With More on Ballot, Runoff Plan EssentialBy Martin Dyckman
Published June 13th 1999 in St. Petersburg Times
Having opened its ballot to minor party and no-party candidates, Florida faces certain complications. One sort would be spoiler campaigns such as the Democrats expect from the once-spurned, ever-vengeful Willie Logan in next year's U.S. Senate race. Another is that people will be winning offices with less than a majority of the vote.
That's how Jesse Ventura became governor of Minnesota. The Reform Party candidate led a field of five with just 37 percent.
This could happen in Florida, which might make many people happy and serve others right.
The Constitution Revision Commission did a good thing in busting up the major-party cartel. But Florida needs now to provide for a general election runoff when no candidate has a majority or at least a convincing plurality.
Otherwise, Florida could be governed by people with questionable mandates or, worse, extremists of David Duke's ilk who could never win one-on-one but who might successfully exploit crowded fields.
Fear of the fringes has helped preserve Florida's post-primary runoffs despite their high costs (upwards of $4-million statewide), often pathetic turnouts (only 7.1 percent last year) and the time pressures on overseas absentee balloting.
None of these problems would apply to an instantaneous runoff. Florida legislators should be considering this, for the primaries as well as the general election, before they wake up some November morning to news that a governor or senator from the planet Mongo has been elected with only a fourth of the vote.
Instant runoffs failed in Florida's paper ballot days, when it took a week to learn who had been nominated. Today, computers and modern ballot technology could produce a consensus winner almost as soon as they told who drew the most first-choice votes.
Instant runoffs are used without problems in local races elsewhere. Voters simply mark second and third choices, or even more in crowded races, along with their first choices.
The more I hear about Minnesota and Ventura, the more I'm convinced he would have won such a runoff. An extremist like Duke, on the other hand, would have virtually no chance in an instant runoff because he would be the last choice of everyone else's supporters.
The Center for Voting and Democracy reports that the Alaska, New Mexico and Vermont legislatures considered instant-runoff voting this year but put off final action because of uncertainty over procedures and costs.
Georgia is the only state with a general-election runoff, a method chosen after the Legislature's infamous decision to make Lester Maddox governor instead of Bo Callaway, the Republican who had led with less than a majority. Now, the leading candidate must have at least a 45 percent plurality to avoid a runoff.
Ventura's wasn't the only significant less-than-majority victory last year. Republican Bill Owens was elected Colorado's governor with 48.9 percent, a 4,758-vote edge over the Democratic nominee. Previously, Connecticut and Maine have elected independent governors by less than 40 percent.
No Contest
By MARTIN DYCKMAN Associate Editor
© St. Petersburg Times, published May 30, 1999
All too often, the people of Florida have no real choice when it comes to picking their state senators and representatives. The candidates aren't running, and only profound reform would increase competition.
People who ask how an elected legislature can behave as Florida's so often does are missing an essential point.
As traditionally meant by the word "elected," Florida's Legislature isn't.
In the 11 regular campaigns from 1978 through 1998, some 35 percent of House members and 28 percent of Senate candidates ran unopposed. Another 15 percent in each chamber faced opposition only in the Democratic or Republican primaries. Half the time, at least half the population was denied the opportunity to vote.
Meaningful races are even rarer. Of the 649 House campaigns that did make it to the November ballot, merely 179 (27.5 percent) were competitive enough to be won by only 10 percentage points or less. The typical race is a blowout. Last November, half the winners won with 60 percent or more of the vote.
Poor as they are, even these statistics are inflated by the occasional years, 1982 and 1992, when redistricting created unusual numbers of open seats.
Last year, as the Democratic Party all but abandoned the House in a vain attempt to save the governor's office, only 45 of the 120 House seats were contested in November, and 52 members were elected with no opposition. The Democrats ceded 49 seats to the Republicans, who gave them only 27 free passes in return. Among the races that did appear on the Nov. 3 ballot, only 14 were tight; the GOP won those 8 to 6.
In the Senate, 11 of 21 available seats were entirely uncontested last year and only seven races made it past the primaries. Of those seven, only two -- Jim Sebesta's narrow victory over Mary Brennan for an open Tampa Bay seat and indicted Miami Sen. Al Gutman's squeaker re-election -- were even close.
