Tag: FL-13

Roll Call (subscription required) is reporting that Vern Buchanan has been hit with a lawsuit alleging consumer fraud at the auto dealerships that he owns. In and of itself, this might not be huge news; this isn’t a criminal indictment, so when you’re in the same party as the Doolittles, Renzis, and Fossellas of the world, a little civil action isn’t even going to get you noticed, right? (The Sarasota Herald Tribune has a story here about the basics of the case.)

There are some eye-raising details to the case that Roll Call raises, though, suggesting that campaign finance violations in his 2006 run for Congress may be intertwined with the fraud allegations. FLA Politics has some excerpts:

Joseph Kezer, a former finance director at Buchanan’s Sarasota Ford dealership … Kezer also alleged in an interview with Roll Call that he observed campaign finance violations ahead of Buchanan’s narrow 2006 victory against bank executive Christine Jennings (D)…

Some of the Buchanan campaign’s record $8 million outlay in the 2006 campaign, according to Kezer, likely was laundered corporate cash funneled through higher-ups at Buchanan’s numerous dealerships.

Buchanan faces a rematch against 2006 opponent Christine Jennings, against whom he won by 369 votes against a backdrop of malfunctioning electronic voting machines… well, assuming he’s still a free man in November.

With filing deadline for congressional candidates in Florida passing last night, let’s check in with a few key races:

• FL-10: Crumb-bum Bill Young qualified for another term in this tossup district.  Three Democrats have filed: Ron Paul aficionado Samm Simpson, ’06 Reform Party gubernatorial candidate Max Linn, and Dunedin Mayor (and former Republican) Bob Hackworth.  Linn, who won 2% statewide in 2006, has given or lent his campaign over $150K so far.  It’s an odd field, to be sure.  I still wouldn’t put it past Young to make a surprise retirement announcement now that the filing deadline has passed.
• FL-13: Surprise, surprise.  Everyone’s favorite purity troll, two-time three-time congressional loser and ex-Democrat Jan Schneider is back — this time as an independent.  With Democrat Christine Jennings locked in a tight battle with frosh Rep. Vern Buchanan, Schneider’s ballot antics have just made this race even tougher.  It’s clear that Schneider has effectively joined the “Stay in Iraq Forever Party” now.
• FL-14: Republican state Sen. Burt Saunders has filed to run against incumbent Rep. Connie Mack in this R+10.5 district as an independent.  Despite some vote-splitting by Mack and Saunders, this is still going to be a very uphill climb for Democrat Larry Byrnes.
• FL-15: Incumbent GOP Rep. Dave Weldon announced his retirement in this R+4.1 district back in January, and Democrats moved immediately to set up a competitive open seat challenge here.  But after Nancy Higgs, a former Brevard Co. commissioner, abruptly exited the race, things looked startlingly quiet here.  However, just before the deadline passed, Paul Rancatore, a Lt. Colonel in the Air Force reserves, re-entered the race.  Rancatore was recruited to run against Weldon last summer, but dropped out of the race in October, citing his mother’s health as his overriding concern.  Rancatore will face off with physician Stephen Blythe for the Democratic nomination.

  Four Republican candidates have filed to run, but the party establishment appears to have closed ranks around state Sen. Bill Posey, who is currently sitting on more than $200K cash-on-hand.

Well, well.  It looks like a familiar face is reemerging to take on frosh GOP Rep. Vern Buchanan — only this time, as an independent:

In what could be a damaging blow to Democratic hopes of winning the 13th Congressional District seat, former party nominee Jan Schneider has filed to run again for the seat, but this time as an independent.

“I’ve had it with both political parties,” said Schneider, 60, who will be making her fourth try for the seat.

Schneider says she will run as an anti-war candidate dedicated to bringing the troops home.

Schneider hasn’t made her decision final, but her move to split the anti-GOP vote is tantamount to running for the “Stay in Iraq Forever” Party.  Consider the golden material that Buchanan is offering Democrat Christine Jennings:

Buchanan, 56, could not be reached for comment. But Tim Clarke, a campaign spokesman, said Buchanan continues to support President George W. Bush’s views on the war. He said Buchanan wants to fight the terrorists “over there instead of over here.”

You couldn’t ask for a dumber statement, yet Schneider is content to allow this Bush-enabler to saunter his way to a second term.  And the reason why?  She’s offended for not being shown the attention she clearly deserves from the DCCC!

She said she considered running as a Democrat, but the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee has not returned her phone calls.

“They don’t want me in their party,” Schneider said.

Wonderful.  Schneider, born in 1947, celebrates her sixth birthday this summer.

