By BRANDON LARRABEE
THE NEWS SERVICE OF FLORIDA
The national clock-cleaning that Republicans administered to Democrats in this week’s midterm elections reached into Florida, helping carry Gov. Rick Scott to victory over former Gov. Charlie Crist, his Democratic challenger, and strengthening the GOP’s hand in the Legislature.
Crist, a former Republican, failed in his attempted political comeback. Democrats lost six seats in the state House, giving the GOP a two-thirds majority and making the minority party largely irrelevant. The composition of the state’s congressional delegation didn’t change — one Democrat and one Republican lost — but that was about the only bright spot for Democrats.
The fallout: The GOP once again has total control of state government. House Democrats are once again ensnared in a fight over who will lead them for the 2015 legislative session. And Florida is once again primed to be one of the central states in the 2016 presidential election.
The campaign is over. Let the campaign begin.
SCOTT 2.0
In March 2013, it looked for all the world like Crist would be able to walk into the Governor’s Mansion. Scott was trailing his predecessor by 16 percentage points, according to a Quinnipiac University Poll, which showed Crist with a 50-34 lead that included leads in essentially every demographic category.
They don’t hold elections in the spring of odd-numbered years, though, and Scott used an avalanche of negative ads and a stronger ground game than Republicans have run recently to hold onto his seat for four more years. It was one of the more improbable comebacks in the state’s political history.
It came after a bitterly personal and extraordinarily expensive race — one that eventually lightened Scott’s wallet to the tune of $12.8 million, the amount he and his wife pumped into the Republican Party of Florida in October to ensure victory.
“They’re going to announce at 8 o’clock that we are going to kick Charlie’s rear. And he deserves it. Because he doesn’t worry about our families,” Scott said Monday during a rally in The Villages, a retirement community that is ruby-red Republican.
It wasn’t 8 p.m. when Scott claimed victory Tuesday. In fact, it was closer to midnight. It came after an unsuccessful legal effort by Crist’s campaign to keep the polls open in Broward County — no Florida election would be complete without a court fight — and a margin that started out strong in Scott’s favor and narrowed but never closed.
In the end, unofficial results showed Scott carrying about 48.2 percent of the vote, with Crist picking up almost 47.1 percent. There was no talk of kicking anyone’s rear in Scott’s victory speech.
“It’s time to put all the division behind us and come together,” Scott told cheering supporters at the Hyatt Regency Coconut Point in Bonita Springs. “Forget about all the partisanship. Florida is on a mission. And that mission is to keep growing, and to become the very best place in the world to get a job, to raise a family, and live the American dream.”
Crist took the stage in a nearly empty ballroom at the Vinoy Renaissance resort in St. Petersburg to make a similar case. He was interrupted when he said he had called Scott and congratulated him. “Demand a recount!” a supporter cried out.
“We need to come together. We really do,” Crist said.
WAVE GOODBYE TO DEMOCRATS
The wave didn’t just hurt Crist, of course. It ravaged Democratic chances up and down the ballot. The only truly high-profile challenger to a Republican Cabinet official was George Sheldon, who ran against Attorney General Pam Bondi.
But Bondi crushed Sheldon, beating him by 13 points while Libertarian Bill Wohlsifer garnered just 3 percent of the vote.
Agriculture Commissioner Adam Putnam and state Chief Financial Officer Jeff Atwater also easily won re-election. And House Democrats, trying to hold onto at least 41 seats to either sustain Crist’s potential vetoes or cause trouble for the Republican majority, instead lost six seats to fall to 39 and yield a supermajority to the GOP. Republicans can now essentially run the House as they see fit.
Outgoing House Speaker Rep. Will Weatherford, R-Wesley Chapel, called the Tuesday night results a “validation of the policies we’ve been fighting for the last several years.”
“This is a great Republican night across the board,” Weatherford said.
The bad night for Democrats prompted a challenge to incoming House Minority Leader Mark Pafford, D-West Palm Beach. Rep. Dwayne Taylor, D-Daytona Beach, said he would run against Pafford at a caucus meeting set for Nov. 17. The meeting had been expected to result in a pro forma vote to elevate Pafford to the position.
“Moving forward, we don’t have the time to take a chance on what else (Pafford) might not be able to do,” Taylor said.
Pafford indicated that Democrats were hurt by the national climate and the Republicans’ strong fundraising advantage.
“There was never any guarantee that we would come back with all of our members,” Pafford said.
Also, an amendment that would have allowed for the broader use of medical marijuana, supported by many Democrats, narrowly failed to get the 60 percent approval from voters necessary to take effect.
There were two bright spots for Democrats: In South Florida, Congressman Patrick Murphy managed to hold onto his Treasure Coast area seat, fighting off Republican challenger Carl Domino, a former state House member.
And in one of the few Democratic pickups anywhere in the nation Tuesday night, Gwen Graham — daughter of former Gov. and U.S. Sen. Bob Graham — ousted two-term incumbent U.S. Rep. Steve Southerland, a Panama City Republican who was elected in the tea-party wave of 2010.
A QUICK PROMOTION
The path from senator to president usually takes at least a couple of years, but Sen. John Thrasher made it happen in just 48 hours. On Thursday, two days after he was re-elected to his Northeast Florida Senate seat, Thrasher was officially approved as the president of Florida State University by the state university system’s Board of Governors.
Thrasher, R-St. Augustine, won approval alongside Kent Fuchs, the provost of Cornell University who will now lead the University of Florida.
“I have no doubt both universities will thrive under these leaders,” university system Chancellor Marshall Criser said.
Thrasher resigned from the Senate, effective at midnight Sunday, sparking the need for a special election to fill his seat. Rep. Ronald “Doc” Renuart, R-Ponte Vedra Beach, and Rep. Travis Hutson, R-Elkton, quickly moved to run for Thrasher’s seat, saying they would resign from the House a day before the special election.
Thrasher’s selection was contentious as it played out across the summer in Tallahassee. But Thrasher, who was Gov. Rick Scott’s campaign chairman when the FSU search began, was the front-runner for the job throughout the process.
Thrasher acknowledged he may have had a hand in state schools not being as adequately funded the past few years as some board members would want. But, he added, that in order to achieve higher standards at the university he wants to quickly prepare the school for the legislative session, focus on the university’s ongoing $1 billion capital campaign and look into increasing faculty pay.
“If we’re going to get in the top 25, we’ve got to be realistic about the salaries we pay,” Thrasher said.
STORY OF THE WEEK: Gov. Rick Scott beat former Gov. Charlie Crist to win re-election after one of the most expensive and bitter races in Florida history.
QUOTE OF THE WEEK: “If the campaign hadn’t built the ship and raised the sail, that last little bit of wind wouldn’t have moved us.”—Rick Wilson, a Republican political operative, on the effect of the national Republican victory on Scott’s re-election.