Tallahassee Democrat : GOP shows it can get out the vote

GOP shows it can get out the vote

By Bill Cotterell | CAPITAL CURMUDGEON | September 7, 2006

A few passing thoughts and random observations on this week's Florida primary results.

Everybody expected voter turnout to be light, and it was, but the Republicans did a better job of getting their people to the polls. This might have big implications for November.

Yes, it rained in the Miami-West Palm Beach area, where Democrats usually get their biggest vote. And yes, it was the day after Labor Day, and yes, a hot congressional race between Republican U.S. Rep. Clay Shaw and state Sen. Ron Klein will increase turnout down there in the general election - as will Sen. Bill Nelson's re-election campaign.

But this week's raw numbers were impressive.

Unofficial results posted Wednesday by the Division of Elections indicated that 978,410 ballots were cast in the Republican primary for governor. That's about 128,000 more than the Democrats - still numerically Florida's leading party - produced in their primary for governor.

In Cabinet races, it was the same story.

And the Republicans had almost as much turnout in their lopsided U.S. Senate primary as they did in the heated Charlie Crist-Tom Gallagher race for governor. That U.S. Rep. Katherine Harris won the GOP nomination to face Nelson was not a surprise, but turnout of nearly a million votes in such a low-key primary was.

Contrast all this to two years ago - a presidential election year, when public interest is presumed to be higher. The Republicans drew more votes in their statewide primary then, too, but they had eight candidates running for the U.S. Senate while the Democrats had four, and the difference in turnout was a negligible 13,000.

What's ominous for U.S. Rep. Jim Davis in November is that 98,000 Democrats didn't vote for him or state Sen. Rod Smith. They went to the polls to vote in their local races, presumably, but 11.5 percent of the Democrats chose one of the three unknown candidates.

Those are voters Crist can go after. By contrast, only 2.6 percent of GOP voters - about 24,700 of them - chose one of the two unknown Republicans on the ballot against him and Gallagher.

With the nominations decided, speculation about running mates will be a good story for the next few days.

Conventional wisdom dictates that Crist and Davis, both from the Tampa Bay area, need some geographic balance. State Rep. Jennifer Carroll of Jacksonville, a black Republican woman, has been prominently mentioned as a possible choice for Crist, and so has House Speaker Allen Bense of Panama City - as if the GOP needs any help in the Panhandle.

For Davis, someone with statewide name recognition would be nice, preferably from southeast Florida. But Bob Graham is busy.

Here's a bit of heresy: It really doesn't matter.

Nobody votes for the second banana. A poor choice for vice president or lieutenant governor can hurt, but even a miscue is survivable, as Gov. Jeb Bush and his father both demonstrated.

The governor may have been hurt some by picking a little-known conservative legislator, Tom Feeney, in 1994, and he had to part with then-Rep. Sandra Mortham on his 1998 ticket, but neither choice affected the outcome of those races.

Let's not forget Max Linn and the Reform Party. He will be on the November ballot for governor.

Linn, who headed a grass-roots organization that successfully fought an now-withdrawn proposal to increase legislative term limits from eight years to 12, has already put up some TV spots urging people to say no to the political pros of both parties.

The political survival of state Sen. Alex Villalobos, R-Miami, in the state's most closely watched legislative race is good news for Sen. Nancy Argenziano.

Bush had backed Miami-Dade school board member Frank Bolanos against Villalobos, who crossed the governor on school tuition vouchers and relaxation of the class-size constitutional mandate in the past session. Argenziano, R-Dunnellon, also bucked Bush on those issues, and she spoke out loudly for Villalobos last week.

But she did more than that. When the Bolanos campaign sent her a fund-raising letter signed by Bush, Argenziano released her reply letter to Bolanos, in which she said the governor prefers dictatorship to democracy, among other unpleasantries.

The money spent in that Miami-Dade race - estimated at $2 million by Villalobos and his supporters, $6 million by Bolanos and business organizations trying to defeat the incumbent - is simply staggering.

Most of it was spent by outside groups, mostly on nasty mass mailings and attack TV ads.

Those "electioneering campaign organizations," also known as “527s" for the section of the IRS code that applies to them, were also spewing their venom in both races for governor and a few Leon County Commission contests.

No wonder voter turnout was so light.

Contact Bill Cotterell at (850) 671-6545 or bcotterell@tallahassee.com.