Where State Dems Failed

Following politics means suffering through a lot of ups and downs for anyone with an ounce of convictions, but it has been especially frustrating this year to watch a number of good candidates go down to especially lousy ones. The biggest frustration for me has been an utter failure for state Democrats to sell themselves as agents of change.

This complaint really only applies for our state offices: the Governor, Cabinet and Legislature. For more than a decade, all of these state offices have been dominated by Republican politicians. Yet, a supposed discontent with the status quo was directed to punish Democrats running for these offices. I can't really blame Republicans for winning. But Democrats should never have let this narrative take form, much less hold through election day.

I noted more than a month ago that it was insane that Republicans could promise on bringing change to the governor's mansion. With Rick Scott's election, we have guaranteed GOP control of our state's top office for a 16-year run. As for the Cabinet, Alex Sink was the only member who was a Democrat. And four years prior to her election in 2006, no Democrat was on that board. Come January, that will be the situation again.

As for the Florida Legislature, enormous GOP caucuses got bigger. The Division of Elections says the state Senate will have a 28-12 Republican-Democrat split. The state House will be 81-39. That means Democrats in either chamber will be outnumbered more than 2-to-1. And people say Rick Scott won't be able to push a far-right agenda. I think he will be able to do whatever he wants.

I don't really want to beat up on the candidates too much. I think Sink really did run an outstanding campaign this year, and the final margin of defeat was less than 62,000 votes. We had good candidates for the Cabinet, particularly with Dan Gelber seeking the Attorney General post.

But in the end, it seemed as if no campaign could break through a general noise. An election cycle which started as being discontent with the party in power became all about voting Republican to really show those guys in D.C. But our state officials aren't going to D.C. Florida Republicans have controlled Tallahassee for more than a decade, and their power was only expanded on Nov. 2. That is not just a disconnect. That is voters intent on punishing the party in power doing exactly the opposite of what they intended to do.

Florida has been hit especially hard by the recession, in part because lawmakers and state leaders have created policies which suck our tax coffers in order to give people an enormous number of tax exemptions, underfunded education to the point where our students are graduating without a very diverse skillset but able to bubble the hell out of a Scantron, and created growth management policies which encouraged construction of more homes than Realtors could sell before the bubble burst.

This year, we saw the leadership of the Republican Party of Florida audited and indicted. We had an oil rig explosion damage our tourism-based economy while Republicans were apologizing to BP for shakedowns. The GOP managed to nominate a gubernatorial nominee with a record fraud fine on his resume, a black guy who hangs with racist motorcycle gangs, a Senate candidate who had a home foreclosure with another Congressional candidate, and an attorney general candidate who used her position as a prosecutor to allegedly steal a dog.

And they won.

This is just embarrassing. We cannot allow the other side to control the narrative to this point. The Florida GOP controls all the pursestrings here. They are the status quo. And yet, when the going got tough, they told the voters the handful of Democrats in Tallahassee were to blame, and voters bought it. I have to give begrudging respect to the other side on that one. But the consequences are too great for us to let that happen again. While we lick out wounds, Rick Scott is putting together a transition team. And that just hurts.

The Absence of Democracy

Qualification deadlines in Florida tend to incite in me a temporary depression. Potential and hope for a resurgence is often dashed that day. Particularly upsetting to me this year was the failure of Bud Chiles to do the right thing and run as a Democrat. But the biggest problem for me each year is the scant number of Democrats willing to run at all. Nowhere is that more apparent each cycle than in the races for state House seats each year.

Check out the slate. When you look closely, you realize that in 35 of the 120 state House seats, there is no Democrat in the race. Of those, eight are for open seats.

In the arena of personal disgust, I must note the district where I live, District 74, Republican Rep. Gary Aubuchon is running unopposed in a district where he has never had to stand up for election one time. Aubuchon was selected by Republican Party officials in 2006 to take this seat after Charlie Crist chose former Rep. Jeff Kottkamp as his running mate in the governor's race. Since then, Aubuchon has skated through unopposed, without ever having to print a single campaign sign.

We will never take control of the House is we refuse to even compete in nearly a third of the races for state House seats, but there is more at stake than that. By not fielding candidates to run for office, the Democratic Party of Florida is not only denying progressives in Florida the opportunity to govern, but every voter the chance to even make a choice regarding who should manage the Sunshine State.

Thanks to a write-in candidate loophole, discussed with precision by Norwood last week, many voters are also being disenfranchised. In 10 races, a state Representative will effectively be selected in the Republican or Democratic primary, and anyone registered as an independent or with another party will be denied the right to vote. This is a loophole just as abused by Democrats as Republicans, and half of these write-in candidates are closing primaries in seats the Democrats will hold.

But at least voters within the majority party get a vote in those races. In 31 different races, a candidate is either running unopposed or only has write-in opposition. In many more, only one major-party candidate is running, and facing a third-party or nonpartisan opponent in November. I suppose a case can be made the Republican Party of Florida is also failing its members. There are 26 House seats where no Republican is running. But I am sure they care less because they have controlled the House by overwhelming numbers for more than a decade.

All of this is especially important for Democrats because the next House will handle the once-a-decade redistricting process. By not fielding a solid slate of House candidates, the party has doomed itself to another decade in the minority. Of course, the rigged map approved in 2002 is part of why so few districts in Florida are battlegrounds. Democrats and Republicans alike have been drawn into isolated boxes.

I am especially angry as a progressive, but voters of all political persuasions are being cheated of the Democratic process. Consider this. If we assume every independent, third-party and write-in candidate loses, which history shows is a safe bet, then more than half of the state House races have already been won by one party or the other. Only 59 races have both a Democrat and a Republican in the race.

We are a closed primary state, and that assumes legislatively that a two-party system offers the best choice for voters. Too bad neither members of the Legislature nor leaders of the two parties feel the same way.