The Political Whore

Other than Brian Blair’s nutty news conference and Buddy’s post-election-disaster interview?

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The votes have finally been counted in Hillsborough County, and shockingly enough, the good guys (or rather, the good guy and gal) won. And both wins could pretty much be considered upsets. Kevin Beckner, whose lead in the county commission race had been evident since election night, pulled ahead of incumbent Brian Blair for good with the final count: 55.26% to Blair’s 44.74% (259,831 to 210,399 votes). Yup, he trounced him.

And, with a justice that can only be called poetic, incumbent incompetent Buddy Johnson — the man who presided over the Hillsborough vote-count debacle — lost to Phyllis Busansky in the race for Supervisor of Elections.

Ya think Buddy will call for a recount?

UPDATE: The answer appears to be no. Johnson conceded defeat at about 6 p.m., according to TBO.com:

“Anything we can do to make her transition smooth, we will,” Johnson told reporters. “There’s a lot of big issues to deal with.”

The supervisor dodged questions about his handling of the election but praised his staff.

“The pressure they have been under in this election is tremendous.”

The Times reported that Johnson also said: “You may not have seen the last of Buddy Johnson.”

Here’s Mike Deeson of 10 Connects’ report.

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The counting of more than 80,000 early votes continues today, and at the latest tabulation (from late last night), challenger Kevin Beckner has opened a 22,839 vote lead over incumbent Brian Blair, who may have attended his last meeting as a commissioner:

Hillsborough County Commissioner Brian Blair said this morning he is not ready to concede defeat in his race with Democrat Kevin Beckner.

… “I’m an athlete,” Blair said this morning during a break in a commission meeting. “I’m running until the race is over.”

Commissioner Rose Ferlita, who has often crossed swords with Blair over environmental issues and other matters, wished Blair well if the ultimate vote total went Beckner’s way.

“In the event you are replaced by someone else, I want to thank you for your service and say good luck and Godspeed,” she said.

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In 25 years in politics and journalism I have never seen such a surreal scene as the “counting” of votes going on at the Hillsborough Supervisor of Elections Office Wednesday. I visited the elections counting office out on Faulkenberg Road in Brandon late in the afternoon, nearly 24 hours after the close of the polls and tens of thousands of votes away from having final results in Hillsborough’s elections, including the close race between incumbent Buddy Johnson and challenger Phyllis Busansky.

The veteran reporters there were just shaking their heads as the hours dragged on, watching through panes of glass as elections workers carefully took absentee ballots out of large envelopes and fed them through a counting machine. This happened only intermittently. Meanwhile, there was no Johnson, the elected supervisor, or his chief PR flak in sight. Johnson had not been seen since the night before. The situation was so exempt of information, the elections office so weird and unresponsive, that one TV reporter remarked loudly that the supervisor’s PIO’s (public information officers) were horrible — as one of them sat in the room silently against a wall.

(more…)

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Just a sample of Tampa Bay and Florida conservatives with their reaction to last night’s Obama victory.

From Chris Ingram, a former Capitol Hill staffer and Republican consultant in Tampa:

Get Ready for Obamalism
I want to puke, but at least HRC isn’t the president-elect.

My friends, George W. Bush has left our Republican Party in disarray. Make no mistake, John McCain ran a lousy campaign, but McCain could have run a lousy campaign and won had it not been for the pathetic eight years of the Bush presidency. Bush I believe will go down in modern history as our worst president — even worse than Carter.

Despite being outspent by hundreds of millions of dollars, and taking bad advice by a bunch of (Bush) people who never had his interest at heart, John McCain’s numbers on Election Night were actually respectable. Had George W. Bush been on the ballot for re-election to a third term, I’m not sure he would have even carried Texas. McCain for his part put up a good fight and managed to win enough states to show this wasn’t a clear mandate on Obamalism. But in the long run, McCain was in the wrong place at the wrong time. Or as my friend and noted political scientist Darryl Paulson likes to say, George W. Bush defeated John McCain not once, but twice.

So where do we go from here? I can tell you one thing, as sick as I am that Barack Obama (a man with no experience leading anything other than a bunch of little old ladies as a community organizer), is our next president, I am thankful every time I get ready to puke about that fact, that it is not Hillary “Rob’em” Clinton who is our president-elect. Yeah, Obama sucks. He’s a socialist. He cavorts with terrorists. He has no spine. He’s untested. He has no record. But he’s not a Clinton.

And for that, I am thankful.

(more…)

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The elections office in Hillsborough has started its task of resuming the count this afternoon, but it could take until tomorrow before we have final numbers out of that county. The St. Petersburg Times reports:

A final tally of votes in Hillsborough County may not be finished until sometime tomorrow, says canvassing board member Judge James Dominguez. Technical difficulties stopped the counting of votes early this morning with tens of thousands of ballots cast during early voting still not tabulated. At about 12:30 p.m. today, the vote counting began again. Dominguez said the task will start with counting about 6,000 absentee ballots cast Tuesday.

Three Democratic challengers’ efforts hang in the balance: Kevin Beckner, who we project has beaten incumbent Commissioner Brian Blair; Phyllis Busansky, who is a few thousand votes behind incumbent Supervisor of Elections Buddy Johnson; and Stephen Gorham, who is some 15,000 votes behind incumbent School Board member Carol Kurdell and faces a tough task to make up that many votes.

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Despite a well-coordinated Vote Local effort in Pinellas County by the local Democratic Party, Republicans nearly swept the down-ballot races even though Barack Obama carried the county.

So what happened? Did Vote Local fail?

Yes and no.

