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Saturday, Jul 11, 2009
The 2004 presidential race could turn on the Sunshine State, just as it did in 2000. And the early evidence suggests Bush is in big trouble.
Mar 9, 2004 | Five hundred and thirty-seven votes.
Assume for a moment that all the votes were counted in Florida four years ago. Assume that the punch-card voting machines never malfunctioned. Assume that a badly designed butterfly ballot didn't cause thousands of Democrats to vote for Pat Buchanan by mistake. Assume that a highway patrol roadblock didn't scare off black voters, and that all of the black voters who made it to their polling places actually got to vote.
Assume that Katherine Harris and the Supreme Court Five and all of those angry white men with the "Sore-Loserman" bumper stickers were actually right about stopping the recount.
Assume all of that -- give the Republicans the benefit of every conceivable doubt -- and it still comes down to this: In an election in which 5.9 million Floridians went to the polls, the official margin of victory -- the one Katherine Harris certified, the one you'll find in the history books, the one that put George Bush and Dick Cheney in the White House, the one that wrought massive tax cuts, huge budget deficits, a war on Iraq, a slew of extremist judges, an attorney general named John Ashcroft, and a culture war over gay marriage -- that margin of victory was 537 votes.
"If you throw out enough votes, you can call it a nail-biter," says U.S. Rep. Kendrick Meek, D-Fla., who led a major African-American voter turnout effort in 2000 and is pushing hard for Sen. John Kerry this time around. "But if George W. Bush keeps being George W. Bush, I'm not expecting it to be a nail-biter this time around."
Voters in Florida go to the polls Tuesday for the state's Democratic presidential primary. But with the outcome of that race a foregone conclusion, and with the Bush-Cheney campaign flooding Florida's airwaves with controversial new TV commercials, all eyes are on November. And for the moment, at least, Democrats are feeling cautiously optimistic about their presidential prospects in a state they believe they won four years ago.
There may be good reason for that. While Bush began the 2000 race with a double-digit lead over Vice President Al Gore in Florida, a poll released over the weekend has the president trailing Kerry in the state by six percentage points. A majority of Florida voters disapprove of the way Bush is handling the economy; a plurality believes he exaggerated intelligence to build support for the invasion of Iraq; and, by a wide margin, voters in this senior-heavy state trust Kerry more than Bush when it comes to protecting Medicare and Social Security.
Many of those who supported Bush in 2000 seem ambivalent and unenthusiastic about him today, while Floridians who voted against Bush four years ago -- particularly African-Americans and older voters in Palm Beach County who believe they were disenfranchised -- are enraged and inspired to oust him from office now.
"We understand that the deck is stacked against us, and it's just wrong," said the Rev. Griffin Davis, pastor of the predominately black Hilltop Baptist Church in the Palm Beach County city of Riviera Beach. "But God ain't pleased with what's happening in this country, and it's going to keep on happening until Bush is out of there."
And among Democrats, Davis may be the rule, not the exception. Shirish Dáte, the capitol bureau chief for the Palm Beach Post, said he has never seen Florida's Democrats as "fired up" as they are today. "You could run Mickey Mouse against Bush right now," he said, "and a lot of Democrats would turn out to vote."
Drive through the city of Palm Beach, and you might think that Walt Disney himself slid over from Orlando to open a theme park called "Prosperityland." The city is rich-person perfect, all sun-kissed and sanitized without a palm frond out of place.
It's hard to imagine that there's anger seething just under the shiny surface of this county, but there is. Thousands of voters were disenfranchised by a confusing butterfly ballot here in 2000, and they're every bit as upset about it today as they were four years ago. "People are still furious, and the anger and the venom has not diminished," says Tony Fransetta, president of the Florida Alliance for Retired Americans, an umbrella organization for advocacy groups representing more than 150,000 residents. "Seniors in Palm Beach County will tell you in a heartbeat that George Bush stole the election."
You can count Jewel Littenberg in that group. Littenberg is a politically active senior citizen from West Palm Beach, the only slightly less tony community just across the bridge from Palm Beach itself. Littenberg lobbies for better care for seniors, and she hosts a senior-focused show on the local cable channel. She's smart and articulate and she's got all her wits about her. But almost three and a half years out from 2000, Littenberg says she has "absolutely no idea" who she voted for in that ill-fated election.
Like thousands of other Palm Beach County residents, Littenberg fell victim to a ballot that put the chad to punch for Reform Party candidate Pat Buchanan right where many voters would logically have punched a hole for Al Gore. Post-election analyses showed that voters in reliably Democratic parts of Palm Beach County cast votes for Buchanan in inexplicably large numbers; a Palm Beach Post study found that Gore lost more than 6,600 votes in the county -- or more than 10 times Bush's official margin of victory -- because voters selected both Buchanan and Gore.
"It was a poorly designed ballot, just terrible," Littenberg said last week. "All I know is that the card absolutely did not fit and the holes did not line up. I don't know who I voted for. To this day, I don't know."
What Littenberg does know is that she'll channel her frustration from 2000 into action in 2004. She is mortified by the notion that she might have helped elect George W. Bush, and she was insulted when Katherine Harris and others suggested that any problems with the ballot were the result of voter error. "Does it make me angry? Yes, it makes me angry," Littenberg said. "Bush became president on a lie," she said, and his administration has lied repeatedly since then. "So much of what he has said he was going to do he hasn't done, and so much of what he has said was there wasn't there."
