Seventeen Months: Carl Cascio and the Palm Beach County GOP

Eighteen months ago the Palm Beach County Republican Party was making national headlines for internal turmoil. The voter-registration gap with the Democrats has since narrowed by roughly sixty-five percent, and the chair has a deadline in mind.

The author is a member of the Palm Beach County Republican Executive Committee, which Cascio chairs.

West Palm Beach, December of 2024. The bi-annual meeting of the Republican Executive Committee was held on a Thursday evening, the sort of room that political-party officers fill on a quiet weeknight in a county whose national profile is much louder than its committee meetings. The outgoing chair, Kevin Neal, had said over the summer that he would not seek a second term and was backing his successor. The vote was on the first ballot. There was no runoff. Carl Cascio was the new chair.

The room knew Cascio. He had served as the committee’s general counsel since June of 2023, and as a precinct committeeman since 2019. The decisive election that night was, in the dry vocabulary of county-party politics, an institutional handoff — the kind of result that does not by itself make news, except that the year before it had been the same room and a different shape entirely. In January of 2024, the same committeemen and committeewomen had voted no-confidence in Neal, eighty-two to sixty-three. Newsweek had run a piece called “Republicans in Disarray in Donald Trump’s Backyard.” Eleven months later the room handed the chair to Cascio in a single ballot. There is not really a name for the kind of organizational story that runs through that arc; this is what one looks like.

He is, today, the chairman of the Republican Party of Palm Beach County, seventeen months into a two-year term running through December of 2026. Palm Beach County is a politically singular American place. It is home to the President of the United States and to Mar-a-Lago; it is also a county that has long leaned Democratic in voter registration, and that has, over the past fifteen months, watched that lean narrow by roughly sixty-five percent. The Republican Executive Committee — the local party apparatus that picks delegates, runs voter-mobilization, fundraises, and makes endorsements — has been in mainstream-press headlines as recently as last year. The story since then has been quieter and, in its quietness, more substantive.

A brief biographical scaffolding. Cascio was admitted to the Florida Bar in 1992 (Bar No. 937721) and is the founder and sole practitioner of Carl A. Cascio, P.A., in Delray Beach, where he handles real-estate and probate matters. He owns and runs a title company, Dolphin Title of the Palm Beaches, Inc. He earned his bachelor’s at Purdue in 1986, where he was a four-year starter on the men’s varsity tennis team, and his J.D. at the University of Mississippi in 1991. He was born in Miami; his family moved to Palm Beach County in 1988; he has lived there since. His wife, Dianne, and four grown children are placed in the public record by his own party-biographical material. His political life, before the chair role, includes a 1994 Republican nomination for the Florida House of Representatives in District 88, which he lost; the precinct-committee work since 2019; and the general-counsel role beginning in June of 2023.

The chairmanship Cascio took in December of 2024 had a year of difficult coverage behind it. Neal was elected chair in mid-2023. By January of 2024, with the presidential cycle approaching, the committee voted no-confidence in him: eighty-two members voting no-confidence, sixty-three voting against the motion. Florida Republican Party rules make a county-committee no-confidence vote non-binding — the county REC cannot remove its own chair — and Neal continued through the year. “I’m still the chairman. It’s nonbinding,” he told the press at the time. The criticisms his critics named on the record were specific: fundraising, voter mobilization, a meeting that hadn’t been called, a Lincoln Day fundraiser that had not been communicated. The broward.us reporting from January 2024 used the phrase “complete lack of communication.”

Through that year Cascio served as general counsel — the bridge role that placed him in the committee’s leadership without making him the public face of the dispute. By the summer Neal had decided not to run for a second term, citing wanting more time with his family, and had endorsed Cascio. The December election was, in that frame, the close of a difficult year and the open of a different one. Cascio was elected on the first ballot. The four-officer slate elected that evening included Vice Chair Jason Kulp, a former Marine and police officer now in real estate; Secretary Katina Maxwell; and Treasurer Jane Pike, who had held the role under Neal and was the only returning officer. The committee that had voted no-confidence eleven months before chose continuity in one position and turnover in three; the result was a slate that has held in the seventeen months since.

Two patterns are visible in the public-record evidence from those seventeen months.