Today, the DCCC unveiled the second wave of participants in its Red to Blue program.  The 13 beneficiaries are:

Kay Barnes (MO-06)

Anne Barth (WV-02)

Darcy Burner (WA-08)

Robert Daskas (NV-03)

Steven Driehaus (OH-01)

Jim Himes (CT-04)

Christine Jennings (FL-13)

Larry Kissell (NC-08)

Suzanne Kosmas (FL-24)

Eric Massa (NY-29)

Gary Peters (MI-09)

Mark Schauer (MI-07)

Dan Seals (IL-10)

There are few surprises here, but the committee’s stamp of approval given to replacement candidate Anne Barth, who is running against incumbent GOP Rep. Shelley Moore Capito in WV-02 seems indicative of the DCCC’s desire to bust open the 2008 playing field in a big way.

Considering that it’s a state that Gore won (in my book), and that John “The Haunted Tree” Kerry lost by 5 points, Florida’s lopsided congressional delegation of 16 Republicans and 9 Democrats sticks out like a sore thumb on the U.S. electoral map.  (Of course, it was even worse before the victories of Tim Mahoney in FL-16 and Ron Klein in FL-22 last year, at a brutal margin of 18R-7D.)  Chalk it up to tenaciously shrewd gerrymandering by the Florida state legislature.  Five of Florida’s House Democrats are packed in districts that delivered over 65% of their votes to Kerry in 2004, one (FL-11) gave Kerry 58%, one is in marginally Democratic turf (Klein), and two Blue Doggies hold districts that lean GOP on the Presidential level as of late (Allen Boyd and Mahoney, whose districts both delivered 54% their vote to Bush in 2004).  Florida’s Congressional Republicans, on the other hand, have set up shop in a plethora of districts specially created for them–areas that Bush won by margins between 10 and 20 points (of which there are 11).

But as Democrats have proven themselves more adept at holding red turf than Republicans have been at retaining seats in blue districts (Democrats currently hold 62 House districts that Bush won in 2004, while Republicans hold a scant eight that voted for Kerry), so too has their zeal for stepping up the pressure against incumbents in Republican-leading districts.  According to the AP,  DCCC chair Chris Van Hollen has lined up five Republican seats for aggressive challenges in 2008:

For Democrats, the targets are Reps. Vern Buchanan, Ric Keller, Dave Weldon, Tom Feeney and C.W. “Bill” Young.

Here’s the rationale for each:

– Buchanan barely won his District 13 seat in the Sarasota area after spending more than $5 million of his own money on the race. He won by 369 votes. His opponent, Christine Jennings, believes touch-screen voting machines lost thousands of ballots and that she would have won if all votes had been counted.

– Keller promised to leave office after eight years, then decided after the last election to break his vow. He’ll have to use resources in a primary before facing a Democratic opponent. Democrats see signs the District 8 seat that includes the Orlando area could favor one of their candidates, and they’ll make a case that Keller’s voting record doesn’t reflect the interests of his constituents.

– Weldon underperformed at the polls last year when he was re-elected in District 15, which represents the Atlantic coast from Vero Beach north to Cape Canaveral. He was re-elected with 56 percent of the vote, but against a weak Democratic candidate who spent far less money. A stronger, better financed candidate could be a challenge.

– Feeney’s District 24, which stretches from the area north and east of Orlando to Brevard and Volusia counties’ coastline, would normally be considered safely his. But Feeney’s golf trip to Scotland with disgraced lobbyist Jack Abramoff could taint the congressman as Democrats continue to make ethics an issue in 2008.

– Young’s District 10 seat, which represents Pinellas County, is slightly Republican, but trends show the large independent voting bloc favors Democratic candidates. Young also hasn’t been seriously tested in years.

Democrats have already lined up a few ambitious challengers for these districts.  Keller, who won re-election by an underwhelming 53-46 margin against Democrat Charlie Stuart (a DCCC pick whose ability to compete monetarily in the general election was hampered by a competitive primary), will square off either with prosecutor Mike Smith or Sierra Club activist Corbett Kroehler.  But first Keller (who’s breaking his term limit pledge by running again), will have to get through a primary with conservative radio host and attorney Todd Long.  Long caught Keller somewhat off-guard during the first quarter, where he outraised the incumbent by a $40k to $27k margin.

In FL-15, Democrats have recruited Paul Rancatore, a Lt. Col. in the Air Force Reserves and the current “Director for Commercialization of Human Space Flight in the National Security and Space Office” at the Pentagon (that’s a mouthful).  In FL-13, Christine Jennings never ended her campaign against Vern Buchanan, of course, and she’s been raising money at a fast clip to pay for her legal expenses.  Despite her narrow “loss” last year, her race will be as tough to win as the rest of these, given some of Buchanan’s cautious votes in the House.

