The Florida 2008 Presidential Primary: The Voters Seize Control of the Candidate Selection Process

            The January 29, 2008 Florida Presidential Primary was not supposed to count for the Democrats.  Having violated national party rules against holding primaries before February 5th, to give selected small states around the country a chance to hold their primaries and caucuses before the big states chimed in, Florida was stripped of its Democratic delegates and the candidates agreed not to mount campaigns in the Sunshine State.

            This did not stop voters from flocking to the polls to pick between Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and John Edwards on the Democratic side, and John McCain, Mitt Romney, Rudy Giuliani, Ron Paul and Mike Huckabee on the Republican side.  Some 3,658,802 voted for president in the Florida primary, which is almost half of the record number that voted for president in the General election in 2004.  50.3% of the Republicans and 41.9% of the Democrats cast ballots.  As a result, even though the Florida primary allegedly did not “count” for the Democrats, John Edwards dropped out of the race after his weak showing.

            Here are the results:

Hillary Clinton

863,787

23.61%

John McCain

693,508

18.95%

Mitt Romney

595,830

16.28%

Barack Obama

570,432

15.59%

Rudy Giuliani

282,503

7.72%

Mike Huckabee

259,598

7.10%

John Edwards

249,500

6.82%

Ron Paul

62,146

1.70%

Fred Thompson

22,389

0.61%

Joseph Biden Jr.

15,574

0.43%

William Richardson III

14,866

0.41%

Dennis Kucinich

9,625

0.26%

Christopher Dodd

5,423

0.15%

Mike Gravel

5,249

0.14%

Alan Keyes

4,004

0.11%

Duncan Hunter

2816

0.08%

Tom Tancredo

1552

0.04%

 

 

Total Vote

3,658,802

 

 

Rep. Vote

1,924,346

52.59%

Dem. Vote

1,734,456

47.41%

 

            What is happening is that the voters are trying to take control of the nominating process from the professional politicians and the media by turning out at the polls in landslide proportions.  Florida’s primary turnout was 75% of the 2006 off-year election turnout in Florida when there was a Governor’s race.  The reason for this lack of apathy is that the nation faces serious problems but none of the candidates seem to be presenting viable solutions.  Now, the voters are winnowing the field before holding the candidates’ feet to the fire on specific issues.

            In the Republican primary, the race is between the economy and foreign policy; where McCain represents foreign policy, a Senator, veteran, prisoner of war opposed to the torture policy of the Bush administration (having been tortured himself), but who has never held executive office, indeed, has almost never been off the public payroll.  Mitt Romney represents it’s the economy stupid, a successful businessman, son of a businessman, who used his religion to shirk the Vietnam war, while supporting torture and the war in Iraq.  In the Republican party all the candidates are men, their differences are religion.

            In the Democratic Party, the white men have all lost, leaving a woman and a black man as the major contenders.  The voters will try to use these candidates and the positions they represent as instruments with which to evolve a set of policies to be implemented by whoever is the ultimate winner in November.  So, the Republican primary is hashing out the issues, while the Democratic primary is hashing out the personalities and ethnicities given the fact that Clinton’s and Obama’s positions on issues are really quite similar.

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Contact: Joshua Leinsdorf