David Dean sat down with WSLR News the morning after the election.
By Gretchen Cochran
Original Air Date: March 14, 2025
Host: In the November elections, the Democratic Party lost more than they won. In Sarasota, they failed to field candidates in some key races and lost their last county-wide post. In early February, local party Chair Dan Kuether resigned. On Wednesday evening, the party’s rank-and-file picked a new chair whom few people, even party insiders in Sarasota, have heard of. Gretchen Cochran sat down with David Dean the morning after his election.
Gretchen Cochran: We’re sitting with David Dean in his home office near the Celery Fields. It’s just been a few hours since he was elected the new Chair of Sarasota County’s Democratic Party.
His home is in that newly developing transition zone from cattle country to suburban sprawl, somewhat capturing his own move from managing ones and zeros in his computer job to growing voter rolls as the underdog.
However, right now he’s juggling two jobs. He will be retiring from Pfizer, the global drug maker, in a month, where he’s been a computer analyst for 34 years. Running a political party is new for him.
David Dean: I don’t like the expression “sink or swim” because it’s kind-of cruel, really, but I like to learn on the job.
David Dean looking through his telescope. Photos by Gretchen Cochran
GC: Above David’s office chair is a black-and-white Ansel Adams photograph of a rugged snow-sprinkled mountain. On a top shelf nearby is an old Brownie camera that used to belong to his father. On a counter sits a single reflex camera with a lens about 10 inches long and six inches in diameter. It’s for shooting birds and other wildlife around the Audubon Center less than a mile down the road. Next to him is an enormous telescope, allowing him to catch planets lining up in galaxies in the night sky.
Just as he photographs the darkness and the tiny creatures in the grass, he will use that same vision focusing national politics on local impacts.
He digresses for a minute to recall his work in the Peace Corps between Amherst College and graduate school. He was assigned to Zaire, the French-speaking country in Central Africa. His job was to teach students there in the French language, which he barely knew. That was a steep learning curve, he chuckled.
Today, he worries about USAID workers in Zaire.
DD: I think about that a lot. We had a big Peace Corps presence; there were quite a few USAID workers in the capital. I didn’t work there much with them, but they’re working for the government, representing us, supporting business. Now that’s all been canned. Any food assistance or anything just stopped. I can’t imagine what the consequences are going to be. This is one of the many things that are pretty disturbing to me right now.
GC: And then there are the effects of the national issues here:
DD: My wife, Jackie, is a nurse. I work in a related field, so the impact of health care here is a big problem, particularly the spread of measles—not really an epidemic yet, but it could be.
GC: Ever the analyst, he works the numbers in his head.
David Dean
DD: One thing the USAID does is distribute a lot of food that’s grown here. We’ve basically stopped shipping grain abroad, so now there’s a huge surplus of grain in the U.S., and prices are falling. All those crops have nowhere to go. There’s implications for farmers, for our economy, never mind places in the world that we’re trying to keep stable.
GC: Dean is not entirely new at this party job. He and Jackie were precinct captains—the neighborhood organizers that do the legwork—and he organized the poll greeters at the Fruitville Library for the primary in August and then the general election, running it every day for 12 hours.
DD: One thing I want to do is focus on what are the impacts of the current administration’s actions on life in Sarasota, whether it be big cuts to education—when they essentially defund the department of education—health care, immigration—they’re talking about revoking TPS status for some countries.
GC: One of his first tasks will be to meet people. He’s encouraged there are other new officers and another group will be joining the leadership next month. There are new state committee members—the people who represent the local party on the state level. He’s hoping to broaden the diversity in the party, he said.
Some have been concerned about the rumored closing of the party’s Newtown branch office. That has become an issue of access to the building, not a desire to close, Dean said, and one he is working on. That African American-majority neighborhood is important, he added. He knows there is a Hispanic Caucus and plans to check that out. He’s also hoping to ramp up operations at the party’s main office on Tamiami Trail in South Sarasota, having it open more hours.
With a few exceptions, the party has relied on retired people who have the time to volunteer. But more and more, they are finding the younger voters are going to make the change.
DD: We say we have a big tent, but we need inclusion in that tent. That takes work so that we have younger people represented in our party and they know who to talk to and how to talk to them and what the message is. They have to have an equal say in things. That takes work. It doesn’t happen automatically, and that’s why we still stand for DEI. even though that term gets maligned. I think that’s who we are.
GC: This has been Gretchen Cochran, reporting for WSLR.
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