"Political scientists have been worried a long time about the lack of competition," remarks Susan MacManus, professor of government at the University of South Florida. "Most everyone acknowledges that part of the turnout problem is that races aren't interesting. . . . (But) the political parties bear some responsibility for this. It's been everything about winning seats and nothing about offering people a choice."
Indeed, in the last decade Republicans, once the minority in Tallahassee, have completely turned the tables. The GOP's current 73-47 domination of the House is the precise reverse of a decade ago, and it controls the Senate 25-15 after being down 17-23.
But this supposed revolution masks the fact that, throughout, most voters had few choices. The decisive shifts came in a relative few districts where changing demographics opened the door to Republican victories or helped persuade Democratic incumbents to switch. The notion that every voter should have a voice every time was as quaint and unpopular as campaign finance reform.
The goals were chiefly to protect or seize control of the House and Senate and the perquisites and power that come with the House speakership and Senate presidency. Voters in "safe" districts -- which are the certain result of letting any legislature design its own constituencies -- continue to be taken for granted and treated accordingly.
Each party has 29 House districts that have consistently resisted the other's occasional challenges. Both sides owe them in part to the conscious "stacking" of districts along racial lines, which created sinecures for both black Democrats and white Republicans.
Incumbency, meanwhile, continues to be a large and growing financial advantage. Incumbents monopolized two-thirds of the $16.1-million raised for House races last year. Most significant was the $4.1-million that went to incumbents who were unopposed in their primaries and the $2.9-million raised by incumbents who had no opposition at all.
This is why special interests have so much influence. The money they contribute is more decisive than the electorate.
For example, though Democrats and independents account for nearly 47 percent of the voters in the district of House Speaker John Thrasher, R-Orange Park, none has ever had a chance to vote for or against him. After winning his seat in the 1992 Republican primary, Thrasher -- previously a lobbyist for the Florida Medical Association -- has been unopposed since. Term limits may force him out, but the odds against any Democrat running a credible race are so long that few if any will apply.
Eight House members, including Rep. Dennis Jones, R-Seminole, have had no opposition since 1990 or before.
Rep. Joe Arnall, R-Jacksonville Beach, who is BellSouth's chief patron in the House, had a tight primary in 1988. He had landslides in the 1988 and 1990 general elections and hasn't had an opponent since. The lobbies are one reason: the $100,000 he already had in his campaign account sent a powerful message to anyone who might have thought about qualifying against him last July.
Arnall was one of 13 House members who raised at least $100,000 before the qualifying deadline. Democrat John Cosgrove of Miami led with $285,165. Though it didn't buy him a pass, it did scare off anyone who might have a plausible chance to win. He scored 82 percent in the primary and 70 in the general election. Among the other top 12, only three drew opponents, and only one lost.
What money starts, demographics finish
By MARTIN DYCKMAN Associate Editor
© St. Petersburg Times
Since 1978, only two Republicans have run for the seat now held by Janegale Boyd, D-Monticello.
In the 20 years since I moved to south St. Petersburg, I have had only two opportunities to vote for a member of the House: when Doug Jamerson won his seat in 1982 from an incumbent who had been unopposed in 1980, and in a special election in 1994 when Rudy Bradley won the seat Jamerson had given up to be appointed commissioner of education. Neither representative was ever opposed for re-election.
Such statistics could seem to make a case in support of term limits, which will toll on 66 Florida legislators next year unless the Supreme Court discards the initiative voters approved in 1992. But few people in Tallahassee expect term limits to cause more than a momentary blip in competitiveness. If anything, even fewer seats are likely to be contested once the newcomers settle in, so long as the underlying non-competitive influences persist. Potential challengers will be strongly tempted to simply wait out the incumbents' allotted eight years.
But of course not even a glut of vacancies can guarantee effective competition and meaningful choices for the voters. Most "safe" districts will stay safe for the parties that hold them, precluding choices in November.
Special interests will scout for likely winners and move in quickly to pre-empt their loyalties.
Sen. Tom Lee, R-Brandon, who was running a grass-roots campaign in 1996, recalls that he started receiving offers of help from Tallahassee lobbyists "the day after Associated Industries took a poll showing that I was going to win."
