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The real reason for early vote
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Location: Blogs Broken News |
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| Posted by: Bill Thompson |
12/4/2007 2:26 PM |
My colleagues Lloyd Dunkelberger and Joe Follick, reporting Monday from the Star-Banner’s Tallahassee bunker, pointed out that the Democratic presidential candidates to date have not run a single TV ad in Florida.
The people who know about such things say this inactivity hurts the Democrats, and gives the Republicans vying for the White House a leg up --- the outta sight, outta mind theory of political science. But I'm not so sure.
Recall that this snub is a self-imposed boycott by the Dems' candidates in response to the Democratic National Committee punishing us uppity Floridians for daring to move our primary election up so we could have a voice in the selection of the president befitting the fourth-biggest state in the country. That push led the DNC to strip Florida of all 210 delegates to next year's party convention, and now the DNC has done the same to Michigan.
National GOP leaders have done likewise, but have stripped the state party of only half the delegates and have not mandated a ban on campaigning.
Ironically, the Dems continue to rake in the Sunshine State cash, as Sen. Hillary Clinton leads all candidates in fund-raising in Florida, and six of the top 10 contenders in the money chase are from the donkey party.
The aforementioned experts predict the demise of the Democrats in Florida because of the campaign ban, which many see as hypocritical because the Howard Dean and the party leadership have not barred the candidates from making fund-raising trips here.
I, however, see a form of genius at work — albeit on the order of Wile E. Coyote. Many voters might become so sick of being saturated with all those GOP ads by Jan. 29 that they might opt for the Dems just out of spite and fatigue.
Certainly, this topsy-turvy primary bickering has a certain BCS flavor to it, so who knows how it will turn out. And voters regularly thwart the best laid predictions of professional pundits.
But I just wish we'd get to the heart of why everybody wants the primaries moved up. We --- OK, just two of every three of us — are so fed up with how W's doing that we're ready to vote tomorrow to replace him. |
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Re: The real reason for early vote |
By Kyle Culley on
12/19/2007 12:44 PM |
| I don't pretend to know the reason for Florida's early vote but one thing I do know is that by the DNC stripping Florida of all 210 delegates, it pretty much stops the NY snowbirds who have their absentee ballots sent to their Florida homes from voting twice. Well, they can still vote twice, but it will have little significance. And if you wonder why I suspect this double voting is happening, well, I heard it right from the horses' mouths, in the precincts in South Florida, where I used to live and vote. |
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