But it’s perhaps Florida’s 10th district that could be the most exciting of the five.  Unlike the rest of Florida’s Republican delegation, Bill Young holds a true toss-up seat, with a PVI of D+1.1.  Gore won this area by two points, and Kerry lost it by the same margin.  On paper, Young would appear formidable: he’s a 36-year incumbent, and he hasn’t won a re-election with less than 65% of the vote in ages.  But on the other hand: Democrats haven’t really tested his hand.  And given his totally irresponsible handling of the Walter Reed scandal, there’s clearly some rust to be punctured here.  Democrats have yet to line up a strong challenger to either him or the Abramoff-loving Tom Feeney (FL-24), and these will be major tests of Van Hollen’s recruiting prowess.

One final note about the article:

Rep. Tom Cole of Oklahoma, chairman of the National Republican Congressional Committee, expressed confidence that the party wouldn’t repeat its showing in 2006. He said Mahoney never would have won if it hadn’t been for Foley’s scandal and that Republicans perform better in Florida during presidential elections.

“All these districts will perform more like they normally do in ’08 than they did in ’06. That’s what presidential elections do. The Democrats had their best shot at a lot of these folks in 2006 and either didn’t make it or didn’t pull the trigger. I don’t think they’ll get a second opportunity,” Cole said. “We’re back to normal politics.”

With Iraq spiraling out of control, it’ll never be “normal politics”, Tom.  You should be ashamed of yourself.

From the AP:

A state appellate court ruled Monday that Christine Jennings has no right to examine the programming source code that runs the electronic voting machines she says malfunctioned in her southwest Florida congressional race.

The three-judge panel said Monday Jennings did not meet the “extraordinary burden” of proving a lower court was wrong to deny her request last December.

Jennings already had shifted focus to a congressional task force assigned to sort out her election dispute with Republican Vern Buchanan, the state-certified winner of the race by only 369 votes. A spokesman said she has no immediate plans to appeal Monday’s ruling.

Don’t worry, sports fans – this is hardly the end of the game:

“I think the only important activity right now is what is going on in Congress, since they have the ultimate authority in this matter,” Jennings’ spokesman David Kochman said. “They are also moving quicker than the court ever has. In terms of access to the source code and machines, the task force made it clear last week that won’t be a hurdle. They have subpoena power.”

Exactly right. What has taken the glacial Florida courts half a year to decide not to do, Congress can (and likely will) do in an afternoon. While it would have been nice if the courts, rather than Congress, wound up granting access to the ES&S source code, Republicans would have cried “politics” no matter what. And like the spokesman says, now that the legal proceedings are essentially moot, things can move a lot faster.

This has the potential to be really fascinating – our first-ever true window into the “black box” of voting machine source code. Congress’s experts will be able to look at the actual guts of what animates ES&S’s electronic ballot boxes. Even if the eventual findings don’t prove favorable to Jennings’ specific case, we’ll have a chance to know once and for all whether the voting machine companies’ claims that their products are secure and accurate are for real.

Nationally, many pundits and bloggers didn’t take Nevada’s 2nd district too seriously in 2006. It was too safe a Republican district to be even slightly competitive, so the argument went.

Well, we all know that Dean Heller in the end won his election against Democrat Jill Derby. Against expectations though, his result wasn’t very convincing. The man who was elected Secretary of State of Nevada three times, barely won more than 50% of the vote in a district that doesn’t include Democratic Las Vegas. So today, I ventured out in search of Republicans who won their districts in 2006 and did worse than him. Turns out that there weren’t that many.

Only 11 Republicans were elected with a worse result than Heller. Among them: Rep. Sali of Idaho, Rep. Cubin of Wyoming, Rep. Musgrave of Colorado and Rep. Doolittle of California. All these districts were presumed to be safely in Republican hands. There was no way they would become competitive and yet they were.

Again, there is talk of Heller being safe, of other Republican districts more important than Nevada’s 2nd. This is reminder for all of these folks that Heller is among the vulnerable dozen Republicans currently serving in Congress:

  * 50.37% Heller
  * 50.24% Pryce (OH-15)
  * 50.21% Wilson (NM-01)
  * 50.14% Hayes (NC-08)
  * 50.08% Buchanan (FL-13)
  * 50.05% Bachmann (MN-06)
  * 49.95% Sali (ID-01)
  * 49.53% Ferguson (NJ-07)
  * 49.26% Doolittle (CA-04)
  * 48.46% Porter (NV-03)
  * 48.33% Cubin (WY-01)
  * 45.91% Musgrave (CO-04)

Results were taken from NPR.