For the voters to have choices, profound reforms must take place in the ways Florida organizes and finances its politics.
Voters approved one of the easiest last fall in the form of a constitutional amendment, recommended by the Constitution Revision Commission, that calls for all voters to participate when a primary is, in effect, the election. Had that been in effect last year, it would have opened up another 23 races in the House and three in the Senate to all voters and likely have attracted more candidates as well.
But the implementing legislation failed to pass this year. Conservative Republicans in the House don't seem to want more moderate voters (or candidates) involved in districts such as Thrasher's, Arnall's and Speaker-designate Tom Feeney's. Their bill, by equating a write-in candidacy with ballot opposition, would close a party primary to other voters when a write-in candidate qualifies -- even if that candidate is a ringer who will not be heard from again.
Voters will have another crack at fundamental reform if revision commission Chairman Dexter Douglass and like-minded members succeed in a planned petition drive for an amendment establishing a bipartisan commission to draw legislative and congressional district lines. The commission would not be so likely to design safe seats and protect incumbents. Republican pressure killed this in the CRC last year.
Florida needs to abandon single-member districts, the exclusive election system since 1982, in favor of proportional voting that would give voice to political as well as racial minorities. While single-member districting has succeeded in electing blacks, Hispanics and more women to the Legislature, it has not fostered and may actually have discouraged competition overall. More seats were contested in the 1978 campaigns than 20 years later.
In one common form of proportional voting, to elect multimember delegations, all candidates run against each other, but citizens can cast all their votes for a single candidate if they wish. Critics object that this gives extremist candidates a better chance to win. That may be so, but it is less of a danger to democracy than the slow death it is suffering now.
Despite Supreme Court rulings equating free speech with free spending, something must be done about the dominating influence of money on the Legislature. The legislators elected in 1974 spent only $1.2-million to win. Last year's winners accounted for more than $18-million, some 41/2 times as much in constant dollars, and that doesn't count unreported money the parties spent in their behalf through an advertising loophole. Legislation to shut the loophole passed the Senate this year but was dead on arrival in the House.
"I can assure you that we haven't heard the last of that," says Senate Majority Leader Jack Latvala, who promises an initiative campaign that would bypass the House leadership if they did not agree to compromise.
Florida once limited total spending for candidates, but the U.S. Supreme Court said it couldn't. Florida also forbade candidates to spend money before the mid-summer qualifying date of a campaign year, but the Florida Supreme Court unanimously overruled that, in 1977, "as unconstitutionally violative of freedom of speech rights in that it is designed primarily to be a limitation on the quantity of political speech."
The original campaign spending lawsuit was filed by one of the most public-spirited legislators of all time, the late Bill Sadowski, who argued that the prequalifying moratorium favored incumbents. So it did.
But the ironic consequences came to full fruit in 1996, when Sen. W. D. Childers, R-Pensacola, in office since 1970, raised a record $700,000 and used it to buy up, far in advance, all the political advertising time on television stations in his area. Not surprisingly, Childers easily won.
Term limits or no, Childers says he will run again next year -- as a write-in candidate, if necessary. In a state where money and special interests and party pols are robbing common people of their right to meaningful elections, few people doubt Childers would win yet again.
This is how democracy is dying in Florida. Not by inches, but by dollars.
Making the Case Against Term Limits
By MARTIN DYCKMAN Associate Editor
© St. Petersburg Times, published June 6, 1999
Early in the French Revolution, its leaders decided that the fastest way to a perfect new society was to guillotine everyone who symbolized the old. It didn't work. Radical solutions rarely do.
Florida voters acted in the same fashion, albeit bloodlessly, when they approved the "Eight is Enough" term limits initiative in November 1988. Experienced heads would be purged with no thought to who -- or what -- would replace them.
For those of us who believe the Legislature has fallen on hard times, there is no comfort in the thought that things could be worse. They will be, if the Florida Supreme Court allows term limits to take hold next year.
Few of the court's cases have been as important as the challenge to term limits. Oral arguments are set for Friday. The court should not need much time to make its decision; the issues are simple.
The most important one is not whether the voters, as the initiative's defenders tirelessly insist, have the right to be wrong.
