■ Scott Maxwell has his 4 takeaways from Tuesday’s election.
There’s a lot to unpack from this week’s election results. Here are four things that stand out:
1) Incumbents dominated. Every single legislator and congressional rep who was seeking reelection — both Republican and Democrat — kept their seat in Central Florida.
2) If you live in these parts, you live in a dark blue community — but within a reliably red state.
3) Florida Republicans are simply better at winning. Especially when the chips are down in tight races.
4) The polling industry should be toast.
Let’s look a bit deeper at each of these things.
The status quo won
As my newsroom colleagues and I studied the results Tuesday night, looking for trends, we were puzzled at first to see both Republicans and Democrats doing so well in so many places. That’s when we realized what the winners had in common: Most were incumbents.
In fact, every single incumbent seeking reelection in Central Florida — for both the Legislature and Congress — won reelection.
It didn’t matter whether the incumbents were super progressive (like Anna Eskamani), super conservative (like Anthony Sabatini) or relatively moderate (like Stephanie Murphy). They all won.
Even when races were tight — including the hard-fought battles over the state House seats held by Democrat Joy Goff-Marcil and Republicans Scott Plakon and David Smith — the incumbent prevailed.
The bottom line? Never doubt the power of incum
Florida Republicans are just really good at what they do — recruiting candidates, delivering a consistent message and turning out the vote.
bency with the bully pulpit and fundraising potential it affords.
Orange is blue
With Republicans controlling every significant lever of statelevel government in Florida, it’s easy to forget how liberal the landscape is in our own backyard.
Orange County went for Joe Biden over Donald Trump by lopsided 61-38 split. How blue is that? It’s a split that mirrors some of America’s better-known progressive communities such as Portland and Chicago.
Central Florida is blue as an overall region as well.
Basically, Orange and Osceola are dark blue. Lake is deep red. And Seminole is purple.
Put together the votes of all four counties, and you get a region that went 55-45 for Biden.
Florida is red
The second half of this point, though, is that Florida simply isn’t much of a swing state anymore.
Yes, Democrats outnumber Republicans on the voter rolls. And yes, the results are often close. But those results almost always go the way Republicans want — whether we’re talking about races for president, governor or U.S. Senate.
In the last six years, Florida
Democrats have won precisely one statewide race … for agriculture commissioner … with 50.04% of the vote.
When one team’s winning only one out of every 10 or so tries, it’s not really much of a competition.
Republicans are better at winning
There’s a lot of talk about Florida Democrats being a fractured mess. (Remember the famous Will Rogers quote: “I’m not a member of an organized party. I’m a Democrat.”)
But don’t overlook that Florida Republicans are just really good at what they do — recruiting candidates, delivering a consistent message and turning out the vote.
Both sides talk big on Twitter. But Florida Republicans are simply better at backing up the tweets on Election Day.
The death of polling
As the results trickled in during the wee hours of Wednesday morning, well-known GOP pollster Frank Luntz declared his industry was broken beyond repair.
“The political polling profession is done,” Luntz told Axios. “It is devastating for my industry.”
Good. We should’ve put the industrial polling complex out of its misery in 2016 — at least as far as poll-obsessed media coverage goes.
This problem isn’t just with the presidential race. We saw badly errant polls in U.S. Senate races (like North Carolina, where the Democrat was consistently said to be ahead … right until he lost) and even local legislative races (like Senate District 9, where polls suggested Democrat Patricia Sigman was ahead of Republican Jason Brodeur by as much as 7 points … until Sigman lost by 3).
The bigger problem, though, doesn’t even involve accuracy. (Because, yes, sometimes the polls are proven accurate.) The problem, as I and others have mentioned before, is that pollcentric media coverage is lazy journalism that focuses on daily horse-race updates instead of important issues and policy records.
We don’t need to know whether an aspiring legislator is up 2 or down 3. We need to know where they stand on important issues and what their track record says about whether they’ll keep their word.
If campaigns want to fund and rely upon polls for strategy, have at it.
But this cycle should forever end this errant approach to media coverage. Unfortunately, I’m not holding my breath.
The last word
And finally, if something feels odd today, it’s probably because you’re a Floridian who is watching controversy about ballot counting unfold … and noticing that Florida somehow isn’t in the middle of it all.
We’re not used to that. Usually, when there’s an elections dumpster fire raging, Florida is the one holding the match.
So congratulations to the state’s elections supervisors this year
We may have introduced the world to the term “dangling chad,” but I think most of us would happily step out of the spotlight.