I've been holding off putting this diary together. It has been stewing around my teeny weeny brain since the night of November 7th. I thought I'd give it some time to mellow out and not write out of anger. I'd almost gotten there. And then...
BPK put up his diary on The 49 State Strategy. Of course, he proposes that Florida is the state to be left out.
Well, I consider above the fold to be not ready for adult only material. So, if you want to know how I really feel about that, you'll just have to follow me....
OK, it blows. I know, BPK made some reasoned arguments, but it still blows. It blows worse than the hurricanes that have knocked the crap out of us over the last two years.
Here's the facts about Florida:
In 1992, Clinton lost by less than 2%.
In 1996, Clinton won by almost 6%.
In 2000, well, you know. It was as close to a draw as you could get. Or. Al Gore won. You pick.
In 2004, Kerry lost by 5%.
BPK proposes that Democrats just give up on Florida because it's just too hard to win here. That sounds like George Bush saying the presidency is hard work. It's lame and it's wrong. Florida made huge gains in 2006, despite being screwed by the DNC, the DGA and just about every other organization with a D in front of its name.
So let's start with what went right in Florida in 2006. First, we for sure picked up two seats in the US House of Representatives. I'd say it's a better than even bet that we will pick up FL-13 before it is all said and done. Yes, I know, the state certified Buchanan as the winner yesterday. But, hey, this is Florida. You don't really expect it to be over that easy do you?
Florida Democrats also picked up one statewide race. Alex Sink was elected to the state Cabinet as Chief Financial Officer. Sink, the wife of 2004 Democratic nominee for governor, Bill McBride, won handily by 53.5% to 46.5% over state Senate President Tom Lee. Alex Sink was an extremely well qualified candidate for CFO, having formerly been the Chief Executive Officer for Bank of America in Florida. She did not have a primary opponent and thus was able to build her campign coffers continously without dissapating any of her funding on a primary. She also ran a good, strong campaign.
I'm going into all this detail on the CFO race because it shows that a well qualified, well funded candidate who runs a good race can win statewide in Florida. Seems we had another well qualifed well funded statewide race in Florida this year. Oh, yeah..
Bill Nelson kicked the crap out of Katherine Harris to hold onto his Senate seat. Nelson was once number one on the Goper hit list as an R pickup in the Senate. But then along came Katherine Harris. Karl Rove and Co. figured out pretty early that Kooky Katherine couldn't win. But they had a problem. Harris had a big base of support among the nut case right wingers in Florida. And she had a reputation as a gargantuan fund raiser. So Rove could not find a credible Republican to go against her in a primary. So what did he do? He pulled the plug on her national funding. Harris, who had been all over the country raising money from Republicans for four years since 2000, suddenly couldn't get the Republican money bags to take her calls. She wound up having to put $3 million of her own money into the race. She had promised to put in $10 million, but even she is not that crazy. So while that worked out pretty well for Nelson, it had some pretty bad ramifications for another Democrat on the statewide ballot.
Jim Davis survived a brutal Democratic primary to become the nominee for Governor, He had to combat $5 million in Republican special interest (Big Sugar) money spent against him in the primary. Davis beat State Senator Rod Smith by 6 points in the Democratic primary. But it left him somewhat bruised and definitely broke. It also left some of Rod Smith's supporters bitterly opposed to the idea of Jim Davis becoming Governor. Some of Smith's former staffers even set up their own 527 to support the Goper nominee, Charlie Crist.
Crist cruised to victory in the Republican primary. He crushed his opponent by 31 points, barely breaking a sweat. He was able to go right back up on the air with TV spots immediately after the primary. While he was doing that, he was franticly flying around the state on a giant corporate jet raking in more campaign contributions. The Republican donors, you see, had cash to burn because they weren't giving any to their Senate nominee, Katherine Harris. So Crist had the major GOP donor base basicly all to himself, and he took advantage of it.
Crist spent more money than any other candidate in the country this cycle. He outspent Davis 4 to 1 in the general election. And still he only managed to win by 7 points, 52% to 45%. Among Crists' contributors, the Republican Governors Association handed Crist a check for %1.2 million delivered in person by Mitt Romney.
The Democratic Governors Association showed up in Florida as well. Bill Richardson showed up here for a couple opf days. I'm not really sure what he did, but he didn't bring a pile of money with him. The DGA gave a token $300,000 for the Forida governors race. That's nearly $1 million less than the RGA gave Crist. Thank you so much, Governor Richardson. We'll be sure to remember your largesse in the 2008 cycle.
That brings us to the DNC's famed 50 state strategy. I'll admit, I haven't finished my research to see how much, if any , money the DNC spent on the FL-Gov race. But they weren't really supposed to be so much about the money as they were about field organizers and other support. Well if you know anything about Florida politics, you know this. The so called I-4 corridor running across Central Florida is the crucial swing area of the state. Just the place you would send field organizers if you were going to right?
Well, the DNC did send field organizers to the I-4 corridor. Oops, did I say organizers? I meant organizer, singular. That's right, the DNC sent one very young, very inexperienced field organizer to the crucial battle ground area of Central Florida. She was a very bright, dedicated young woman, but she was not a net asset to the Davis campaign. This is not a personal criticism of this person. She worked hard and did what she could, but she was just out of her element. So, the famed 50 state strategy in Florida amounted to one young woman. Thank you, Doctor Dean.
OK, OK. Yes the Davis campaign made mistakes too. They did not spend enough of their scarce resources on field as they needed to. They did not respond to an ad featuring an empty chair signifying Davis missing votes in congress while he was running for governor. the man had a 93% lifetime voting record. Who would care about a stupid empty chair? well, after Crist spent about 5 times the GDP of Montana on this ad, apparently a lot of folks thought that Jim Davis ought to have spent more time in his chair.
Jim Davis was a well qualified candidate. He spent 8 years in the Florida House and 10 yers in congress. He beat Crist soundly in both of the debates they had. He was closing at the end. What he didn't have was enough money to compete more closely.
If the Gopers had to split their contributions between a Senate candidate and the Governor candidate...
If the DGA had not let the RGA give Crist a one week's worth of TV advertising advantage ($1 milion net difference in contributions)...
If the DNC had sent help to the 4th largest of the 50 states...
And if the Davis campaign had done a few things differently, we'd be talking about how blue Florida has become. Instead we've got people posting diaries suggesting we chuck the 50 state strategy and go with 49 - leaving Florida as the odd state out.
Here's the facts about Florida:
In 2004, Kerry lost by 5%.
In early 2003, I saw John Kerry at a fund raiser in Tampa. I asked him how he planned to win in the South. After his face stopped getting red and his neck stopped tightening up, he told me that if Al Gore had won New Hampshire, he'd be President of the United States.
If you get us a candidate who understands that the South and Florida are not New Hampshire, we'll get you 27 electoral votes.