 31, 2021.
Other candidates
Jacobs is executive director of the Miami Civilian Investigative Panel, a government agency that investigates complaints about alleged police misconduct in the city’s police department. He is also a captain in the Army Reserve and company commander of a unit in Sanford.
Sharief is founder of a home health agency, South Florida Pediatric Homecare. She is also a former Broward County Commissioner who was twice chosen by fellow commissioners to serve one-year terms as county mayor and a former Miramar city commissioner.
Republican Vincent Parlatore has filed paperwork to run for the seat.
Parlatore also announced a candidacy in 2022, but in a late move, he switched to run for state representative, a contest he lost. His paperwork to change races arrived just 33 minutes before the deadline for candidates to get on the ballot, too late for another candidate to come forward for the Senate race.
That move left Republicans without a candidate — and made the primary for the 35th District open to all voters, who reelected Book.
The 2024 Democratic primary is on Aug. 20.
Anthony Man can be reached at and can be found @browardpolitics on Facebook, Threads.net and Post.news.
