Is Polk now a 51-49 county? pt. 2: will a coalition of decency continue punishing the GOP in a crucial Florida county?

In Florida's fastest growing county, the engines of growth and creativity and the future trended away hard from the GOP in the August primary. Will that continue?

Polk County is already a large, important Florida county, strategically located between Tampa and Orlando on the I-4 Corridor. We are Florida’s fastest growing. And these four political facts are all true about our county and our 2022 primary election:

1. The Polk Republican voter registration advantage is R + 6 and growing.

2. The Republican turnout advantage for the August primary (R + 13) was slightly larger than normal, although overall turnout was not.

3. Ron DeSantis and Republican party officials made the officially non-partisan School Board races the most nakedly, overtly partisan they have ever been, in Florida and Polk County.

4. As a group, Republican candidates fared far worse in the August primary than they have in any countywide election — partisan or otherwise — in my 23 years in Polk County. Despite all DeSantis’ efforts — and one formal endorsement — 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.

I did a full breakdown of all that in Part 1.

Is Polk a 51-49 county, part 1: The night the Polk GOP ate itself. Was it a blip? Or generational change?

In short, a big chunk of GOP and independent voters — in a geographically uniform, bloc-style pattern — punished three disgusting candidates (and one decent one) from the Republican party. They punished party, not individuals, although two individuals got punished worse, likely based on a specific behavior — openly hiring the arch criminal James Dunn to run their campaigns.

The GOP candidates not explicitly tied to Dunn both narrowly won their races against Democrats roughly 51-49. That’s a much closer split than any openly partisan, generic R vs D in Polk in a very long time — since before I came to Polk County in 1999. And it’s the source for the question in the title.

Polling v. voting

This actual August voting outcome runs contrary to most public polling one sees about Florida; and it’s impossible to know if anything like it will hold in the much larger, but almost certainly less Republican, general election voter universe.

I have no opinion about polling for the mid-terms in general, other than I mistrust all polling these days — and especially Florida polling.

But these are voting facts:

• The GOP has underperformed its polling and registration advantage in recent special elections across the country.

• Abortion rights in Kansas vastly outperformed pre-election polling.

• The GOP badly underperformed in the August primary in Florida’s fastest growing county.

The latter outcome suggests Polk County’s most civically and politically-attentive voters (including Republicans) are quite dissatisfied and disapproving of Polk’s CCDF/Jan. 6th dominated GOP, compared to 2020 and previous years.

Whatever its implication for the November election, that’s very encouraging for my top priority in public life moving ahead.

The coalition of decency and the future

I want to defeat — in every non-violent, civic way possible — the corrupt, gross, lying, violent, and often criminal fake Christian dictatorship movement that has taken over the formal structures of the Polk GOP even more thoroughly than it has the state and national GOP, which it has also taken over.

I certainly want to defeat that movement at the state and national levels as well; but turning back fake Christian, gross dictatorship movements starts at home, with close confrontation. It’s where I have most access to actual gross, fake Christian dictator wannabes I can confront. (By contrast, I have great respect for real Christians, who make a serious attempt to live the tenets of their religion through something other than abusive politics.)

Voting is only a very small part of that process.

Other parts include: taking back public space from crankish transgression of it; relentlessly denying respectability or moral legitimacy in public; making them afraid to speak to wider audiences because they’ll get ask uncomfortable questions; turning society against their behavior; pressuring official power and law enforcement to stop protecting and coddling them, legally and politically.

A cross-party coalition of citizenship and decency is doing all of those things in Polk County right now, as I laid out here.

If we succeed over time here and in the country, as we did during a similar battle in the 1920s, the vague term “our democracy,” which has never truly existed in America, has a chance to flower in peace, decency, and security like never before.

Polk’s engines of growth, quality of life, and the future turned on the CCDF/J6 GOP — as did our most Latino region

Here are some images to illustrate the implications of Polk’s August primary vote becoming a lasting trend.

Look at the projected population growth for Polk County through 2045, which is now closer to us than 1999. This is from the official “State of the County” presentation given by County Manager Bill Beasley.

The massive growth is in what Beasley calls “the urban belt” — the Lakeland and Winter Haven areas and particularly the Northeast part of the county, which is projected to add an astonishing 201,000 people in the next 20-ish years.

Now flash back with me to 2020. Take a look at how a very partisan R v D School Board race (probably the most openly partisan ever at that time) played out. 57-43 for the GOP candidate. (I broke this down in great detail in part 1.)

Now take a look at very very similar race from 2022, in a completely partisanized environment. Look at where all the anti-GOP, pro-Dem voting came from — the “urban belt.”

This was a 51-49 race, a narrow win for a GOP candidate who isn’t a crank running against a progressive, black woman defense lawyer, endorsed by Charlie Crist, who had no money. This is generic R v D party voting. The Democratic candidate vastly overperformed; the decent R candidate vastly underperformed in an R+13 environment.

Here’s the same exact pattern in the other very “R v. D,” 51-49 race, in which the GOP candidate, who was endorsed by DeSantis, could not be conclusively tied to the criminal James Dunn.

The big area of orange in northeast Polk is heavily Latino, with a particularly large Puerto Rican community. It’s also Polk’s fastest growing area. A group called Mi Vecino Florida has been working to register and turn out Latino voters. My perception is that they’re targeting voters likely to vote for Democratic candidates in this environment. See website here. (I hope to interview organizers after the election.)

Polk and Osceola top the list — with Polk having the most Mi Vecino voters overall and next door Osceola the most per capita. Both far outstrip bigger south Florida counties. As I understand it, many of these voters are registering NPA.

Seven thousand new “left-leaning” NPA/Dem votes in Polk could a make a significant dent in outcomes. But we’ll have to wait for the general to draw any real conclusions and assess any trends.

Voting for a future

In any event, you see a newly emergent coalition of civic decency on those precinct maps above, located where every engine of the future for Polk County resides — in the areas where Polk is growing fastest.

This a coalition thinking about a future. The GOP, in Polk and elsewhere, isn’t. It’s longing for a past and using whatever discomfort exists in the present — no matter what role it had in creating it — to seize raw power with which to grift.

That coalition of the future is not 50 percent of the vote yet in Polk because voting patterns are complicated and stubbornly tied to personal identity and a college football-style rooting structure. I’ll touch on that in part 3, tentatively titled — “How Seminoles, Gators, and cranks explain Lakeland's transition.”

For now, it’s enough to look at our map and see where the future lies.