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Tallahassee, FL – By any measure, this election was a sweeping defeat for Florida Democrats. The party lost its lone State Cabinet seat and faces an even larger GOP majority in the Legislature. Tom Flanigan spoke with some political analysts to gain some insights on exactly what happened.
If you ask how the Nov. 2 general election went in Florida, Interim Secretary of State Dawn K. Roberts has the answer from the purely technical angle.
"This has been another great day for Florida elections, just as it was in the primary and also in 2008, all of the election reforms that Florida has put into place over the last decade have worked," Roberts said.
Of course, there are other ways to look at how elections went. One is to look at turnout: how many voters actually bothered to vote. Leon County Elections Supervisor Ion Sancho was crunching the numbers the day after the election. He found the statewide voter turnout was a paltry forty-nine percent.
"When you look at that forty-nine percent voter turnout, one out of every two registered voters stayed home," he said. "And we need to address this issue, because if we're going to have elections in which the majority of our voters don't show up, then we really can't represent We the People' if We the People' don't vote."
Even more critical to the outcome, Sancho says, is that the majority of those who didn't vote happened to be in one political party.
"I would say that it probably impacted on the Democratic voters of the state of Florida more so than the Republican voters, and I think therein lies the tale of the election."
LeRoy Collins Institute Director and political science professor Carol Weissert agrees with Sancho on who didn't vote. But she says there were also some changes as regards those people who did cast ballots this time around.
"South Florida turnout was down, particularly in Broward and somewhat in Palm Beach counties, those are Democratic strongholds," she said. "And then the other thing that's really important that's coming out from the exit polls is that the independents and the elderly were really key in changing their vote. So the ones that voted tended to vote for Democrats in 2006 and they voted for Republicans in 2010."
Not all of the voters were older, of course. Among the young, minority voters was twenty-one year old Mona.
"I don't really know a lot about it," she said. "I'm just going off of the little bit that I've seen on TV and the radio and stuff like that, but I'm not old enough to quite know what affects me and what doesn't affect me."
Weissert says the problem, at least for Florida Democrats, was that not enough "Monas" went to the polls.
"Young people and minorities, particularly as related to the 2008 election...those numbers were down," she said.
Most Florida voters seemed to agree there was plenty of mud being slung on all sides during this year's campaigns.
"It was a lot of negative bashing against opponents, you know, but I guess that's politics."
But Weissert says there was one negative message that the GOP used to great effect. That was linking Democratic candidates, even many for state and even local office, to Barack Obama and U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.
"Nancy Pelosi was featured in a lot of the ads. I think Allen Boyd once said you'd have thought he was running in San Francisco rather than Northern Florida by looking at the opposition ads," said Weissert. "So clearly it worked. They (Republicans) picked up four U.S. congressional seats, which is amazing, too with real outsider candidates. (Steve) Southerland and (Allen) West really haven't run for office before."
Still, all of this might have been overcome IF Florida Democrats had just
gotten their act together. That's the opinion of Democratic National Committee member and Florida Democratic Strategist Jon Ausman. He thinks his party created four big problems for itself.
"Not enough money into grass roots, a lack of focus on North Florida, we didn't have competitive primaries so that the Democrats could get enthused about them (the candidates). And fourth and final, we lost total control of the messaging and that's what killed us."
Ausman says this election's Republican victory was especially galling because it came just two years after Democrats fielded such a great grass roots effort.
"You have to remember that in 2008, the Obama campaign and its Democratic allies spent almost $70 million in Florida, a lot of that on grass roots activities, putting together hundreds of field offices and employing hundreds of people to work the neighborhoods," he said.
For Florida Democrats, the bitter taste of defeat is still fresh. But the party's leadership is already focused on the election two years hence and looking to learn some lessons from the Great Republican Tsunami of 2010.