Investor's Business Daily, August 28th, 2007
Election 2008: What is it about Democrats and Florida? After 2000's fiasco, you'd think they would try for a trouble-free vote. Instead, they've managed to disenfranchise their own voters, without even the GOP to blame.
The Democratic National Committee voted to punish the Florida Democratic Party for moving its primary up to Jan. 29 by nullifying its primary vote and delegates.
They did it not because Florida had a particularly rebellious party, but because dominant Republicans in the Florida state legislature pushed the primary date forward to increase Florida's clout in national elections.
Rather than stand up for his party's Florida members, DNC Chairman Howard Dean & Co. instead chose to punish the outnumbered Florida Democrats by telling them their primary votes wouldn't count in the national nomination.
The national party wants Florida to hold a second caucus for votes after Feb. 5, as part of its arbitrary rules. The January vote could turn out to be, as a spokesman for Florida Democratic Sen. Bill Nelson told us, just "a beauty contest," something that will encourage people to stay home.
So the surreal intrudes again in Florida elections, this time as a result of the built-in incentive all states have to move forward their primary dates. The problem is, there'll be 210 empty Florida seats for electoral delegates at the Democratic Party nomination this year, sending a message to the country at large.
If it happens, the national Democrats will in effect be washing their hands of dynamic sunbelt Florida's vote.
Yet they're tolerating a small group of four other states that registered earlier for pre-Feb. 5 primaries, only because they got in under the deadline. These include farm-subsidy-loving Iowa, manufacturing-heavy South Carolina, Harry Reid's Nevada and retail-politics regular New Hampshire.
By throwing out pivotal Florida over a rules dispute, it's hard to imagine what they think they're going to gain from this in the national election. National Democrats seem to think they've won the election already, and would rather not think about Florida.
This is unusually foolish. Since 2000, Florida has shown itself to be a centrist state whose slightest tilt can determine the fate of a national election. Spreading so much ill will among Florida's Democrats before the national election in November 2008 is a sure way of losing at least some Democrats to the Republicans.
As for the candidates, this is a loss for them, too. Before Monday's DNC broadside to Florida voters, Barack Obama spent last weekend campaigning in Florida in a bid to win Miami's Cuban votes. He now must realize he's wasted his time, no matter how many voters he has persuaded.
Hillary Clinton -- who holds a commanding lead in the state, according to an Aug. 13 Rasmussen poll -- can also forget about that advantage now. No delegates, no clout.
Nobody's happy about the move to front-load the primaries toward the beginning of 2008 to influence the results of the national election. But it's happening for a reason: Early primary states have more influence on the national election's outcome than later ones.
Regional primaries or rotating primaries may help, but no action has been taken. Blaming Florida for all this is blaming the messenger rather than finding out what's really the problem and fixing it.
"The bottom line is that if the votes aren't counted, then the system is broken," said Bryan Gulley, the spokesman for Sen. Nelson, who's leading the opposition to the DNC's action on Florida's vote.
The DNC may think it has fixed Florida for now, but this issue isn't going away. "If there's no resolution in 20 days, we will take legal action," said Gulley. If that happens, Florida will again be embroiled in courts over the outcome of elections.
But the real result may be that Florida's largely centrist Democrats get fed up and switch their registration to Republican -- where their votes will count.
With Florida's vote hinging on very narrow margins, this may be enough to give Florida's Republicans the margin required to swing the vote their way.
If it happens, all the polls and all the fundraisers in the world won't be able to correct the problem. And the Democrats will have no one to blame but themselves.
