At the end of March, there were 54 seats in the Florida House that no Democrat had filed any candidacy papers for. (Official filings come in June.) Today, instead of letting almost half of the 120-seat House go uncontested, Democrats are letting a quarter go uncontested: 33 House districts have no Democrats filed. Details below the cut...
Here are the district numbers without Democrats filing yet: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 12, 13, 16, 17, 20, 28, 37, 42, 43, 45, 50, 58, 62, 63, 65, 66, 70, 72, 74, 75, 76, 77, 79, 80, 102, 110, 111, 113. They include four seats (102, 110, 111, 113) with parts of Miami-Dade county, four in the Tampa Bay area (45, 50, 62, and 63), one in Orlando (37), and three in the Jacksonville area (13, 16, 17). If the Democrats get candidates for those four metro areas, they'll reduce the uncontested seats to 21. Not as good as zero, but the metro-area districts are low-hanging fruit on candidate recruitment.
And as far as I'm concerned, the number one job of county Democratic Executive Committee chairs for the next two months is candidate recruitment. So if you've got some spare time right now, leave a message for one of these good folks:
I'm going to e-mail them, offer such assistance as I can provide, and point out that I'm going to track THEIR candidate recruitment here on DKos over the next few weeks.
Update: Apparently Janet Cruz cannot effectively file yet for reelection in 58 because her special election was so close to the legislative session that she could not open a committee account before Florida law prohibited her from fundraising (during the session). 33 seats to go.