They do, which also happens to be the core of the argument against term limits. If their constituents want to keep re-electing the likes of W.D. Childers, George Kirkpatrick and Jim Hargrett, no voters in other times or places should have the gall to tell them they can't. Rather than be depriving them of those choices, Florida should be pursuing the districting and campaign reforms that would encourage qualified, competitive opponents to these habitually unopposed grandees. But this is of course a political objection.
The constitutional issue, rather, is simply this: Regardless of whether the voters were right or wrong in ratifying the initiative, was the question put to them fairly? Or were they tricked into casting a single vote on multiple subjects -- term limits for both state and federal legislators -- which the Florida Constitution does not allow?
The court's 1992 ruling was advisory, which means the court does not have to treat it as a precedent if it does not want to. In that case, the decision was that term limits were properly a single subject for the 1992 ballot.
But the majority ignored warnings by Justices Ben Overton and Gerald Kogan that if the U.S. Supreme Court later held congressional term limits unconstitutional -- as it did -- Florida voters would be left with something they might not have wanted had the issues been on the ballot separately.
Would Floridians have voted to term-limit only their legislators if congressional limits had not been a part of it? Probably, but there is no way to be sure. FSU President Sandy D'Alemberte, whose friend-of-the-court brief posed these issues, argued that Florida legislators were collateral casualties in a nationwide campaign against Congress.
"There is no evidence of any public revulsion against the state legislators for lengthy terms and there has not been an abuse in the long-term retention of office by state legislators," he wrote. "Indeed, in Florida, the problem may be the opposite -- the rapid turnover in legislative leadership."
D'Alemberte voluntarily left the Legislature after only six years, after having worked to create Florida's current judicial system, but a strong cadre of veteran leaders remained to help Reubin Askew build his reputation as one of Florida's most effective governors.
Term limits mean that very few House members -- those who had left and come back -- would ever have more than eight years of experience. Where half the members of the 1999 House have served only four years or less (already a significant turnover), term limits mean that at least three-fourths of each new House would always be relatively inexperienced. The total turnover, ironically, could turn out to be no greater under term limits and easily could be lower, if they lead to an even lazier, risk-averse political climate. This phenomenon is evident already. Though 63 candidates already have declared for open House seats next year, only five are challenging incumbents who would be eligible to run again. The nine eligible senators are all still unopposed.
The average annual House turnover since 1992 has been 30.4 percent, which is more than the 25 percent that term limits alone would guarantee. The costly difference would come in the toll on experience and leadership. That does not mean power to the voters but power to the lobbyists and staff, who have more than enough of it already.
The legislative process is complex and subject to manipulation at scores of places in dozens of ways. Not knowing how to do this, and having only eight years to make their marks, the newcomers will depend on those who know the tricks.
The problem will not be in the Senate, where most term-limited seats are likely to be taken by term-limited House members, but in the House, where term limits will empty 55 of the 120 seats. Only the court-ordered redistrictings that ended rural control turned over more.
But even then there were still plenty of senior members to provide leadership and advice, and the same was true after other substantial turnovers in 1978, 1982 and 1992. This will not be true after November 2000, and choices will be skewed in strange ways. The speaker Republicans have chosen to install then, if they keep their majority, is one of their more extreme members, Tom Feeney of Oviedo, who left and came back and will have a rare edge in seniority. The speaker after him, Johnny Byrd of Plant City, will have been a Floridian for only 15 years and a legislator for only 6 when he is installed in November 2002 Such people used to be called carpetbaggers.
How About a Single-House Legislature?
By MARTIN DYCKMAN
© St. Petersburg Times, published August 24, 1999
They said Jesse Ventura couldn't possibly get himself elected governor of Minnesota, but he did it anyway.
Now, he's trying something that really ought to be impossible. He wants Minnesota to have a single-house, nonpartisan legislature.
I wouldn't bet against him even if nothing comparable has happened anywhere in the United States since 1934.
That's when Sen. George Norris, a self-described "New Deal Republican," persuaded Nebraskans to trade in their conventional bicameral legislature.
They had voted no to that several times before, but on the last try, Norris' popularity, the prospect of saving money at the depth of the Great Depression and two other hot ballot issues won unicameralism nearly 60 percent of the vote.
