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ADAM C. SMITHIn statewide elections, Republicans have been the winners in three straight election cycles.
Somebody might want to tell Sen. Bill Nelson to turn out the lights after he's done.
Come January, he will be the lone Democrat holding statewide office in Florida. Given President Bush's surprisingly decisive Florida win Tuesday, a question looms:
Can Democrats win statewide Florida races anymore?
"This is now the third election cycle where we mistakenly think we've hit rock bottom," said state Rep. Dan Gelber of Miami, one of many Florida Democrats on Wednesday trying to figure out what went wrong after losing the races for president and for U.S. Senate.
Despite polls showing a neck-and-neck race and an unprecedented voter mobilization campaign by Democrats, the Bush-Cheney campaign turned its 537-vote margin in 2000 into a nearly 370,000 vote advantage this year.
How? Republicans blew the doors off on turnout.
"I thought the superior turnout was going to be the Democrats. It wasn't," said Nelson, who faces re-election in 2006. In his campaigns, he has been helped by performing relatively well in conservative North Florida.
"I have to make sure we have the ground game in an off-year election that we need."
The Bush-Cheney voter mobilization was apparent throughout the state, but especially in North and north-central Florida. Just on the mostly small, rural counties stretching from Pensacola to Jacksonville, Bush picked up more than 193,000 votes more than he did in 2000.
"I look at the math - and it applies to Florida and the country - and say if we can't do better in rural areas as Democrats, we can't win," said Democratic pollster Dave Beattie.
Hurricanes disproportionately affected Republican-leaning counties, but they did little to dampen turnout. Escambia County in the western Panhandle, hit hard by Hurricane Ivan, boasted the highest turnout in the state, 85 percent.
"The intensity of the support was so strong and people were really motivated to vote," Gov. Jeb Bush said, noting that he always believed high turnout would favor his brother.
Hours before the networks called America's largest battleground state for Bush, his brother saw what was coming from the early returns streaming into the Division of Elections.
"The two counties I look at, thankfully the ones who come in early, are Pasco County and Orange County," the governor said. "And when we were up by significant amount in Pasco County, I did call my brother and I told him that this is much better than what our projections were."
Pasco was an especially tough hit for the Kerry-Edwards campaign. Gore won the county by less than 1,000 votes in 2000, just as Democrat Betty Castor's Senate campaign narrowly carried the county Tuesday. But President Bush won Pasco by more than 18,000 votes.
The president campaigned in person there and had an aggressive and energized local party working on his behalf. The Kerry-Edwards campaign focused little attention on Pasco.
The basic Democratic strategy for winning Florida is to overwhelmingly take southeast Florida, stay nearly even in Central Florida and minimize losses in North Florida. Kerry lost the Tampa Bay area, which almost always means losing the state.
Overall, Bush won 56 of 67 counties, flipping Pinellas, Pasco, Hernando, Flagler and Osceola, which Gore had won four years ago. His strength extended across the state.
In 51 counties, he increased his share of the vote by at least 5 percent over his share in 2000. Only six counties showed Kerry increasing his share of the vote that much over Gore's share in 2000. Bush's share dropped in only five counties, compared to 25 for Kerry.
One of those included Democrat-rich Palm Beach County, where a relatively weak 62 percent of voters turned out. Kerry carried Palm Beach with 61 percent of the vote, but his share of the overall vote was 3 percent less than Al Gore's in 2000.
Broward County offers the mother lode of Democratic votes in Florida, and Kerry beat Bush there by more than 200,000 votes, just as Gore did in 2000.
But a closer look at the numbers shows how the Bush-Cheney campaign's aggressive efforts to build support in Broward paid off. Kerry's share of the overall Broward vote was 2 percent less than Gore's, while Bush's was 2 percent better than his 2000 showing. The upshot: Bush netted an extra 5,000 Broward votes compared to 2000.
The Bush-Cheney advantage in Florida was all the more startling given the Democratic efforts. The Kerry-Edwards campaign had at least 10 times the staff Gore had working in Florida, and lavishly funded independent groups spent millions to mobilize Democratic voters across Florida.
"To understand our win you have to comprehend the intensity of the opposition effort," said former state GOP chairman Al Cardenas. "For the first time, they were able to spend more money on the air. They did things they have never done before. They matched us with the ground game as well. They ventured into what heretofore was our private arena and matched us blow to blow."
Bush-Cheney aggressively sought to motivate infrequently voting conservatives, organizing voters registration drives at, among other places, churches and gun shows. The results were clear in their huge advantage in North Florida.
"They mobilized the base, as the base has never been mobilized," Republican consultant Bill Coletti said. "The evangelical Christians, I've never seen them as excited as this year."
The campaign also reached into Democratic turf, with results that are less clear. Republicans offered varying estimates how they increased their share of support among Jewish voters, though exit polls suggest eight in 10 Jewish voters backed Kerry. Those same exit polls, however, concluded Florida was a 50-50 race, yet Bush wound up winning by five percentage points.
Likewise, it was unclear precisely how well Bush and Kerry did among Hispanic voters in Florida. There is some evidence that Kerry may have peeled off a sliver of the staunchly Republican Cuban-American vote. In two overwhelmingly Cuban-American precincts in Hialeah, unofficial returns showed Kerry winning about 25 percent of the vote.
The governor said he believes his brother did especially well among Hispanics, and that the huge turnout was due to enthusiasm for his candidacy.
"He energized a whole new group of voters," Gov. Bush said. "The conventional wisdom I heard repeated, that a high turnout would hurt Republicans and hurt the president, I just never believed. The level of energy among the volunteers and the interest in this campaign is something I've never seen before."
Times staff writers David Adams and Joni James contributed to this report. Adam C. Smith can be reached at adam@sptimes.com or 727 893-8241.