Every vote counts.
Florida held down ballot primary elections on August 30th. In congressional district 2, there was a tough (but fairly cordial) fight between former Florida Assistant Attorney General Walt Dartland, and former DCF supervisor Steve Crapps. A bit over 60,000 Democratic Party voters turned out.
On election night, only 136 votes separated the two candidates. The closeness of the race triggered both machine and manual recounts.
Yesterday evening, the manual recount was completed, and Dartland eked out a 233 vote victory over Crapps. He’ll now face an uphill battle against Republican Neal Dunn (who had a close primary race himself) on November 8th.
We all know (at least those of us who were around during 2000) how close elections can be, and most importantly, that elections have consequences.
Quite a few people are still fence sitting for the presidential election this year. That’s pretty darned obvious when you take a look at this poll from Arizona (h/t Greg Dworkin and APR). It’s September, and almost 23% of Arizona voters are still undecided? Really?
There have been quite a few prior Sanders supporters, both here and on other online forums, who have publicly stated that they’ll either throw in for Johnson, or Stein, or just not vote at all on the top line because they can’t stand HRC.
The results of the Dartland / Crapps race hopefully gives pause to those who don’t believe their vote means anything, or that they’d have to clip a clothespin to their nose to vote for Hillary. If you have to throw a protest vote, do it for Clinton — a protest vote against Trump is vitally more important to the future of this country. And a few of those single votes here and there across the country could make a stark difference in what America looks like just a few months down the road.
Another lesson from Dartland / Crapps: pay attention to your local candidates, especially in primary races in the future, which tend to be friends and family races at a local level. 2017 is an off year election cycle, but there will still be a lot of local races where we need to get more progressive voices in on the ground floor.
Single votes do matter. Please consider that as we head toward the start of early voting.