Is Polk a 51-49 county? pt. 3: will the decency coalition get NPAs and the anti-GOP part of the GOP again?
Is Polk a 51-49 county? pt. 3: will the decency coalition get NPAs and the anti-GOP part of the GOP again?
Republican school board candidates vastly underperformed in the Polk primary. As we match primary turnout, the Polk general election electorate looks more hostile to the GOP. What does that portend?
The Polk County Republican Party has become the party of cranks, shamefully protected by the sheriff and state attorney, who openly report committing election crimes and who hire arch-criminal church-cheaters as campaign managers to lie about their fellow citizens and neighbors.
These cranks are empowered by a state and national Republican Party whose powerful “leaders” laugh at old men considered political enemies getting their heads bashed in with hammers, in their own homes, for political reasons.
You can’t work with any of that as a human being and citizen. Submit or don’t submit. That’s all. There’s nothing with which to compromise.
You can only oppose that criminality and hammer and laughter however you can until your own head gets bashed in by a MAGA groupie in your own home and they laugh at your wife or husband, too.
The coalition of decency
But that’s much better than going through life as the miserable crank, the hammer basher, or the laugher — or the person who willingly submits to or enables them for the sake of scraps or status.
If you don’t have equal claim on life space, power can do whatever it wants to you economically and socially. It can take whatever it wants from you, including your body and your business. I think this is what people actually mean when they talk about “our democracy.” But that abstract phrase, which has never really existed in conjunction with that pronoun, doesn’t capture the human stakes.
Laying an equal claim to personhood and civic space for all of us and defending that claim however I can, wherever I can, against the party of the Capitol Lynch Mob is what truly matters to me in this era. That very simple civic reality, that pursuit of basic decency, defines public life for me in America and Florida and Polk County. Voting and politics are only a very, very small part of it.
The struggle for equal claim on space and personhood will not remotely end with Tuesday’s vote, no matter how it goes. It’s unlikely ever to end. And I find great purpose in fighting for good people and vulnerable people, not garbage people, in that struggle. It’s an easy choice for me to make.
Curiously, Polk’s primary vote in August suggested that a local voting coalition of decency might be forming along those lines of laying equal claim to shared space.
Mathematically, this coalition of decency cannot be explained by Democratic voting. It must have included NPAs and a sizable group of citizens registered as Republicans who lament the violent, smirking gang of cranks and menace their party has become. (I’m an NPA, if you care. That makes me a “lib” to the violent cranks. Call me whatever you want.)
These decent GOP allies will be important on Election Day — but especially beyond it and in everyday life.
A 46.7% GOP primary share in a 52-39-9 electorate. What would a 45-38-17 general deliver?
As of today (Friday), in the general election, vote-by-mail and early vote have now matched the ~100,000-vote, low 20s turnout of the Polk primary. And these electorates look very different at roughly 100,000 votes. Here is the August primary turnout breakdown:
Here’s today’s.
Note particularly the change in the NPA and GOP vote share. Democrats are almost identical. The sharp rise in NPA vote has come, thus far, almost entirely at the expense of GOP share. But NPA vote remains well below its share of registration. It is the wild card heading into Election Day.
The “decency coalition” story of the August primary was simple to observe, but difficult to comprehend: an unusually favorable Republican turnout (52 percent, +13 over Democrats), in the most partisanized school board races in Florida and red Polk County history, led to historically bad performance by Republican school board candidates.
The collective vote share of Polk GOP School Board candidates plummeted 11 points — from 57.3 percent of the vote in '20 to 46.7 in '22.
Two GOP candidates (one a crank, endorsed by DeSantis, and one not) won very narrowly (~51-49) in almost identical voting patterns against Democratic opponents. Their narrow wins squandered an R+13 advantage over Democrats, where the GOP made up 52 percent of the votes cast. One GOP candidate lost outright against a Democrat and a fourth could only muster 37 percent in a three-way race.
You can’t explain this performance away with CCDF cranks because the one GOPer who is not a crank or a person who laughs at political enemies beaten by hammers, also found himself capped at 51 percent against an unknown progressive black woman with no money. It was a generic R v D race with a pretty shocking result, unlike any I’ve seen in Polk County in my 23 years here.
Weird and unpredictable
Something weird, unforeseen — but uniform — happened on primary night with the NPA and GOP vote.
Democratic School Board candidates either won all Democrats and all NPAs (highly unlikely) or won a sizable mix of all three. That’s just the math. I broke it all down in detail here:
And here’s part 2.
[Part 3 was supposed to look at Lakeland’s political transformation; but I’m going to wait until after the election to do that. This part 3 is more timely.]
Polk County looks a lot like Florida as a whole; and if something weird and unexpected happens statewide on Tuesday, this NPAs + anti-GOP wing of the GOP coalition of decency dynamic will deliver it. It won’t be a “blue wave” because there isn’t one and wasn’t one in the primary.
But, it’s worth considering that the Polk Republican general election turnout advantage and percentage of the electorate is far smaller now at 100,000 votes than it was in the primary.
Yes, yes, there are caveats — mostly that the GOP dominated on Election Day in the primary and will likely do so again — although there seems to be a pivot back to early and mail voting for the Polk GOP. It is very hard to compare primary and general electorates in a predictive way.
I do expect the GOP turnout advantage to creep up a few points in Polk. But I don’t expect it to reach more than half the electorate. I bet it ends up at 48 percent by end of Election Day. That’s mostly because of the sharp rise in NPA turnout — the small “gray” wave on my charts, which has massive room to grow.
If NPAs could somehow get close to 25 percent, that’s just a total upending of the picture, particularly if they include young women voting against forced birth and state dominance of their bodies.
Hot takes
My hottest take: I don’t expect DeSantis to lose Polk; but if the various state polls are correct, I do expect DeSantis to underperform in Polk compared to the overall state margin. That would be a first for a GOP governor in Polk in my time here.
If DeSantis somehow loses, or the race ends up way closer than expected, the Polk primary predicted it. Remember where you heard it. LOL.
Anyway, it’s all interesting, but pointless, speculation right now.
But the primary coalition of decency was real — and it conforms to a national trend: Democratic candidates — and bodily autonomy voters — have outperformed their polling and expectations across the country this year.
But that’s not because of Democrats. It’s because of the GOP and what it’s become.