There were five statewide races in the 2006 general election in Florida. Democrats won two and lost three. I want to look closer at and compare results of three of those races, US Senator, Governor, and Chief Financial Officer, to see what lessons Democrats can learn.
More below.
Here are the basic result of the five state-wide races:
US Senator
Katherine Harris (REP) 1,826,127 38.1%
Bill Nelson (DEM) 2,890,548 60.3%
Others 76,859 1.6%
Total 4,793,534 100%
Governor
Charlie Crist (REP) 2,519,845 52.2%
Jim Davis (DEM) 2,178,289 45.1%
Others 131,136 2.7%
Total 4,829,270 100%
Attorney General
Bill McCollum (REP) 2,448,008 52.70%
Walter "Skip" Campbell (DEM) 2,197,959 47.30%
Chief Financial Officer
Tom Lee (REP) 2,151,232 46.50%
Alex Sink (DEM) 2,479,861 53.50%
Commissioner of Agriculture
Charles H. Bronson (REP) 2,651,833 57.00%
Eric Copeland (DEM) 2,002,464 43.00%
The Attorney General race pretty much parallels the Governor race, so it is not being considered here. Charles Bronson was a popular Republican incumbent and his victory was generally expected by all.
What I want to compare are the county results of four of the candidates: Bill Nelson, Charlie Crist, Alex Sink, and Jim Davis. This will allow certain patterns to emerge and allow conclusions to be made.
First, a county map of Florida.
Next, the county results of the four candidates:
I have color coded these results to give an indication of what’s going on. The blue counties are those that are clearly Democratic. The red counties are those that are clearly Republican. The purple are swing counties. The designation of the latter is somewhat arbitrary.
A blue county was one were Davis beat Crist. A purple county was one where Crist beat Davis but Sink outpaced Crist or they differed by less than 5%. Hillsborough is an exception and is included as purple based on its 2004 vote in the presidential election (53% for Bush). The same is true for Pasco (55% for Bush).
The Bill Nelson vote is included to show the top end of what a Democrat in Florida can do. Nelson was a popular incumbent with celebrity cachet as an ex-astronaut who was running against an unpopular and incompetent opponent (Katherine Harris). It should be noted that Sen. Nelson out-polled all Republican state wide candidates.
One use of Sen. Nelson’s results is to gauge the viability of various districts around the state. When I first became involved in the special election for State House District 3 I pulled out precinct results from Escambia and Santa Rosa counties to find out how Nelson did there. It turned out that he won by around 1700 votes. From that I knew a Democratic victory was possible.
If you do the same for Florida Congressional District 1, or FL-01 in dkos terms, you find that Nelson lost 45%-55%. That’s a tough district for a Democrat and an area where a lot of rebuilding of the party needs to take place.
There were only five counties where Katherine Harris had a majority of the vote: Clay (59.8%), Okaloosa (60.8%), Santa Rosa (57.4%), St. Johns (53.3%), Walton (53.9%), and two where she had a very small plurality: Bay (49.5%) and Holmes (49.6%).
As you can see, there are only 8 blue counties in Florida. The three big ones in the southeast where all the population is, then Alachua, the home of the University of Florida, Leon, the state capital and home of Florida State and Florida A&M Universities, and then three small counties in the region around the Tallahassee metropolitan area that have high minority populations.
The major purple counties are usually considered to be the ones running across the middle of the state, what’s called the I-4 corridor. Many of the small purple counties listed here went strongly for Bush in 2004: Calhoun (64%), Dixie (69%), Franklin (59%), Glades (59%), Liberty (64%), Okeechobee (58%), Putnam (60%), and Taylor (64%). So, these designations should be considered fluid.
The main point to be taken away from this list of votes is that Alex Sink out polled Jim Davis in every County. Her total was only 40,000 votes less than Crist’s, less than 1% difference. In the large purple counties of Pinellas and Orange she out polled Davis by about 25,000 and 22,000 respectively. That’s 9% and 10% better, which is a substantial difference.
