Our View

At least the ads are off the air.

But like most other media, we can’t resist from picking at the Nov. 2 election with a few post-mortems of our own.

Analyzing some of the results is, after all, revealing. That’s how you spot the trends and changes.
In Florida, there were no big trends or changes. Voters continued to follow the patterns of the past 20 years. Indeed, if you look at the accompanying table below, you’ll see that Florida is a lot like the United States: predominantly red and Republican in the lesser populated and rural areas (with a few exceptions near Tallahassee) and deep blue Democrat in the urban areas and the state’s major college town of Gainesville and the seat of state government, Tallahassee.

This pattern should be no surprise. The blue regions tend to be those where there are the most recipients of government checks and largesse. Not to mention, the large urban areas tend to attract the most liberal voters.

Perhaps an anomaly might be Palm Beach County, among the bluest of the blue counties. Normally, you might expect one of the wealthiest counties in Florida to side with conservative, fat-cat Republicans, the way Collier County/Naples does. But the roots of the wealth in Palm Beach is much like the Warren Buffett-Bill Gates wealth — once capitalistic, but now that they’ve got their foundations, trust funds and inheritance, they tend to shift way to the left.

Palm Beach County, for instance, voted 61% for Barack Obama in 2008 and 58% for Democrat gubernatorial candidate Alex Sink — two of the highest percentages in those elections.

These days, that’s a given in Florida. Palm Beach, Broward and Miami-Dade are automatics for the Democrats. Especially Broward (Fort Lauderdale). Sink won 64% of the vote there.

But where close elections are often won and lost in Florida are in the urban counties of Orange (Orlando), Hillsborough (Tampa) and Pinellas (St. Petersburg-Clearwater).

When you analyze the gubernatorial voting results in these three counties, it’s evident that this is where Sink ultimately lost the election (see table, upper right).

In Miami-Dade, Sink came close to winning by the same percentage as Obama did in 2008. But in the other three central Florida counties, she gave up three to four percentage points to her opponent and the ultimate winner, Republican Rick Scott. Ever-present pundit Susan McManus even expressed her surprise at Sink’s less-than-expected margin in Hillsborough County.

The ultimate difference came from voter turnout. As George W. Bush and Karl Rove did in the 2004 presidential election, the Republicans did a better job than the Democrats getting out the vote. Here are two statistics that illustrate the point: In this year’s general election, Democratic votes amounted to 59.7% of the total Democratic votes cast in the 2008 presidential election. Republican votes amounted to 64.7% as many votes votes cast in 2008. In short, the Repubicans got out the vote.

+ Sen. Bennett: Go-to guy
If you need the Legislature to change or adopt a new law next spring, you might start now setting up an appointment with Sen. Mike Bennett, R-Sarasota-Manatee.

He was named Senate President Pro-tem, placing him as the No. 2 in the Senate in the 2011 session. This means he will have a lot of influence in what happens.

In a conversation earlier this week, Sen. Bennett expressed some worry about having a Republican sweep in Tallahassee — governor, attorney general, CFO, agriculture commissioner, Senate and House.

Said Bennett:
“If we can stay focused on jobs and not get carried away with the social issues, we’ll be all right.”
Amen, brother.

+ Mayhem on redistricting
The average Joe on the street isn’t going to think much about the brain-numbing yet volatile process of congressional and legislative redistricting over the next year. But come 2012, just as the presidential election races shift into high speed, this process is going to cause a volcanic eruption in Florida’s courts.

Judging from the voting results on Amendments 5 and 6 (both won 62% of the vote), the only places in the state where voters understood what they were doing were up in the Panhandle and the Northeast corner of the state. Voters from 18 counties in those areas voted against the two amendments. Everywhere else, the amendments passed easily.

We discussed the future consequences of this prior to the election. But most voters apparently believed the crafty TV ads. If you recall, the ads tried to persuade you to believe that state legislators should not be allowed to draw congressional and legislative districts because they draw them to favor themselves.

As noted before, the two amendments were sponsored primarily by Democrats and the unions — both groups of which are tired of being out of power. Of course, they didn’t say that when Democrats were in power for 40-plus years in Florida, they did the same thing — only worse. At least when Republicans drew the districts in 1992, they crafted districts that gave African-Americans a chance at being elected to the Legislature for the first time in state history.

What voters have done now is create a boiling legal cauldron. Last spring, for instance, when legislators asked the Florida Supreme Court how the proposed amendments would be put into practice without creating a flood of lawsuits, the court wouldn’t even touch the subject with a response.

When legislators sent a disc of the present legislative district to the authors of Amendments 5 and 6, FairDistricstFlorida.com, in the last legislative session and asked its representatives to explain how the amendments would be implemented, they declined to respond or participate.

You watch. The game plan is to get redistricting out of the power of the Republican Legislature and shift it to the federal (liberal) courts. But there is an irony here.

The last time the courts were asked to intervene in Florida redistricting, they gerrymandered a district for the eventual black congresswoman, Corrine Brown, in Jacksonville. Even the courts gerrymander.

Too bad the voters didn’t think beyond the TV ads. It’s going to be ugly.

BOX
Good, not good enough
                             Obama                       Sink
Orange                59%                           54.2%
Hillsborough      53.0%                        50.0%
Pinellas               53%                           50.7%
Miami-Dade       57.8%                        56.3%