PS: Please note that I only looked at how many people were willing to vote for the Republican, not how well the opponent did. This is not a diary on close margins. Feel free to comment on that below.

Cross posted from Helluva Heller, where Nevada bloggers have united to take down Heller in 2008.

From CQ:

A House task force will investigate allegations that voting machine errors contributed to the razor-thin victory by Republican Vern Buchanan (news, bio, voting record) in Florida’s 13th Congressional District.

Democrat Christine Jennings, who was declared the loser to Buchanan by 369 votes in last fall’s election, has contested those results with the House of Representatives.

A three-member House Administration Committee task force agreed by voice vote Wednesday to embark on a formal investigation.

The task force will examine what Jennings contends is a glitch in touchscreen voting machines that resulted in the disappearance of 18,000 votes in the congressional race.

I’m glad to see that the task force is moving ahead despite the sad loss of committee chair Juanita Millender-McDonald recently.

Speaking of which, CQ also notes that Rep. Bob Brady of PA (currently the acting committee chair) is likely to get tapped as Millender-McDonald’s permanent replacement, assuming he loses the May 15th mayoral primary in Philly (which looks likely). I can’t say that I’m inspired by this choice, as Brady is very much an old-school machine politician and the House Administration Committee performs an important oversight role. I’d prefer a reformer, but let’s see if Brady surprises us. And so far, the move to a formal investigation is the right one.

Originally posted at FLAPolitics

Congresswoman Karen Thurman, Chair of the Florida Democratic Party (FDP), titled a recent email “The Road to the Presidency Runs Through Central Florida”. Like most missives from a political party it was soliciting funds (which is to be expected). This one was for the Democratic challenger in the special election for a central Florida State House seat. 

But, the email’s title spoke to me, because I’ve been thinking along the same lines recently. Let me explain.

Way back in December of 2006 James Carville and Mark Penn did an op-ed piece in the Washington Post that made the case for how Hillary could win the presidency:

Certainly she could win the states John Kerry did. But with the pathbreaking possibility of this country’s first female president, we could see an explosion of women voting — and voting Democratic. States that were close in the past, from Arkansas to Colorado to Florida to Ohio, could well move to the Democratic column. It takes only one more state to win.

And then in an interview with Tom Schaller, Carville added which state was the most likely to go Hillary’s way:

Carville puts Arkansas, Florida, and Virginia in Tier 1, with Louisiana and Tennessee in Tier 2. That makes sense in terms of ranking, but I pressed him to pick the one state he thought Hillary was most likely to flip, if she were to win only one. He picked Florida.

Now, I’m not exactly a fan of Hillary‘s, but if she does get the nomination, I still want her to win. Also, I think there would be a silver lining for Florida if she does get the nomination. Before I proceed, let me post a map of Florida showing the counties.

In a comment to a diary I wrote right after the election, GatorDem made the point that the key to winning a state-wide election in Florida for a Democrat was for the candidate to hold his or her own in the part of central Florida known as the I-4 corridor. I looked at this phenomenon in depth in my diary called What Can We Learn From the Florida State-Wide Races of 2006?

The only state-wide race in Florida for 2008 will be the presidency. That means that if Hillary wants to win Florida’s 27 electoral votes, she has to do okay in central Florida.

In 2006, the Democrat running for Chief Financial Officer, Alex Sink, did all right there. If we look at her totals for the central Florida counties (Brevard, Citrus, Hardee, Hernando, Hillsborough, Indian River, Lake, Manatee, Marion, Orange, Osceola, Pasco, Pinellas, Polk, Sarasota, Seminole, St. Lucie, Sumter, and Volusia) we see that she bested her opponent Tom Lee 1,122,770 to 1,059,063 (51.5%-48.5%).

For comparison, the 2006 Democratic candidate for governor, Jim Davis, lost to Charlie Crist in those same counties by 954,960 to 1,221,558 (43.9%-56.1%) and Democratic candidate for attorney general, Skip Campbell, lost to Bill McCollum 973,653 to 1,220,365 (44.4%-55.6%).

In 2004 John Kerry lost the central Florida counties 45.8%-54.2%. In 2000 Al Gore also lost, but was closer, 48.6%-51.4%. Again, the point to be made is that if you’re a Democrat and you break even in this area, then you’ve won the state wide race.

