Florida – What To Look For
According to the state there are over 4 million registered Republicans, and normally about half of them would show up for the Presidential primary, so 2 million is the number to watch to gauge the interest in this process.
Florida has blocs of yahoos, like South Carolina, the Cubans, business Republicans, and more moderate types who retired down here, so it provides a cross-section of the GOP. If you look at where the votes are coming from, you can judge the interest level among those blocs.
At the moment, I would guess that the yahoos aren’t very enthused based on the lack of signs. The Cubans are not a group I’m familiar enough with to even guess about, but the business and moderate blocs are probably trending towards Romney.
If the Grinch can fire up the yahoos he has a real shot at this with the latest poll showing a tie between him and Romney. Romney will probably have a decent return from the absentees, as they went out before the South Carolina vote, but early voting doesn’t seem to be very active, especially with the changes that were made to the system.
Another factor to be aware of is that a huge chunk of the yahoos live in the Central Time Zone on the Panhandle, so their votes will be showing up at the end of the count.
2 comments
The Gin Grinch is going all-out for the Cubano vote with numerous Spanish-language ads. Rubio appears to be on Romney’s team but Rubio’s pull in the Cubano community is hardly iron-clad. Personally it doesn’t matter to me which of the two wins, they’re both evil venal spiteful little moral dwarfs. I mean, c’mon. Even Romney’s dog looks down upon him. 😈
I noticed that Rubio jumped to Romney’s defense on the immigration issue after claiming he would stay out of it. The news that Rubio’s family left Cuba during Batista’s years, not after Fidel took power, has hurt his standing among the hardcore Calle Ocho crowd, and knocked him down a couple of tiers in the Cuban community, who were generally Batista supporters.
Turn out is going to be the key, and I don’t see that anyone has an organization in place to push it. People have to make an effort to vote in Florida, especially after the Republicans screwed around with the laws, so this could be a very low turn out primary.