Dan Green, who earlier this month won the Republican primary in Florida’s newly redrawn 9th Congressional District, would be the first-ever resident of Vero Beach to represent our county in Congress if he wins the Nov. 3 general election.
Green, 50, a former Pentagon official in the first Trump administration and a onetime research fellow at the conservative-leaning Heritage Foundation in Washington, DC, topped a crowded field of seven candidates in the GOP primary.
All the other candidates in the primary race were from central Florida, including Orlando.
Our county’s Congressmen for all of this century have been from Brevard County, which is no longer part of our district. After Jan. 3rd, Rep. Mike Haridopolos – whose 8th Congressional District was also redrawn – will no longer represent Vero Beach.
In the November election, Green will try to unseat the five-term incumbent Democratic congressman in the redrawn 9th Congressional District, Darren Soto, 48, from Kissimmee, who is seeking re-election.
Green edged his top Republican rival by a small margin, gaining 25.4 percent of the votes, just ahead of cattle rancher Ben Butler’s 24.4 percent. Former Osceola County School Board President Thomas Chalifoux, Jr. wasn’t far behind, with 20.3 percent, while Cuban American businessman Jorge Martinez garnered 19.5 percent.
When Gov. Ron DeSantis and the Republican-controlled state legislature earlier this year adopted a new electoral map and moved Indian River County into this new district, it was for the express purpose of increasing the Republicans’ 20-8 advantage in Florida congressional seats to 24-4.
Soto’s seat was one of the prime targets. In redistricting, Soto’s 9th district lost some of the “blue” parts of the Orlando metro area while picking up the reliably “red” Republican stronghold of Indian River County, where Republicans hold a 62,000-to-26,000 voter registration advantage over Democrats. The district also picked up red-leaning rural areas of Okeechobee and Polk counties.
Green readily admits that being the only Republican primary candidate from Vero Beach helped him in Indian River County, where many people knew him; his rivals split the vote from the Orlando metro and other areas.
But he also acknowledges that to win the general election against Soto in November, he’s going to have to get more votes in other parts of the district, especially Orlando.
Redistricting may have given him a good chance, Green says, but “I know I still have to show up and do the hard work. I want to be a work horse, not a show horse.
“I am humbled by the support I have received so far,” Green said, “and I am now hopeful of victory in the fall because I believe I do reflect the values and the policy preferences of the voters in the district. I am confident people will realize my deep commitment to my country through my military service.”
As a military veteran and captain in the U.S. Navy reserves, Green’s forte is in foreign policy, national security and defense matters, but he realizes that to win the election, he can’t only talk about strategic rivalries with China and other such international issues, as important as they are.
“Our message has to be about kitchen-table topics and about local issues like over-development, which I consider to be a non-partisan problem,” Green says, “as well as how best to defend the Constitution and pay off the national debt.”
Green has worked on numerous political campaigns in various capacities, starting with being part of Gov. George W. Bush’s Florida recount team in the bitterly contested 2000 presidential election and later organizing veterans committees for Republican candidates. But this is his very first try for elected office on his own.
“I do believe that running for office was natural next step for me,” Green says.
Green has never been married. “I’ve been kind of busy with other things,” he says, adding that he hopes getting married and having a family may still be in his future someday. “I just hope the voters won’t hold the fact that I’m still a bachelor against me,” he says.
Green moved to Vero Beach with his parents in 1977, coming from Iowa, when he was only one year old. His father was an engineer as well as a veteran and his mother taught Spanish at Vero Beach High School for decades before her retirement. His parents still live in the same house they moved into 49 years ago.
Green played soccer on the school’s varsity team. “I wasn’t big enough for football,” he recalls. He graduated in 1994.
Four years later, Green graduated summa cum laude from American University in Washington, DC, with three majors and a minor and was voted the outstanding undergraduate of the entire university. He then obtained a master’s degree in international Affairs from Florida State University in Tallahassee in one year through a program that usually takes two years.
Green followed up those academic achievements with a Ph.D. in political science obtained in early 2001 from George Washington University in Washington, DC, which he attended while working full-time at the Republican National Committee in the capital.
After helping count and re-count the ballots in the 2000 presidential election, Green worked on President-elect George W. Bush’s transition committee and after the inauguration, at the tender age of 24, he was assigned to work in the Pentagon on strategic disarmament issues.
On Sept. 11, 2001, he was working in the Pentagon when he suddenly saw the fireball caused by the crash of one of the hijacked 9/11 planes into the building. He was lucky because he had just changed offices – if he had still been in his old office, he might not have survived the attack. One of his co-workers was killed in the attack.
Green says the 9/11 terrorist attacks had a profound impact on him, and he joined the U.S. Navy two years after the dramatic events, in 2003, going on to serve several tours of duty in both Iraq and Afghanistan. Military service for him was the continuation of a family tradition, as his great-grandfather was part of the American force that captured Puerto Rico from Spain in the Spanish-American war in 1898, and his grandfather served in World War II. His father also served in the military.
In Iraq and Afghanistan, and later in Syria in the campaign against ISIS, Green often worked on counter-terrorism task forces that required working closely with local chieftains.
He has written 68 articles and five books about his experiences, including one about his time in southern Afghanistan, titled “In the Warlord’s Shadow.” Another book deals with the challenges and problems faced by veterans returning from the Mideast wars.
In 2019, President Trump appointed Green to a top position in the Pentagon as Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Strategy and Force Development. In that role, he was charged with analyzing whether today’s armed forces are well designed to meet the likely challenges of the future and recommend force adjustments where needed.
After the Democrats took the presidency with Joe Biden in 2021, Green went to work for the Heritage Foundation.
During the past 20 years, Green has gone back and forth between Vero Beach and his various jobs overseas and in Washington, DC. He visited his parents regularly when away and bought a home in Vero in 2011.
Green recognizes that his opponent Soto, who is of Puerto Rican extraction through his father, may have an advantage with the sizable Latino population in Osceola County, but he doesn’t concede the Latino vote to his opponent.
“I love the Latino culture. I grew up with it all my life through my mother, the Spanish teacher who studied in Spain,” Green says. “I remember she took me to a Julio Iglesias concert at the Orange Bowl in Miami and we were also part of a Latino music club, listening to Latino music all the time at home.”
Green says he also traveled extensively with his mother to Costa Rica and Mexico, and his mother was an expert in Oaxaca-style cooking. They had exchange students staying at their house from many different countries, including Macedonia and Costa Rica, and he himself was an exchange student in New Zealand.
“In our family we loved the richness of foreign cultures,” Green says, “and I still do. My parents used to call each other ‘guapo’ and ‘guapa’ (two versions of the Spanish word for beautiful).”
Photos by Joshua Kodis
