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Mar 17, 2008 10:18 am US/Eastern
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Return To Sender
Opinion By CBS4 Commentator and I-Team Reporter Jim DeFede
MIAMI (CBS4) ―
As soon as the Democratic plan for a re-vote by mail in Florida was released Wednesday night, I started receiving phone calls from senior party officials saying the plan was already dead. And sure enough they were right. The official death notice will be issued sometime today, when the chairwoman of the state Democratic Party, Karen Thurman, pronounces the idea unworkable.
Although logistical concerns will be the official rationale for the plan's demise, the politics of a new vote made it impossible.
For the Clinton campaign, a new vote would be unlikely to garner them the same number of delegates they won in the January 29 primary. Hillary Clinton won Florida by a sizeable margin, capturing 50 percent of the vote compared to only 33 percent for Barack Obama. In terms of delegates, based on the January 29 results, Clinton would come out of Florida with a net gain of 38 delegates.
If she has any hope of catching Obama, she will need every single one of those 38 delegates. And since a new vote, with both candidates campaigning in the state, would almost certainly be far closer than the 17 point win Clinton racked up in January, a new vote in Florida became a non-starter for Clinton tacticians.
The Clinton campaign would rather mount a fight at the nominating convention in Denver to seat the Florida delegates based on the January 29 results. They are gambling on the belief the party will ultimately not want to snub Florida – the largest and arguably most important swing state in the country. Already you are seeing major Clinton and Democratic party fundraisers, like Chris Korge and Ira Leesfield, say that if the Florida delegates aren't seated, then not only will they stop raising money, but they will want the tens of thousands they have already donated to the Democratic National Committee returned to them.
And money was another reason Clinton opposed a re-vote. Florida is an extremely expensive state to campaign in – with multiple TV and radio markets. Every dollar Clinton spends in Florida to win a state she feels she already won, is a dollar her campaign can't spend in Pennsylvania, Indiana, North Carolina, and more than likely, Michigan.
Likewise, the Obama folks never liked the idea of a re-vote. Florida's demographics line up nicely for Clinton, since she does well with older voters, as well as Jewish and Hispanic voters. This would be a hard state for Obama to win, and while he would certainly garner more than 33 percent of the vote this time around, there is no reason for him to risk losing yet another "big" state.
In fact, he doesn't even admit to losing Florida the first time around. As far as Obama is concerned Florida never happened.
The Obama campaign also does not want to give Clinton another reason for dragging the campaign out until the middle of June. A new vote in Florida would allow Clinton to argue it is essential to wait until the Florida results are complete before either candidate is declared the presumptive winner. Obama is hoping that if it becomes obvious that Clinton cannot catch up to him in elected delegates, party leaders will pressure her to step aside and accept Obama as the nominee.
This weekend, for instance, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, who has yet to formally endorse either candidate, said the will of the voters should be honored and that whoever has the most elected delegates should be the party's standard bearer. In essence, she rejected the Clinton strategy of relying on Super Delegates to decide this race.
Obama also didn't want to have to spend time or money in Florida, especially since he is going to need those resources to combat Clinton's advantage in the next big state, Pennsylvania.
Of course, the mechanics of holding a new election by mail were no less daunting. The party would have to develop a plan that would guarantee ballots actually reaching all of the 4.1 million registered Democrats, as well as a way of verifying the signatures of those who voted to prevent fraud. Even scarier, they would have to find a way to count the votes on equipment never used in this way before.
Indeed, the notion that Florida – with its history of electoral screw-ups – could master in a matter of weeks the difficulties of a mail-in ballot system that has taken some states more than a decade to perfect is laughable. And I think some party officials were concerned that Florida would once again become a laughingstock of the country.
Or at least more of a laughingstock than we already are.
(© MMVIII, CBS Broadcasting Inc. All Rights Reserved.)