No other state, however, has come even close to following Nebraska's example, though several, including Minnesota, have flirted with it.
It is, obviously, not the sort of reform that legislatures will wish on themselves and it's too complex, mechanically, for voter initiatives.
The Florida Constitution Revision Commission toyed with the idea in 1997 before voting it down, 19 to 14.
But in Minnesota, Ventura has already succeeded in getting people to take it seriously. The House speaker, a Republican, is backing him. Opponents, including three former speakers and an ex-governor, quickly organized a political committee to fight him.
"With Jesse," said one foe apprehensively, "it's got legs."
The Minneapolis Star-Tribune conveyed grudging respect with an editorial that fairly breathed fire.
"A big-budget campaign to eliminate one house of the Minnesota Legislature began in earnest this week," the newspaper complained, "with a rush of rhetoric that would do an old-time medicine show proud. A single-house legislature is being sold as the cure-all elixir for everything that ails state government . . . ."
But it acknowledged that "people of talent, good will and deep pockets are lining up on both sides."
From afar, I'm not sure what I think about one house instead of two.
Way back when Florida's Senate was the roadblock to a progressive, trustworthy House of Representatives, unicameralism seemed like a grand dream for this state. Now, the roles are nearly reversed and the House inspires only nightmares. To contemplate Tallahassee's lobbying corps feasting on a single-house legislature is to recall University of Florida professor Ernest Bartley explaining why, as a consultant to the Alaska statehood commission, he did not advocate unicameralism on their blank slate: "Too much to steal."
Yet Ventura is right when he points out that the bicameral system gives legislators cover to behave irresponsibly. In a single house, he argues, "every vote will have real consequences, and as a result, legislators will carefully weigh issues rather than simply fall in line behind their caucus."
So here's hoping he makes enough of a fight of it to make other states at least take notice.
Especially about the nonpartisan bit.
Florida's Legislature, for one, would be well rid of the petty fights that the Republicans and Democrats put on only because they think they have to.
Best of all, it would put a quick stop to the soft-money scandal. Without party leaders to grease with unlimited contributions, the lobbyists would have to go back to buying votes the old-fashioned way: one member at a time, $500 at a time. Truth is, many of them would be happy to see the extortion disappear.
That may be the only way to ever be rid of it.
After the House killed his bill putting a $5,000 annual limit on soft money donors, Senate Majority Leader Jack Latvala vowed to organize an initiative campaign.
"You haven't heard the last of that," he told an applauding St. Petersburg audience. "Whether we do that in the Legislature or whether we do that at the ballot box through an initiative, I'm not going to quit until we reform that process, because it's not a good process."
Last week, however, Latvala said he's been so busy trying to "make a living" and convince Senate President Toni Jennings to run for insurance commissioner that "frankly, I haven't had the time."
Meanwhile, both Florida parties have been bagging faster than they did early in the 1996-98 cycle. Since the election, at least 42 donors have already given more than $5,000 to the Democrats and 142 have given at least that much to the Republicans.
If only there were twin Jesse Venturas. Florida sure could use one.
http://www.sptimes.com/columns/dyckman.shtml
That's how Jesse Ventura became governor of Minnesota. The Reform Party candidate led a field of five with just 37 percent.
This could happen in Florida, which might make many people happy and serve others right.
The Constitution Revision Commission did a good thing in busting up the major-party cartel. But Florida needs now to provide for a general election runoff when no candidate has a majority or at least a convincing plurality.
Otherwise, Florida could be governed by people with questionable mandates or, worse, extremists of David Duke's ilk who could never win one-on-one but who might successfully exploit crowded fields.
Fear of the fringes has helped preserve Florida's post-primary runoffs despite their high costs (upwards of $4-million statewide), often pathetic turnouts (only 7.1 percent last year) and the time pressures on overseas absentee balloting.
None of these problems would apply to an instantaneous runoff. Florida legislators should be considering this, for the primaries as well as the general election, before they wake up some November morning to news that a governor or senator from the planet Mongo has been elected with only a fourth of the vote.
Instant runoffs failed in Florida's paper ballot days, when it took a week to learn who had been nominated. Today, computers and modern ballot technology could produce a consensus winner almost as soon as they told who drew the most first-choice votes.