But, in the last six years, the only two Democrats to do that are Senator Bill Nelson and CFO Sink. We know Nelson‘s situation is special, being a celebrity ex-astronaut (he won the area 60.8%-39.1%). And it’s possible that Alex Sink‘s case was also unique. She was perfectly qualified for the position, having been a bank executive, she has a lot of personal charisma, and the CFO position avoids the usual liberal-conservative issues that other races get mired in.

So, this is not exactly going to be a cakewalk for Hillary.

If Sen. Clinton wants to do well in the same area she needs to have a strong message and be ready to spend some money. Is there anything else she can do to help her chances?

Republicans control most of the US House seats through the area. Kathy Castor has the safe Democratic seat in FL-11 and Corrine Brown has the majority minority FL-03, but Ginny Brown-Waite is in FL-05, Cliff Stearns in FL-06, Ric Keller in FL-08, Gus Bilirakis is in FL-09, Bill Young is in FL-10, Adam Putnam in FL-12, Dave Weldon in FL-15, Tom Feeney in FL-24, and everyone knows what happened in FL-13.

The lop-sided result is due to the masterful gerrymandering (pdf map of districts) that the Republican legislature accomplished in 2002 and the sorry state of the FDP before Congresswoman Thurman took over.

Now the DCCC has said it is going to target FL-10, probably because they feel Young is going to retire (he’s 76 and has been in congress since 1971). And I’m sure FL-13 is going to get some attention. But what about the rest of them?

One way that Hillary can insure that she does well in central Florida, and thereby win all of the 27 electoral votes, and the presidency, is to make sure that the FDP and the DCCC find serious Democratic challengers for these seats. She can then help them along by funneling some of her megabucks into the races thru the DCCC.

The big advantage is that any challenger to these Republican US House members can still run against George Bush, since this bunch will be part of his rubber stamp congress. If a coordinated campaign against them can be mounted that nationalizes these elections in the same way that Ron Klein successfully did in beating 12 term congressman Clay Shaw in FL-22, then the Democratic vote thru the area will be highly energized.

Since the major media markets in the area overlap several districts, a Friends of Hillary PAC can hammer all the Republican incumbents at once for being stooges for George Bush and Tom DeLay. Why wasn’t proper oversight performed by congress while Bush was running the country into the ground during the six years they were in exclusive power?

You know as well as I do that everyone wants another chance to vote against our incompetent president. Hillary can give it to central Florida Democratic voters by following this strategy.

Another advantage to having Hillary as the candidate would be that she could get Bill to come down to fund raise and campaign with these Democratic challengers. Who would people in Hillsborough County rather see, Gus Bilirakis or Bill Clinton? If the former president shuttled back and forth across the center of the state a couple of times during the election, it would have a dramatic effect.

And when Hillary comes, she could make the trip with Alex Sink. This would allow Hillary to gain the immediate advantage of Sink‘s charisma and strong, fiscally conservative message, and also provide the added effect that having two women politicians appearing together would accomplish by energizing Democratic women to come out and vote.

Now, it’s not critical to Hillary‘s prospects for any of the Democratic candidates to win any of these seats, only that enough Democrats turn out and also vote for her so that she does well enough to win the state.

But, if some good candidates (like Rod Smith) can be recruited, and the FDP and DCCC can coordinate the campaigns so that they’re effective, and Hillary can divert enough money to them to get the message out, then it’s possible some of the Republican congressmen can be defeated as well.

Hey, a win-win. So, what’s Carville‘s email address?

An interesting development:

Unwilling to wait for the courts to rule on the disputed Sarasota elections, a key member of the U.S. Senate is launching an investigation into the 13th Congressional District race.

U.S. Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., said she will ask the investigative arm of Congress, the Government Accountability Office, and the National Institute of Standards and Technology to conduct a “top-to-bottom investigation” to determine what caused 18,000 Sarasota County undervotes in the race for Congress.

A GAO investigation could definitely lap the current court case brought by Dem Christine Jennings. Right now, we’re still waiting on an appeal of the trial court judge’s ruling that Jennings can’t get review ES&S‘s voting machine source code. At first I thought we’d find out this month, but now Jennings’ lawyers are saying we won’t hear any earlier than March.

But with Feinstein’s newly aggressive posture, we  might not even have to wait on the appeals process: The Senate can issue subpoenas to crack this stubborn nut open. Then the real fun begins.

P.S. It’s also notable that this pressure is coming from the Senate, rather than the House, which has said it prefers to wait until the court case runs its course. My sense, based on tiny hints in the article linked above, is that the Senate has a freer hand here, since (as Feinstein is doing) it can frame the issue as purely one of election integrity, rather than appearing to try to increase its majority by an extra seat.

(Thanks to ca democrat.)