From a standpoint of getting local Democrats elected, yes, it failed. An underlying cause, however, is likely that the candidates, with a few exceptions, just weren’t that good or funded enough to be competitive. It also appears that there was not an overwhelming sentiment for change on the County Commission, despite the Jim Smith scandal last year. Where Vote Local had successes down ballot, in the apparent Hillsborough victory for Kevin Beckner and the Pinellas School Board seat captured by Nina Hayden, the candiates were energizing, articulate, good on camera and got the Democratic voters excited.

“Our job was not persuasion but just to convince people to vote the whole ballot,” said Larry Biddle, a Democratic consultant in St. Petersburg who worked on the Vote Local effort.

Vote Local did manage to increase voter participation down ballot in Pinellas, but only by a few percentage points in some of the races. Raw vote totals are more impressive: 14,000 more Pinellas voters cast ballots in the Supervisor of Elections race in 2008 than in 2004; 10,000 more voted in the County Commission District 3 race.

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(Read all of our coverage last night at Election Central.)

With only seven precincts left to be counted, Kevin Beckner has a nearly 20,000 vote lead and appears to have won the Hillsborough County Commission seat now held by Brian Blair. One big caveat: Those “precincts” are mostly absentee and early vote totals, which mean tens of thousands of votes remain outstanding. The Hillsborough elections office stopped counting at 3:30 a.m. with 6,000 absentees and 86,000 early votes left to be tallied, according to the St. Petersburg Times and online elections returns.

TBO.com reported this morning:

First, the issue of uploading early votes must be addressed. As of early Wednesday, only half of the 26 early voting machines had been tabulated. The county received 146,332 early votes, but it is not known how many remain to be counted.

Next, officials must access votes from machines in the outstanding precincts, Temple Terrace Presbyterian Church, a combined precinct, and New Mt. Zion Baptist Church in Tampa. One machine in each precinct was causing problems, Dominguez said.

Then officials also still have to count 6,000 absentee votes received Tuesday which weren’t scheduled to be counted until today. [Canvassing Board chairman Judge James] Dominguez estimated that counting the votes from the precinct machines and the absentee ballots would take about four hours.

But based on Beckner’s performance in early voting and his large lead, we project him the winner in this seat. According to the elections office tablulations, 60,384 early ballots had been counted when the count was halted early this morning. That would leave about 86,000 left to count. To close the 20,000 vote gap in early returns, Blair would have to win 62 percent of the outstanding early ballots, where Beckner has won 68 percent of the early vote counted so far. That dramatic turnaround in early voting results seems extremely unlikely.

Here are the most current vote totals from the Hillsborough Supervisor of Elections:

Brian Blair (REP)		47.38%	180,599
Kevin Beckner (DEM)		52.62%	200,586

How did Beckner do it? Early voting and staying close in the absentees, which usually break big for Republicans. Beckner built his 20,000-vote lead among early voters, a group that appears to be only partially counted still this morning. Blair is beating Beckner in absentees by only 158 votes.

Choice Polling Absentee Early Vote Prov Unscan Total Percent
Brian Blair 113,48 47,981 19,129 0 0 180,599 47.38%
Kevin Beckner 111,508 47,823 41,255 0 0 200,586 52.62%

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At nearly 2 a.m., it still wasn’t clear, owing to another massive screwup by Hillsborough Supervisor Buddy Johnson that saw elections returns trickle out of his office when almost everyone else in the state had the job done.

Kevin Beckner was ahead by nearly 18,000 votes with 312 out of 323 precincts reporting. Republican pro wrestling veteran Brian Blair had run behind from the first returns, a surprise given the fact that the absentee ballots were among the first counted and they run heavily toward to the GOP. Beckner and his troops had set up a party at Gaspar’s Grotto in Ybor City, hoping to celebrate a win. They settled for watching Barack Obama’s victory speech and then huddling around a few laptops trying to figure out why the county race wasn’t settled yet. Beckner ended up leaving after 1 a.m. without a conclusion to his quest.

The race between the progressive Beckner and social conservative Blair dramatically illustrates the split that exists in Hillsborough County, shown in this map from the elections office; Beckner’s winning precincts are in blue, Blair’s in red and the outstanding precincts shown in grey:

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EAST TAMPA — You can hardly fit a car down E. Caracas Street next to the Fair Oaks Rec Center, where this mostly African-American working class neighborhood votes, for all the candidates, yard signs, Barack Obama supporters, T-shirt hawkers and food vendors that have turned Election Day into a community fair of sorts. It is driven by the optimism that within hours, these voters may see the first black president in the nation’s history.

Except, of course, that Obama isn’t just black. He’s half-black and half-white. The white establishment has defined him as black. the people here will let you know that. They’ll also let you know that this is a momentous day for them. One man, Jarvis El-Amin, takes me aside and mentions Michelle Obama’s (in)famous statement about not feeling proud to be an American in the past.

“I ain’t never felt like I was part of America,” says El-Amin, who has been a grassroots politico for 21 years. Until now. “I can see the hope of America with the potential of what this country will be.”

I asked El-Amin if the youth vote really turned out for Obama in this neighborhood.

“Young people with their pants hanging down, with dreadlocks,” he laughed. “I’ve been in politics for 21 years and I have never seen so much excitement.”

Just then a car with a loudspeaker and Tampa’s first poet laureate James E. Tokley Sr. drives by exhorting the Obama vote as well, more of a celebration than a persuasive message.

The man waving the flags and selling “Commander in Chief Barack Obama” T-shirts for $15 is Jet Set Hudson. “This is a wonderful moment,” he said, “I’m just so proud. Everybody can just come together. This is a beautiful day.

“It’s in the air,” Hudson intoned. “We smell victory now.”

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