An endorsement from the “Fire Breathing Liberal” himself has upped the hang-wringing quotient among Florida Democrats who buy into the false premise that they must defeat Gov. Charlie Crist in the U.S. Senate race.
Former U.S. Rep. Robert Wexler (D-South Florida) came out in support of Crist over the weekend.
“There is a special time in which elected officials have to put country before party, and this is one of those times,” the seven-term congressman told a crowd of his former constituents at Century Village west of Boca Raton. “I am here to endorse Gov. Charlie Crist because he has earned it. He has truly earned it.”
How Crist “earned it” is anyone’s guess, although he has shown signs of being a vertebrate with election-year vetoes of egregious legislation passed by Florida’s Republican-majority lawmakers. Still, Democrats expected Wexler to endorse U.S. Rep. Kendrick Meek, whose tagline since Crist went no party affiliation (NPA) is that he is a “lifelong Democrat.”
The often overlooked detail in the three-way race between the newly NPA Crist, the Democrat Meek, and the Tea Party Republican Marco Rubio is that all that has to happen for Rubio not to be the next U.S. Senator from Florida is for him to capture less than 33 percent of the vote. So Democrats can vote for Crist or Meek, just so long as they don’t vote for Rubio.
And so long as a bunch of independents get on board.
And they and we show up to vote, period.
Voter turnout is always key in elections but it seems especially important this year. Demographic-bending has rendered each race a conundrum. Gender could have been expected to play a role in the governor’s contest, with its original match of Rick Scott, the billionaire disgraced former CEO of HCA/Columbia Healthcare and Adelaide “Alex” Sink, the state’s chief financial officer and former Barnett Bank vice president. Then Scott chose as his running mate state Rep. Jennifer Carroll, who was born in Trinidad and is of African descent.
Adding Carroll to the ticket, in addition to drawing women, was also expected to blunt the impact of African-Americans turning out to vote for Meek, who is black. Meanwhile, Crist and Rubio are competing for votes from Jews (and with Wexler’s endorsement, Crist gains an advantage) and Latinos.
There are two distinct Caribbean demographics in Florida. The first are the old-school Cubans who fled to the state after Castro seized their familial lands in 1959, and entrenched stateside Puerto Ricans. The second is comprised of newer groups from throughout the islands (including Haitians, who are not Latino) and Mexico, Venezuela, Columbia, and Guyana. Rubio represents the hardline Cubans and older Latino groups who tend to vote Republican, but despite his own Hispanic bona fides, he is not expected to draw the votes of more recent or younger immigrants.
So almost every traditional shorthand measure for this election fails us. As Democrats, we have only two strategies:
- Get Out the Vote
- Anyone But Rubio
If Scott thought that making Carroll his running mate would encourage African Americans to vote for him in droves, he made a serious miscalculation. Scott may get a few African American votes, but the majority of them will not vote for him and here’s why. Scott represents the GOP, and we have seen the way the GOP has attacked President Obama on everyone of his policies. We know the republicans have prevented important bills from coming up for votes in the Senate repeatedly. We know republicans are aligned with Pox News. The most important thing we know is that many republicans have used racism to turn some Americans against Obama without any evidence to back up their claims. Not that the reasons I stated aren’t all important factors, but the real deal breaker is the last one. The GOP has never fully understood quite how involved we really are in politics, and this accounts for their inability to understand why we don’t vote for their candidates. It’s like President Obama said recently, we know who’s for us, and we know who’s against us. The GOP has made it very plain that the party does not respect African Americans, Hispanics, gay persons, atheists, immigrants, undocumented immigrants, Muslims, etc. Our ancestors were enslaved once, and once was enough. We have no desire to repeat the past by aligning ourselves with a political party that wants to turn back the clock to 1950s America. I lived under segregation once, and that was more than enough for me and millions of other African Americans of my generation.
**every one**