Once Solidly GOP, Florida No Longer a Sure Thing for Bush

Even in a year of unexpected twists, nothing may have surprised George W. Bush more than the fact that he found himself pitching for votes here Saturday morning.

With his brother Jeb holding the governorship, Florida was supposed to be secure for Bush--the matching Sun Belt pillar to his home state base in Texas. Instead, Bush finds himself in a firefight here, with the latest public and private polls showing Vice President Al Gore even or slightly ahead despite a massive Republican television blitz.

For Bush, the stakes in this competition couldn’t be higher: If he can’t hold Florida’s 25 electoral votes, it will be virtually impossible for him to reach an electoral college majority.

When President Clinton won Florida in 1996--becoming the first Democratic nominee in 20 years to carry the state--many analysts considered it a fluke, explained mostly by a Cuban American backlash against Republican immigration policies. But Gore’s strong showing this year suggests that larger demographic, economic and political forces may have lastingly transformed Florida into a swing state that neither party can count on.

“I don’t think for a while yet to come that any Republican candidate for president is going to be able to take their race for granted here,” says Tom Slade, former GOP chairman in the state.

Overall, Republicans remain cautiously optimistic here. That’s partly because they believe the state still tilts slightly in their direction and partly because they believe Jeb Bush will raise and spend whatever it takes to avoid the embarrassment of losing it for his brother. And it remains to be seen whether Gore--who has not matched Bush’s ad blitz--will ultimately invest the money to capture a state he doesn’t need to win.

But no one considers the result here a sure thing for Bush. And that uncertainty alone--coming as Democrats consolidate their presidential-year holds on New York, California and even Illinois and New Jersey--could signal a major shift in the electoral college balance of power.

“The electoral college mathematics really do change if Florida can’t be put in that strongly leaning Republican category,” says Jim Kane, chief pollster of the independent Florida Voter Poll. “And I think it is going to go right down to the wire here.”

Growth is the principal source of change in Florida; new arrivals reconfigure the state as relentlessly as the ocean reshapes the shore. During the 1980s, Kane notes, the dominant stream of migrants was retirees, many from the Midwest, who strengthened the GOP. But today, the state’s prosperity (unemployment is just 3.8%) is attracting a steady flow of younger families who respond to the same mix of centrist policies--fiscally moderate, socially tolerant, pro-public education--as their Northern counterparts.

“The newer voters that are moving into the state are less ideological and certainly less partisan, and there seems to be a slight trend toward the Democrats, especially on social issues,” Kane says.

Those trends were on display late last week when Democratic vice presidential nominee Joseph I. Lieberman stopped in at Cirent Semiconductor, a microchip manufacturing company in Orlando. In the last six years, the firm has more than doubled its work force to 1,800--part of a 40% increase in high-technology jobs over that period along the thriving “I-4 corridor” that follows Interstate 4 southwest from Orlando through Tampa.

Many of the new workers at Cirent are Northern transplants, and even before Lieberman spoke, many were leaning strongly toward Gore. “I’ve enjoyed the prosperity the last few years,” said Cristin Wolfson, who moved here from Massachusetts four years ago. “I agree with most everything Clinton has done.”

Sitting next to her, Dave W. Holley, a longer-time resident, seconded her choice. Holley voted for Vice President George Bush in 1988, but he switched to Clinton in 1992 and 1996 and is sticking with Gore now. “I leaned toward W. Bush early on, but when he picked [Dick] Cheney it bothered me because I was hoping for some moderate choice rather than a conservative,” Holley said. “Gore may be a little more liberal than Clinton, but he’s smart enough to know where the center lies.”

As Holley’s comments suggest, Clinton’s repositioning of his party in the center--a formula Gore has largely followed--has been as important as the demographic change in restoring the Democrats’ ability to contest Florida. From 1968 through 1988, when Democrats generally offered more liberal nominees, the party lost Florida five of six times, averaging less than 40% of the vote. Clinton narrowly lost the state in 1992, and he broke through to defeat Bob Dole handily with 48% of the vote last time.

The state now seems precariously balanced between the parties in national elections. Bush has a solid base in the conservative northern part of the state, which votes more like rural Georgia than urban Miami. Gore’s base is the heavily Jewish retirement community in South Florida, which has been energized by the selection of Lieberman.

That makes the decisive battleground, as it usually is here, the moderate suburban voters along the I-4 corridor in central Florida. “This is where the largest number of split ticket voters reside,” says Susan MacManus, a political scientist at the University of South Florida in Tampa.

