Category Archives: Florida

The Buzz reports that Senate bid by Jeb Bush iffy, friends say.

If true, I don't know whether to be sorry we won't have Jeb! to kick around again — I think he'd lose unless the Democrats really screwed up — or happy that there's no chance he'd actually get elected … Florida Dems are capable of giant screwups …

Update: It's official: Jeb's not running. Nobody ever said he wasn't smart.

Florida Senator and national embarrassment Mel Martinez To Retire.

Should be quite a race to succeed him in both parties. I look forward to the blogger outreach….

A smart politician does the right thing when it helps his side.

Charlie Crist is a smart politician.

The loooong lines at the Florida polls were making people wonder what was wrong (again!) with the state's voting officials. One reason for the long lines was that the legislature changed the rules to reduce the hours and locations — a combination of penny pinching and the historical GOP bias against making it easy for the riff-raff to vote. So it was popular politics for the would-be post-partisan Governor (but see his judicial appointments!!!) to do whatever it took to restore some sanity by extending polling hours to 12 hours per day from the artificially short six hours in most locations.

Lost in all the kudos for the Governor's act of sanity (has it come to this? the government does the obvious and necessary and the Herald's local columnist falls over herself praising it? ) is the political calculation undoubtedly behind this move. Never forget that Charlie Crist is one smart calculating politician: you don't move from “Chain Gang Charlie” to Mr. (attempted) Middle-of-the-Road without a keen sense of how the wind blows.

Now, imagine you are a Republican who believes that his political chances will be best helped by carrying his state for the GOP, or failing that by being seen to have gone the extra mile for the ticket. It's true that having McCain/Palin win the election is bad for your long-term future, but there's so little chance of that happening that you can afford to make a big Florida push.

What are you afraid of? The biggest thing on your mind is that the GOP vote is going to stay home. You're worried they're going to stay home because they never liked John McCain anyway. You're worried they're going to stay home because they think Sarah Palin is unfit to command. You're worried they're going to stay home because the polls suggest that the state and the nation are lost. And, to top it off, you're worried they're going to stay home because with all this baggage weighing the ticket down, a measurable fraction of the GOP vote is going to stay home because it doesn't want to stand in line for three hours. (Anecdotal evidence suggests, that the average Obama voter is more energized about the ticket than the average GOP voter, so the long lines just make matters worse.)

So of course Charlie Crist did what he had to do to shorten the poll lines. It was smart politics. And self-interested too.

The Buzz has the data as of the weekend, The Fla. tally so far: Ds up 80K votes:

The Fla. tally so far: Ds up 80K votes

Through Sunday, it appears absentee and early votes have Democrats up by 80,287 votes.

Of the 1,010,046 people who voted early, 53.7 percent were Democrats, 30.19 percent Republicans and 16.02 percent other. Of the 1,059,518 absentee ballots returned so far, 35.31 percent were from Democrats, 50.23 percent Republicans, and 14.46 percent other.

All told, 2,069,564 people have voted already — 44.33 percent of them Democrats, 40.45 percent Republicans, and 15.22 percent other.

These are statewide totals.

Early voting starts today in Florida.

Early voting should not be confused with absentee voting.

Absentee voting is where you or someone pretending to be you asks to be sent a ballot, and then you or they fill it out with any number of close friends watching. Absentee balloting is a rolling feast, which I think began some time ago.

Early voting is just like regular voting, complete with new optical scanning voting machines, except the hours and locations are different. You can't do it in as many places, nor for as many hours in the day.

Eye on Miami kindly provides a guide, Miami Dade Early Voting Where and When.

I've never voted early — there's something about the democratic ritual of the polls, plus the convenience of the local site, only a few blocks from home, that makes it very appealing, even as I wonder whether it should be legal to use a Catholic Church as a place to hold state balloting on state constitutional amendments regarding things like abortion or gay marriage. Might it sway some religious Catholic voters on some issues? But I digress.

I'm somewhat tempted to try early voting this year, as I think the lines at the polls will be long. But I hear they will probably be long at the early voting stations too.