The first is institutional. The chair Cascio inherited had been characterized in mainstream press as a party in disarray. The seventeen months since show a different shape: the committee meetings happening on schedule (the PBCGOP Club of PB monthly meeting series has continued; Cascio spoke as chair at the February 2025 meeting); the four-officer slate intact; no recurrence of the public turbulence that defined the Neal year. On the day of the second Trump inauguration, January 20, 2025, the Palm Beach County Republican Party hosted the local inauguration party. WFLX captured one rally-goer who had voted Republican through Trump’s wilderness years and was wearing his MAGA hat for the first time at a celebration: “Haven’t worn this hat in 4 years,” he said. The atmosphere in the room, if not the substance of the chair role, fell into the chair’s lap that day.

The second pattern is on the registration data. Florida’s Division of Elections reports voter registration by county and party month-to-month. In November of 2024, immediately before the presidential election, Palm Beach County registered 297,394 Republicans and 337,482 Democrats: a Democratic lead of roughly forty thousand voters. By November of 2025, those numbers were 293,043 Republicans and 308,250 Democrats — a Democratic lead of roughly fifteen thousand. By the most recent FL DoE report, January 31, 2026, the county registered 294,604 Republicans and 308,695 Democrats — a Democratic lead of roughly fourteen thousand. The Republican column has held essentially flat; the Democratic column has fallen substantially through routine voter-roll cleaning and the broader Florida realignment of the past several cycles. The gap that opened the term at forty thousand is now at fourteen thousand. This is the trend the chair role sits inside.

External coverage of Florida county-Republican parties often files them under Trump-orbit performance — rallies, hats, slogans, the partisan iconography. The voter-registration trend in Palm Beach County is something different and more boring than that, which is partly why it shows up in CBS12 trend-reporting and in the Florida Division of Elections data tables but not in the national headlines. The chair role’s substantive work — the committee’s voter-registration drives, the fundraising, the candidate-recruitment, the precinct-level operations — is harder to characterize than the rally-day photographs. It is also where the year’s most measurable result actually sits.

Cascio’s own voice on the registration project is restrained. In a 2025 Palm Beach Post interview he named the deadline directly: “I’m looking for November 2026. That’s going to be the key date.” It is not a prediction; it is an objective. The data are running in the right direction; whether they cross the line by November is open.

Comparables in county-chair profiles are difficult to draw without overshooting; the role’s variations across counties and eras are larger than the personalities that pass through it. One comparable that does illuminate is Joe Gruters, who chaired the Florida Republican Party from 2019 to 2023, the period in which Florida Republicans first overtook Democrats in statewide voter registration — a milestone reached in late 2021. The Gruters comparison is structural, not personal: a party chair presiding over a registration-flip period; the party operation as the unit; the trend as quantifiable. What worked at the state level under Gruters is, in a different register, what is being attempted at the county level under Cascio.

The institutional context cuts the other way as well. The chairmanship of the Palm Beach County Republican Party is older than any one chair: Sid Dinerstein chaired from 2002 to 2014; Michael Barnett from 2017 to 2022; Neal from mid-2023 to December 2024; Cascio since. The role exists across political eras; the question of how substantive any given chairmanship turns out to be is finally not about the chair’s personality but about what the public-record evidence at the end of the term shows. For Cascio that evidence is still being written.

November of 2026 is six months out from the writing of this profile. The voter-registration data run in a direction that the chairman’s stated objective requires; the gap is roughly fourteen thousand registrations and falling. Whether the gap closes fully by election day is not the profile’s call. What the seventeen months have produced — a four-officer slate that has held; meetings happening on schedule; a registration trend that has narrowed sixty-five percent; an internal committee that has spent a year working rather than litigating its own chairmanship — is a record that did not exist when the year before’s headlines about disarray were running. A chairmanship is finally measured by what is in the public record at the end of it. The record so far is substantial. The deadline is on the calendar. The chair has named the date.

Carl Anthony Cascio — Chairman of the Republican Party of Palm Beach County (Republican Executive Committee).
Public role: Chairman, Republican Party of Palm Beach County / Republican Executive Committee (December 2024 – present); previously REC General Counsel (June 2023 – December 2024); REC Committeeman (since 2019); 1994 Republican nominee for Florida House District 88.

— DJT Backyard Editorial