New neighborhoods help the GOP make inroads in Hillsborough.
By LETITIA STEIN
Published October 29, 2004
TAMPA - Jennifer and Rick Christenberry were among the first to post a Bush-Cheney sign outside their 3-year-old home in FishHawk Ranch in southeastern Hillsborough County.
Within days, another neighbor on Heronrise Crescent Drive also tacked up a sign supporting the Republican president. Soon, neighbors up and down the block marked GOP territory.
"It's been a pleasant awakening," said Jennifer Christenberry, 37, a stay-at-home mom.
Never mind the lone minivan with a Democratic sticker in a neighbor's garage. This year, Republican strategists are waking up to a new political powerhouse, a GOP stronghold that emerged in a single presidential election cycle. Party leaders now look to FishHawk Ranch to push Hillsborough into the Republican's camp - just as suburban growth once did in Pinellas County.
"In FishHawk Ranch, there are enough registered Republicans - or soon will be - to win Florida," said Frank Wuco, who is organizing the precinct. "When you take into account what happened in the last election ..."
This summer, Wuco laid out the numbers to a half dozen Bush-Cheney neighborhood volunteers. Over his wife's fresh-baked cookies, the retired naval officer and FishHawk resident outlined the GOP's strategy for the newly minted community.
Sign waving and voter registration drives would rally support. Just before Election Day, neighbors would remind neighbors to vote, because they were likely to vote Republican.
Almost 5,000 registered voters live in the two precincts that span FishHawk Ranch. Half are registered Republican, one-fourth are Democrat, and the rest are affiliated with neither party.
With more than 2,500 Republican voters, the FishHawk Ranch precinct ranks among the county's top Republican strongholds, along with precincts in Sun City Center, Plant City and Valrico.
And a third of those voters likely lived out of state in 2000, when Bush won Florida and the White House by 537 votes.
Ten years ago, what now is called FishHawk Ranch was mostly wooded land. The place didn't appear on many maps, much less on lists of polling precincts.
In 2000, there were about 700 homes there. Four years later, the number has more than doubled to 2,000, and FishHawk Ranch is Hillsborough's fastest-growing community.
The master plan wasn't designed specifically for Republicans; it just worked out that way.
"We don't quiz people on their political affiliations," said Vaike O'Grady, marketing director for FishHawk's developer, Newland Communities.
But demographic trends in FishHawk Ranch mirror earlier suburban growth across the Tampa Bay area, where rapid expansion was followed by overnight changes in a region's political affiliation.
In FishHawk Ranch, large homes, miles of nature trails and top-rated schools have been a major draw for families buying second and third homes.
In 2004, the average home sold for $240,000.
Most of FishHawk Ranch's 2,000 households are headed by professionals, or military commuters, according to a developers' survey in 2003. Eight in 10 residents are white, averaging 30- to 49-years-old.
Such homogenous profiles tend to favor the GOP and are common in new suburban communities, according to Darryl Paulson, a professor of government at the University of South Florida campus in St. Petersburg.
"Hillsborough County is trending Republican because of the demographic changes," he said. "It's moved from a low-income - in many respects, a union kind of community - to a much more corporate, upscale, business friendly community."
Paulson studied a similar trend that swept Pinellas County during peak growth periods of the 1940s, '50s and '60s. The newer Pinellas suburbs attracted conservative voters, who transformed the county seemingly overnight into a Republican stronghold.
Years later, Republicans still dominate elected seats in Pinellas, but by 4 percentage points, county voters favored Democrat Al Gore for president in 2000.
Hillsborough still has plenty of room to grow.
Registered Democrats outnumber Republicans 42 percent to 35 percent in a county of more than 600,000 voters. But in 2000, Bush edged ahead in Hillsborough with 50.17 percent of the vote.
This election, Republicans hope to capitalize on the suburban vote.
This summer, the party opened its first Bush-Cheney headquarters at La Viva Plaza in Brandon. The move symbolized a changing of the guard, following last year's ouster of longtime party head Margie Kincaid, a South Tampa resident.
Under new chairman Al Higginbotham, a Plant City resident, party activities have migrated east and north to unincorporated Hillsborough, home to new suburbanites and rural conservatives.
New Republican clubs have opened in South Shore and New Tampa, and attendance at monthly meetings now held in north Tampa is way up.
Not everyone welcomed the change. After the leadership turnover, longtime Republican Denise Layne switched parties to run for an at-large County Commission seat as a Democrat.
"Democrats for years have ruled Hillsborough," Layne said, criticizing what she saw as right-wing extremism among GOP activists in east Hillsborough. "Now the pendulum has swung, and it's swung all the way to the right. And that won't work either."
Internal GOP squabbles have little meaning to FishHawk Ranch's new residents, who mostly are unaware of the stir their community is causing.
In a few years, FishHawk Ranch could house even more Republican voters. The next phase is expected to bring custom built houses starting at about $550,000.
By 2008, FishHawk Ranch's final size will resemble a small city of as many as 5,000 homes.
Republicans plan to court the newcomers as if the party's future depends on them.
"We've got to be contacting people that move in there," Higginbotham, the GOP chairman in Hillsborough, told volunteers at the opening of the Brandon headquarters in June. "Make sure they're registered, because probably they're Republicans."