Just as he did with suburban voters across the North and Midwest, Clinton in 1996 erased the traditional GOP advantage along I-4, largely by improving his showing with white women.

Here in Orange County, for instance, where Republicans had averaged a crushing 53,000 vote margin since 1976, Clinton held Dole to a dead heat; at the corridor’s other end, in Tampa, Clinton carried Hillsborough County, where the Republican margin had averaged more than 30,000 votes over that period.

For Gore, this region may be more critical than it was for Clinton. Even though younger Cuban Americans appear more open to Democrats, all signs indicate Gore won’t come close to matching the strong showing Clinton posted in 1996 in the Cuban community.

Although Gore broke from the administration’s support for returning Elian Gonzalez, the 6-year-old Cuban refugee, to his father, polls show the Cuban American community moving sharply back toward the GOP in the controversy’s wake. Indeed, Bush received a rapturous reception when he appeared at a heavily Cuban-flavored rally in Miami on Friday night.

Looking to widen that advantage, Bush has been running Spanish-language ads on education in Miami.

And, even with his emphasis on adding a prescription drug benefit to Medicare and the enthusiasm over Lieberman, Gore may have difficulty improving on the 17-point margin Clinton posted among Florida seniors last time, according to network exit polls. MacManus notes that the “replacement generation” of seniors--those in their early 60s--tends to be much less hostile to the “market solutions” for Social Security and Medicare that Bush is proposing.

Thus, Gore may be more dependent than Clinton on the swing voters in the I-4 corridor. This region’s importance is reflected in the barrage of television ads it is receiving. Statewide, the Bush campaign and the Republican National Committee are vastly outspending Gore and the Democratic National Committee: Through Friday, Republicans had spent $6.1 million on television here, double the amount for Democrats and about one-sixth of the total GOP spending nationwide, according to the Campaign Media Analysis Group, which tracks ad buys for The Times. In the last week, Republicans have outspent the Democrats in Florida by more than 3 to 1.

But Democrats have concentrated their buys much more heavily in Tampa and Orlando--enough so to remain competitive there.

With Democrats fiercely contesting for these moderate votes, the I-4 corridor is shaping up as a textbook test of Bush’s “compassionate conservatism,” which is aimed at recapturing precisely these sorts of families. One promising sign for Bush is that Kane’s latest poll, which showed Gore holding a large lead in the state on issues affecting seniors, found Bush running even with the Democrat on education--a key to winning the younger families.

And that issue may be one place where Bush benefits from his brother’s presence. Overall, Jeb Bush’s popularity appears to be having less of a spillover effect than many Republicans expected; although Jeb appeared with his brother this weekend, he’s kept a relatively low profile, refusing almost all interview requests on the grounds that he doesn’t want to become the issue himself.

But Jeb may help his brother specifically on education because the Florida governor has pursued at the state level, with positive reviews, the same accountability-oriented reforms the nominee has proposed nationally. The Texan may need that boost--and any other he can find--in a state that’s proving far more difficult to tame than he expected.

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Profile: Florida

Population: 15.2 million (2000 est.)

Population by race and ethnicity:

White 68%

Latino 15%

Black 14%

Other 2%

Governor: Republican

Senate: Republican majority

House: Republican majority

Registered voters: 8.4 million

(Democrats: 44%; Republicans: 40%; Unaffiliated and minor parties: 16%)

1996 PRESIDENTIAL VOTE

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Bill Clinton (D) 2,545,690 (48%)

Bob Dole (R) 2,242,951 (43%)

Ross Perot (Reform) 483,761 (9%)

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1992 PRESIDENTIAL VOTE

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George Bush (R) 2,171,781 (41%)

Bill Clinton (D) 2,071,651 (39%)

Ross Perot (I) 1,052,481 (20%)

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Note: Latinos may be of any race, so their totals may overlap with white or black racial categories.

Source: Almanac of American Politics, 2000;

U.S. Census Bureau, Florida secretary of state

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Poll Watch

The pace of the polling on the 2000 presidential race has picked up dramatically. Several polls are released each day, and most are showing a very tight race between Republican George W. Bush and Democrat Al Gore, who holds a slight edge in most surveys. Below is a sampling of polls released last week, plus several from the week before. Percentages may not equal 100 because of rounding.

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Note: All polls surveyed likely voters. Margins of error range from +/-3 percentage points to +/-5 percentage points.

Compiled by MASSIE RITSCH / Time researcher