The chances of the Democrats getting support from the powerful Cuban-American community in Florida is going to be low for a long, long time.
Posted on 12/18/2005 6:44:16 PM PST by dukeman
Yeah, but not for 15 years after the Red Diaper Babies in Miami Beach die off. :-)
has the florida democrat party anounced that elian will be giving the opening remarks and fidel will be delivering the keynote address on closed circuit tv with janet reno introducing, of course?
Thats an interesting way of putting it
I'm sure those "young Cuban-Americans" risked their lives fleeing Communist Cuba in order to live in Socialist America.
The chances of the Democrats getting support from the powerful Cuban-American community in Florida is going to be low for a long, long time.
He's Got A Plan
Zippo Hero
many of those cubans have first hand experience of what happens to a country when you put communists/socialists in charge.
The problem is that the younger generations descended from those of us who left Cuba long ago have no memory of it or a memory of relatives living under Communism..
My parents were broken-glass Republicans. When I was a Cuban American kid growing up in the 1960's in Miami, the words "Democrat" and "Communist" were treated as synonyms in our house and my uncle fighting in Vietnam was considered a hero by the Cuban American community and not a "baby killer".
I am a broken-glass Republican.
However, now that I am married to a California woman who pretended to be a Republican when we were dating but turned out to be a Democrat after she married her meal-ticket, I cannot guarantee you that my kids will be voting Republican when they are old enough to vote.
So, yes, we are "dying out".
"all-star team of the party's power hitters: national Chairman Howard Dean" yada yada yada.
Coward dean is a "power $hitter" but the writer forgot to type in the S in the article.
Hint to LSM: there are no power hitters on the left. None, nada, zip.
Actually, Jewish-Americans are the second largest voting block in the Democratic Party in Florida, and the largest voting block in Palm Beach (31% Jewish, 23% black)and Broward Counties, two of the most heavily populated counties in the state. Secular Jews dominate the state legislative delegations from the southern part of the state.
The Democratic Party has an image problem among Latinos and Anglos in Florida. To many, at least at the local level, it is seen as a party of Condo Commandos from New York (South Florida) or the "black people's party" (North Florida and the West Coast of Florida).
What is changing is the Latino/Hispanic electorate in Florida. Puerto Ricans are already the largest single ethnic group period in Osceola County (think Disney World) according to the census, and have a large presence in Orange and Volusia Counties as well. Meanwhile, the Latin population of South Florida continues to diversify, ranging from wealthy Columbians and Venezuelans in the Tri-Counties, and poor Mexicans, who are concentrated on the west coast but do not tend to vote.
The GOP has done an excellent job at courting the affluent and middle class Colombian and Venezuelan emigres, factors that may help us in places like Broward and Palm Beach, that have been Democratic strongholds over the past 25-30 years. The Puerto Rican population may be more of a problem, but their is anecdotal evidence that even they split their votes in the 2002 gubernatorial election.
Only an inbred old Park Avenue Yankee like Dean would put Osama Obama in as keynote speaker to a Hispanic event.
I think it's rather hard for some people to believe that for a time Broward and Palm Beach were Republican from the '50s until the '70s. Anyone who has seen the movie "Porky's" can see the types of backwoods troglodyte 'Rats that once ruled those areas until the northerners came in and turned them into respectable GOP enclaves... that was until the aformentioned radical and rich leftists from NYC imported their destructive and failed politics to the area, overwhelmingly the only 2-decade old GOP areas. It's too bad we can't swap bonafide Jewish Israelis for the phony Florida JINOS. We know how the former would vote if they lived in America.
My parents live in Boca Raton and refer to it as "Scarsdale South."
Actually the second was Ed Gurney in 1962, who became the first Republican elected to the Senate from FL via popular vote in 1968. He followed Bill Cramer, who had been the first elected in 1954. There were several others in between Gurney and Shaw, when he was elected after a one-term RINO turned 'Rat apostate was beaten in the '80 'Rat primary. The late J. Herbert Burke represented most of those now 'Rat areas that Shaw has shed before public drunkenness sunk his reelection to Ed Stack in '78 (the aforementioned RINO turned 'Rat) when he was the 3rd elected GOPer in '66. Louis Frey came in '68, followed by Bill Young in '70 (still there today) when he succeeded Cramer following his disastrous Senate bid. Skip Bafalis came next in '72, then the infamous late Richard Kelly in '74, and Bill McCollum (who helped save Kelly's seat for us) and Shaw were tied for 8th place when they arrived 6 years later in the Reagan landslide.
Still don't understand why so many of the crackers voted for Chiles. What a moronic socialist.
Chiles would've been a footnote in the history books had there not been the brutal infighting in the GOP in 1970. Bill Cramer would've likely coasted to victory, but the oddball GOP Governor and Sen. Ed Gurney got their noses out of whack and dragged the hapless old Judge Harrold Carswell into the race (Carswell, of course, lived in the area of the state where people were still voting like it was 1870 and not 1970, so he didn't have his people turn out to vote in the GOP primary). Barone, in his very first issue of his Almanac in '72, called Carswell "intellectually limited" for giving up a judgeship for a race he could never hope to win. But the damage was done, and Cramer had similarly attempted revenge on Gov. Claude Kirk by trying to take him down in the primaries. Since they both detested each other, and the 'Rats managed to nominate semi-decent candidates (by the public's reckoning, with Reubin Askew for Governor and Chiles for Senator), they end up destroying the GOP's fortunes for nearly a decade... if not 20 years.
And then they'll suddenly start voting Democrat.
-PJ
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