The lesson, when all the numbers are crunched, will likely be about getting out the vote.
That goes for Florida Republicans as well as Democrats. The setting spans from the Sunshine State to the Golden State, where there is a parallel worth examination.
Despite anti-establishment fever, Californians elected former governor Jerry Brown - also a three-time presidential candidate - to run the state again. That’s about as establishment as you can get.
And Californians had a choice in Republican Meg Whitman, the former eBay CEO who even spent $141 million of her own cash to present the best possible image for voters.
What happened? Wednesday‘s Los Angeles Times put it this way: “(Brown) played to California's historic tendency to elect veteran officeholders and send first-timers to the sidelines. And his quirkiness inoculated him from whatever anti-incumbent mood there was.”
Results are unofficial, but Brown is up by nearly 1 million votes. California’s state department shows there are three registered Democrats for every two Republicans, but a quarter of the registration is either a swing voter or chooses not to disclose a political leaning.
Now back to Florida, where the margin between Republican Rick Scott and Democrat Alex Sink was razor-thin as Sink conceded Wednesday morning. Republicans appear to be dominating the turnout, if early voting was any foreshadow.
However, the Dems outnumber GOP voters by 600,000 statewide.
And Scott was no Meg Whitman. He only spent about half of what she did and he had perhaps the largest skeleton in the closet as some voters questioned his time at Columbia/HCA, a hospital chain that was slapped with $1.7 billion in fines for fraud.
Sink, compared to Brown, was a political novice. Yet terms like “insider,” “career politician” and “Obama-liberal” flowed freely in the Republican offensive.
Fewer than half of Florida’s 11.2 million registered voters cast a ballot in the governor’s race, according to State Department totals.
A few factors playing into Florida’s GOP surge:
- Marco Rubio’s Senate candidacy
- A viable challenge for Florida Republican Chairman John Thrasher in his state senate race
- Anti-incumbent rage that eventually led to a pink slip for Democratic U.S. reps. Allen Boyd, Alan Grayson and Suzanne Kosmas.
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