Backlash and affirmation

And so the pendulum is swinging — from the right to the left, closer to the center, albeit still distant enough from crossing the Maginot line to the progressive left.

You can say that for Sarasota and Manatee counties after the Aug. 20 primary elections.

But there was much more behind the results than just an ideological shift. The dynamics in each county were different.

Manatee  

Perhaps most decisively and for sure, in Manatee, voters said they had enough of the sleazy, negative campaign flyers and advertisements and, by extension, enough of the candidates who associated themselves with such tactics. 

Seven of the 10 candidates whom political consultant Anthony Pedicini represented in Manatee and Sarasota lost.

Negative advertising moves the needle, all right.

It’s certainly accurate to say Pedicini’s dirt-stained mailers — or perhaps just whole negative tone of his candidates’ campaigns — fueled the rejection of his and the developer-backed candidates. 

But voters also had plenty of other reasons to motivate them to oust incumbents Kevin Van Ostenbridge and Ray Turner.

Voters apparently were still fuming over the vote to reduce the county’s wetland barriers. And clearly, based on the vote counts, there also was the perception — albeit not true — that the incumbent commissioners these past four years were taking orders from homebuilders and campaign funders, Carlos Beruff, owner of Medallion Homes, and Pat Neal, owner of Neal Communities.

In truth, all the clacking in both counties about the developers causing “overdevelopment” also is not true. But good luck trying to make that case. 

Altogether, the root of the chief motivator for the Manatee County Commission election results was Van Ostenbridge — specifically, his behavior over the past four years. Voters clearly refused to tolerate another term of his open disdain and disrespect for residents during commission meetings.

And by extension, there was guilt by association. Voters  dumped any candidate associated with Van Ostenbridge, the majority on the commission, developer campaign funding and/or Pedicini.

All that boosted to primary victories Republicans Carol Felts, Tal Siddique, Robert McCann and the reelection of George Kruse.

The guilt by association also sank the candidacy of James Satcher, the former county commissioner whom Gov. Ron DeSantis appointed to supervisor of elections. 

Manatee Republicans apparently didn’t care a lick that DeSantis appointed Satcher to be supervisor a few months before the primary. 

Satcher had three strikes going against him. The first: the $800,000 he requested and obtained in a surprise request from the County Commission for so-called system upgrades, some of which could not be used in the primary. Two: He was a client of Pedicini. Three: He was unqualified for the job compared to his opponent Scott Farrington.

Voters saw through it all. Farrington won 59% of the vote; Satcher, 41%. 

We won’t know for two years whether the 2024 primary results will bring a permanent shift in the tone of campaigns in Manatee. But this year’s primary results surely sent a strong message.

Sarasota

Altogether, you can sum up the voting results in Sarasota County as a bit of a dichotomy — the backlash and an affirmation of approval.

The backlash came against two incumbents — one on the school board, and one on the County Commission. The affirmation came in the primaries for four Sarasota County Hospital Board seats.

County Commission

Like Manatee voters, Sarasota County voters also endured nasty and ugly campaigns — in particular the two primaries for the District 1 and District 3 County Commission seats. 

Much to the expressed surprise, disappointment and disgust of many longtime Sarasota County politicos, County Commission candidates Teresa Mast and incumbent Neil Rainford hired Pedicini to bring his brand of campaigning across the county line.

In turn, that fueled a retaliatory campaign of similar untruths and half-truths from the campaign and PACs of former Sarasota County Sheriff Tom Knight.

It’s difficult to conclude how much of an effect the negative campaigns had on the results. 

In Mast’s case, in spite of her negative mailers against opponent Alexandra Coe and the fact she had the backing of developers, Mast won 55% of the vote. Presumably that can be attributed to experiences that make her qualified for the job — a longtime business owner, former member of the county planning commission and 10 years as a business relations coordinator for the county.

The uglier campaign was that between Knight and Rainford. There is no benefit to recounting any of their low points, other than to say to the candidates: You only hurt yourselves. The effect of the ugliness is the candidates damage and lower their character and integrity in the eyes of voters.

When the votes were counted, though, Knight overwhelmed Rainford with 60% of the vote, a margin that can be attributed to Knight being the hometown Venice favorite and popular former sheriff. 

Rainford, meanwhile, suffered the backlash. He was seen as an outsider who recently moved into the district for political reasons; as a developer-backed toady; and as a protégé of sorts of Commissioner Mike Moran, who has offended swaths of voters over the past two years. As the saying goes, perception becomes reality.

School Board

This was the other backlash race — and an upset. 

Incumbent and School Board Chair Karen Rose lost to first-time candidate Liz Barker. Barker’s margin of victory was 2,995 votes out of 100,553, or 3%.

Although regarded as nonpartisan, this contest was partisan: Rose, the conservative Republican, and Barker, the liberal Democrat. Informed voters knew this.

So in a county where Republicans outnumber Democrats nearly 2-1, Rose should have been considered a numerical favorite.

But as it turned out, you can say low Republican turnout cost Rose the election.

