I live in Florida. Crist can DEFINITELY count on at least SOME of the white voters here in Florida to have his back....
Posted on 05/03/2010 9:33:42 PM PDT by freespirited
A generation ago, a candidate like Florida Gov. Charlie Crist would be a lock for the Senate.
As the white candidate in a three-way race with a black Democrat and a Hispanic Republican, Crist would be hard to beat.
Remember that Florida has a racial history that combines all the worst elements of the American experience on the issue.
In 1860, almost half of Florida's population was enslaved, and the state was the third to join the Confederacy.
Florida was one of the last states to integrate its schools, and both of Florida's Democratic senators voted against the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
But Florida also had the same kind of urban racial friction that the big cities of the North experienced. Miami had the only major race riot between the end of the civil rights era and the Rodney King riots in Los Angeles.
In May 1980, five Miami police officers were acquitted of the beating death of a black suspect. The riots that followed left 13 dead and much of the city smoldering.
The same year, as many as 125,000 Cubans -- some refugees, many others exiled from Fidel Castro's jails and asylums -- washed up in South Florida after setting sail in a junkyard armada from Mariel Harbor.
It was the start of a new flood of immigrants from across the Caribbean and South America that poured into the megalopolis of South Florida.
A state that had seen the worst of Jim Crow and a potent version of the same kind of racial strife that wrecked places like Detroit produced some predictably polarized voting patterns.
When Crist first ran for the Senate in a long shot bid against entrenched incumbent Bob Graham in 1998, exit polls show him getting 7 percent of the black vote and 35 percent of the Hispanic vote. The 2006 Senate candidacy of former Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris did about the same with blacks and slightly better with Hispanics.
The fiercely Republican Cuban-American voters of the state accounted for 4 percent of the Florida electorate in the last Senate contest, while Hispanic voters of other backgrounds accounted for 6 percent of the electorate overall.
To be successful, Republicans need to draw half of the overall Hispanic vote, as Crist did when he won the governorship in 2006.
This year's Republican nominee, Marco Rubio, is expected to do even better with Hispanic voters -- perhaps 70 percent.
Black voters, who are heavily concentrated in only three of the state's 25 congressional districts, had grown as a percentage of the state electorate through the 1990s and early part of the last decade. But an explosion in Hispanic population has diminished black electoral clout.
Even in the historic black voter surge for Barack Obama in 2008, black voters accounted for 13 percent of Florida's total turnout -- a point less than in 2006.
Democratic nominee Rep. Kendrick Meek, the son of a barrier-breaking black female member of Congress, can be expected to get at least 90 percent of the African-American vote.
The electorate in Florida this fall will likely be about 15 percent Hispanic and 15 percent black, with non-Hispanic whites making up the remaining 70 percent.
In the past decade, Republicans have generally captured more than half of the white vote in Florida.
Crist took 60 percent of the white vote when he won the governorship in 2006 -- seven points better than successful Hispanic Republican Senate candidate, Mel Martinez, had done two years earlier.
A racially divided electorate produces racially skewed electoral outcomes.
As Crist's new pollsters sift through turnout models, the obvious path to victory will be by running up the score with white voters. If Crist could get half of white Florida votes again, he would win by a landslide in the three-way race.
But a pollster who is working on a down-ballot, statewide race in Florida this year told me something interesting: Crist is dead in the water with white voters.
My source wouldn't share specific results, but suggested that in some congressional districts, Crist was polling behind Meek among whites likely to vote this fall.
In county after county, the pollster found Crist, who was still a Republican at the time, doing far worse with his fellow whites than other Republicans. White voters were going heavily for Rubio. If Rubio gets just 30 percent of the white vote, he'd be a shoo-in.
Florida's 2010 Senate race may break down many of the racial barriers of the state's political past, and that's bad news for Charlie Crist.
My reasoning is that many voters associate both Meek and Crist with Obummer, whose approval rating among the white population is pitiful.
No, Crist can’t count on “the White vote”!
Who’s analysis is this really?
If Key West were all of Florida, he’d be a shoo-in, if you catch my drift.
Time to go to bed.....I can’t read clearly anymore.....
I live in Florida. Crist can DEFINITELY count on at least SOME of the white voters here in Florida to have his back....
Go Rubio!
Hmmm. The guys at the top look like pitchers, and Charlie looks like...
Crist can’t count or is a delusional alcoholic.
This self serving dork can’t win at solitaire.
This character assassination of Florida because of its past is uncalled for. I grew up in Tampa during that time. The only conflicts came when the Yankee government forced itself where it had no business. There were no riots, as there were in that liberal bastion, Wilmington, DE.
True, he takes Holland and Smathers to task for voting against the Civil Rights act. However, he neglects to mention Governor Leroy Collins, who stuck his neck out and accepted integration. And he was reelected!
Yeah, but he’s got the orange vote locked up solid.
“Florida’s 2010 Senate race may break down many of the racial barriers of the state’s political past”
Oh, BS!
The blacks will vote lockstep for the dems as always.
“This character assassination of Florida because of its past is uncalled for”
This is typical when it comes to reporting on us in the “old south”.
"SORRY CHARLIE"
You ain't good enough. . . . . .
We’ll see, but name ID is important in FL too. Just the fact that a voter can recognize Crist makes the typical voter feel good about himself.
I don’t think one could run for reelection in FL at the time Collins was governor. Collins lost the 1968 Senate race to Edward Gurney, as Nixon also won FL again.
Not if you are a RINO & Light in the loafers. . . . .
>>I don’t think one could run for reelection in FL at the time Collins was governor.<<
Governor McCarty died in office. Collins challenged Charley Johns, the acting governor. In the general election, Collins defeated Johns and was sworn in as governor on January 4, 1955. In 1956, he was reelected to serve a regular four-year term, which made him the first governor of Florida to serve two consecutive terms.
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