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If not now, when?
If Democrats can’t win a statewide race in a political environment this dreadful for Republicans, then Florida appears destined to be a one-party state forever.
It’s Alabama, only with iguanas.
For Democrats, it’s now or never. That’s how I see it.
Republicans have vastly more money and massive dominance in voter registration, the largest in Florida’s history. The latest official totals show a Republican lead of 1.6 million voters statewide.
But it’s also hard to imagine that the factors shaping public opinion could ever be this favorable for the party out of power.
Who, in their right mind, would prefer this status quo? Who would refuse to vote for change?
For Republicans, the bad news keeps coming, starting with the mounting public hostility to Donald Trump, his deeply unpopular war and high gasoline prices.
A Pew Research Center national poll shows Trump at 38 points underwater with a record-low 30% approval rating.
The Trump brand is toxic, yet a Trump endorsement is Byron Donalds’ supposed ticket to winning on Nov. 3. As a new Sun Sentinel editorial lays out plainly, the other essential element of Donalds’ victory strategy is money, much of it from millionaires and billionaires.
But votes can overcome money, and all over Florida, people are understandably in a foul mood.
They are suffering under the weight of the high cost of housing and property insurance. They are seething over a sense of corruption and cronyism that hovers over everything like humidity.
It’s the $10 million Hope Florida revelations — exceeded by a DeSantis-dominated appeals court that expunged a leaked report of a grand jury, as if the whole thing never happened.
It’s the $1.2 billion Alligator Alcatraz fiasco, the arrogance of manipulating congressional districts in open defiance of the voters and the state Constitution, and more.
If not now, when?
Jolly sounds as if victory is in his grasp.
“Voter registration doesn’t really matter this cycle,” Jolly told Dana Bash on CNN’s Inside Politics Thursday.
It was an audacious claim, but Jolly cited the morale-boosting upset victory by Democrat Emily Gregory in a March state House race that includes Mar-a-Lago.
“The race right now is essentially a tossup,” Jolly told CNN.
Too few people actually believe that. In reality, polls are all over the place.
Multiple surveys show the race for governor is in a statistical tie, with Jolly and Donalds separated by three percentage points, putting the race inside the margin of error.
A new poll by Mason-Dixon Polling & Strategy, for NBC 6/Telemundo in Miami, has Donalds with a seven-point lead, 48% to 41%. The same poll shows Jolly far ahead with independent NPA voters, 47% to 28% — a possible key to this race.
Before you reject this poll as an aberration, remember: Eight years ago, Mason-Dixon’s final pre-election poll showed a statistical tie in the governor’s race, with Democrat Andrew Gillum leading Ron DeSantis by 45% to 44%. People scoffed at it — and DeSantis won by half a point.
The Mason-Dixon poll by telephone of 625 people who self-identified as likely to vote, from Sept. 28 to Oct. 1, has a margin of error of 4 percentage points, theoretically making it another 3-point race.
The Mason-Dixon numbers show that the only region of the state where Jolly holds a commanding lead is Southeast Florida — Miami-Dade, Broward and Palm Beach — where about a third of all Democrats in Florida live. The two are close in Tampa Bay, a swing area, and Donalds is widely ahead everywhere else in the poll.
If Mason-Dixon’s numbers are close, it seems to me, Jolly can win only by an extraordinarily large turnout in Democrat-heavy South Florida, and early numbers show little sign of that yet.
The diverse blue-collar city of Lauderhill is one of Florida’s bluest places. Two-thirds of its voters are Democrats, 23 points higher than the county.
A Lauderhill city commission candidate, Dr. Mary Smith, tells us she does not yet detect any sign that voters are highly engaged.
“I find that voters feel this is just another election,” she said.
If not now, when?
Steve Bousquet is Opinion Editor of the Sun Sentinel and a columnist in Tallahassee and Fort Lauderdale. Contact him at (850) 567-2240 or at sbousquet@sunsentinel.com.
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