Look at the numbers in the above box. Let’s assume Barker won all 42% of the registered Democrats who voted. That would be 35,977 votes. But her total was 51,774.

That means Barker won additional 15,797 votes from non-Party Affiliates and Republicans.

Now let’s assume the 48,779 votes that Rose won were all Republicans. Not likely, but assume it anyway. That total is less than the 35% Republican turnout. Had Rose won all of the Republican votes, that would have totaled 55,068, enough for victory.

But you can also say Rose lost 6,289 Republican voters to Barker.

Even more critical, Rose did not get votes from the 107,666 Republicans who did not vote. 

Turnout matters — a lot.

No one knows whether those who did not vote sat out because they did not like Rose or just were not motivated. But if Republicans had turned out at the same percentage as Democrats (42%), that likely would have reelected Rose.

As for Tom Edwards and his winning 56% of the vote for reelection, the message here is also one of backlash and turnout. Edwards, a politico-philosophical liberal, successfully has portrayed Rose and board member Bridget Ziegler as political agitators, even though he engages in it aggressively as well. And yet, voters apparently perceived him as the apolitical victim trying to stand up to the other four conservative board members.

Voters don’t like one-sided governance, so Edwards easily retained his seat. He did that, mind you, with 19,031 votes coming from Republicans and NPAs.

Hospital Board

While Sarasota County voters recoiled against and rejected a couple incumbents, the sweep of the four Republican hospital board candidates was a resounding affirmation that Sarasota County residents are satisfied with the post-COVID steps the Sarasota Memorial Healthcare board and administration have taken on the subject of patients’ medical freedom.

The four winning Republicans — two incumbents and two endorsed and supported by the SMH Foundation, — won with percentages from 62% to 70% of the vote. Voters clearly understand that SMH is on a successful track and doesn’t need to be disrupted.

It’s ‘for the people’ populism vs. individual rights

A common theme among the Manatee County Commission candidates who won their primaries Aug. 20 was a populist tune — the standard election promise to be “for the people.” 

Robert McCann, who defeated Ray Turner for the District 5 Manatee County Commission Republican nomination, said on election night, “We’re going to advocate for the people and what they want.”

The same night, incumbent County Commissioner George Kruse, who won the Republican nomination for District 7, said no matter who is elected in the November general election “there are no scenarios where the public side is not the majority.”

Populism is popular. Indeed, voters like to hear candidates and politicians promise with a shake of their fists they “will fight for the people.” For some, that talk can trigger those famous words from Abraham Lincoln: “Democracy is government of the people, by the people, for the people.”

Yeah! That’s what we want — commissioners who will listen to us, the people, and tell that developer “no.” For the people!

While Lincoln defined democracy fairly accurately, he left unsaid what his words actually mean. In truth, democracy “by the people” is majority, mob rule. In a pure democracy, there is no limit placed on the power of the majority. The poor individual who disagrees with the majority becomes subservient, a slave — “slavery of a minority.” And as author Isabel Paterson so ably argued in “The God of the Machine,” “Democracy inevitably lapses into tyranny.” 

Here is the point: As the primary election winners and the candidates on the general election ballot make their case, a fervent hope is they temper their populist “people” rhetoric and take to heart:

1. The individual is supreme, not the collective. 

In truth, there is no such thing as “the common good.” No one speaks to this better than the late Ayn Rand: “When ‘the common good’ of a society is regarded as something apart from and superior to the individual good of its members, it means that the good of some men takes precedence over the good of others, with those others consigned to the status of sacrificial animals.”

In her book, “The Virtues of Selfishness” (a concept most people would think is an impossibility), Rand points out that “society is only a number of individual men.” Or, as Paterson put it: “No group is as intelligent as an individual. No group, as a group, has any intelligence; all intelligence is in individuals.”

Rand further points out how history is littered with failed political systems where the good of society was placed above the individual and individual rights — Pharaoh of Egypt; the democracy of Athens; Emperors of Rome, monarchies of France; and “the gas chambers of Nazi Germany” and “the slaughterhouse of the Soviet Union.”

But when the Founding Fathers came along, they revolutionized the world by subordinating society to individuals and individual rights. The Declaration of Independence and the Constitution put limits on the power of the state, as Rand put it: “… as man’s protection against the brute force of the collective.” 

“All previous systems,” she wrote, “held that man’s life belongs to society, that society can dispose of him in any way it pleases, and that any freedom he enjoys is his only by the permission of society. 

“The United States held that man’s life is his by right, that a right is the property of an individual, that society as such has no rights, and that the only moral purpose of government is the protection of individual rights.”

Thus, when elected officials cast their votes on legislation,  their justification should not be on the argument of what is best for “the common good,” but rather on what is best and right for the individual.

2. The people don’t bow to them. They are servants. 

With the adoption of the Constitution, the Founding Fathers flipped the role of government from that of ruler to servant.

“The Bill of Rights was not directed against private citizens,” Rand wrote, “but against the government — as an explicit declaration that individual rights supersede any public or social power.”