The fact that she was able to out poll Crist in many small counties where Bush won handily in 2004 also shows that she was able to reach out to many voters who usually voted Republican, and did a better job of it than that party’s own gubernatorial nominee.
Now, Sink wasn’t going head to head with Crist, so we’ll never know how she would fare in such a race (and she’s already said she won’t run against him). But, of the three open statewide races, she was the only Democrat who won. Therefore, we must conclude she was doing something right and the other two were doing something wrong.
In a comment to an earlier diary I wrote on Alex Sink, GatorDem had this to say about Jim Davis’ effort:
The two true ingredients to a winning Dem game plan in Florida are:
1. GOTV in the I-4 Corridor to at least break even.
2. GOTV in Dem vote rich South East Florida.
Yes Davis did win Broward by over 100,000 votes winning 63% of the vote there. However, only 45% of the Broward voters turned out to vote. If the turnout percentage could have been raised to 70% in Broward, Davis could have been expected to pick up almost 150,000 votes, over 40% of the margin of defeat.
In the crucial I-4 Corridor, Democrats outnumber Republicans. Yet, Davis did not win a single county and piled up a negative margin of 174,000 votes. Had Davis just broken even in the I-4 Corridor, he would have won by a very small margin.
I want to go on record here as saying that any electoral plan that relies on 70% turnout in a midterm election for victory is delusional at best. This is old fashioned, out-moded thinking that needs to be rejected.
This arguement boils down to "If we had got more votes we would have won!" Well, yes, of course. The issue is always HOW do you get those votes. GatorDem simply resorts to calling for "more GOTV" without explaining how to go about doing that.
But, the biggest criticism of this thinking is that Alex Sink WON with the existing GOTV. To paraphrase the former Defense Secretary, "You don’t win elections with the voters you wish you had; you win elections with the voters you have."
How did she do it. That’s what we need to learn.
In Crashing the Gate Kos and Armstrong make the point that Democrats have not used advertising effectively. Kos reiterated this point in a recent post:
Democrats and liberals have been too willing in the past to make their electoral appeals based on the intellect -- offering a laundry list of 10-point plans and programs they will create and/or support. We're trying to appeal to the brain, while Republicans have learned to appeal to the heart.
This is related to another problem that’s caused Democrats to lose elections for the past decade. It’s an outgrowth of a phrase I often hear progressive friends utter: "We need to educate people about . . ."
Let me be real clear here. It is elitist to assume that people don’t know what’s in their own self interest.
That’s why Republicans have been so successful in negatively branding the Democrats as elitist. We play right into their propaganda, giving them all the ammunition they need.
What more Democrats need to learn how to do is REFRAME what we believe in so that it speaks to people’s needs. This is what Alex Sink did to win.
Sink was able to position herself by running against a putatively profligate state legislature (controlled by Republicans, but not mentioned.) Her television ad showed politicians waiting in line to withdraw money from an ATM and then going off with silly smiles on their faces holding up wads of cash.
Quite bluntly, it looks like an ad for a Republican railing against uncontrolled spending by liberals. The downside of being in power is that your opponents can run appealing populist ads against you.
In the governor’s race Jim Davis’ ads were good ads. If you want, you can watch a bunch of them on YouTube. But most take the form described by Kos above, "plans and programs they will create and/or support".
The Davis ads couldn’t equal the emotional punch of the ad that the Crist campaign used to negatively brand Davis. That was the "empty chair" piece that attacked Davis for missing congressional votes.
In a recent press release about Florida Sen. Mel Martinez dodging the Iraq vote, the Florida Democratic Party even acknowledged the effectiveness of this ad with the comment: "The Republican Party of Florida slammed Jim Davis again and again for missing votes . . ."
The "empty chair" ad played right into the elitist image of Democrats in the same way that national Republicans so effectively tarred John Kerry in 2004. As Kos tries to point out in his post, a Democratic candidate who is going to win has to be able to combat this old attack that Republicans will use whenever they can.
This is main lesson of the Florida state wide elections of 2006. Forget "educating people." Go with reframing and negative branding. That’s what works. That’s what wins.