Instant runoffs are used without problems in local races elsewhere. Voters simply mark second and third choices, or even more in crowded races, along with their first choices.
The more I hear about Minnesota and Ventura, the more I'm convinced he would have won such a runoff. An extremist like Duke, on the other hand, would have virtually no chance in an instant runoff because he would be the last choice of everyone else's supporters.
The Center for Voting and Democracy reports that the Alaska, New Mexico and Vermont legislatures considered instant-runoff voting this year but put off final action because of uncertainty over procedures and costs.
Georgia is the only state with a general-election runoff, a method chosen after the Legislature's infamous decision to make Lester Maddox governor instead of Bo Callaway, the Republican who had led with less than a majority. Now, the leading candidate must have at least a 45 percent plurality to avoid a runoff.
Ventura's wasn't the only significant less-than-majority victory last year. Republican Bill Owens was elected Colorado's governor with 48.9 percent, a 4,758-vote edge over the Democratic nominee. Previously, Connecticut and Maine have elected independent governors by less than 40 percent.
No Contest
By MARTIN DYCKMAN Associate Editor
© St. Petersburg Times, published May 30, 1999
All too often, the people of Florida have no real choice when it comes to picking their state senators and representatives. The candidates aren't running, and only profound reform would increase competition.
People who ask how an elected legislature can behave as Florida's so often does are missing an essential point.
As traditionally meant by the word "elected," Florida's Legislature isn't.
In the 11 regular campaigns from 1978 through 1998, some 35 percent of House members and 28 percent of Senate candidates ran unopposed. Another 15 percent in each chamber faced opposition only in the Democratic or Republican primaries. Half the time, at least half the population was denied the opportunity to vote.
Meaningful races are even rarer. Of the 649 House campaigns that did make it to the November ballot, merely 179 (27.5 percent) were competitive enough to be won by only 10 percentage points or less. The typical race is a blowout. Last November, half the winners won with 60 percent or more of the vote.
Poor as they are, even these statistics are inflated by the occasional years, 1982 and 1992, when redistricting created unusual numbers of open seats.
Last year, as the Democratic Party all but abandoned the House in a vain attempt to save the governor's office, only 45 of the 120 House seats were contested in November, and 52 members were elected with no opposition. The Democrats ceded 49 seats to the Republicans, who gave them only 27 free passes in return. Among the races that did appear on the Nov. 3 ballot, only 14 were tight; the GOP won those 8 to 6.
In the Senate, 11 of 21 available seats were entirely uncontested last year and only seven races made it past the primaries. Of those seven, only two -- Jim Sebesta's narrow victory over Mary Brennan for an open Tampa Bay seat and indicted Miami Sen. Al Gutman's squeaker re-election -- were even close.
"Political scientists have been worried a long time about the lack of competition," remarks Susan MacManus, professor of government at the University of South Florida. "Most everyone acknowledges that part of the turnout problem is that races aren't interesting. . . . (But) the political parties bear some responsibility for this. It's been everything about winning seats and nothing about offering people a choice."
Indeed, in the last decade Republicans, once the minority in Tallahassee, have completely turned the tables. The GOP's current 73-47 domination of the House is the precise reverse of a decade ago, and it controls the Senate 25-15 after being down 17-23.
But this supposed revolution masks the fact that, throughout, most voters had few choices. The decisive shifts came in a relative few districts where changing demographics opened the door to Republican victories or helped persuade Democratic incumbents to switch. The notion that every voter should have a voice every time was as quaint and unpopular as campaign finance reform.
The goals were chiefly to protect or seize control of the House and Senate and the perquisites and power that come with the House speakership and Senate presidency. Voters in "safe" districts -- which are the certain result of letting any legislature design its own constituencies -- continue to be taken for granted and treated accordingly.
Each party has 29 House districts that have consistently resisted the other's occasional challenges. Both sides owe them in part to the conscious "stacking" of districts along racial lines, which created sinecures for both black Democrats and white Republicans.
Incumbency, meanwhile, continues to be a large and growing financial advantage. Incumbents monopolized two-thirds of the $16.1-million raised for House races last year. Most significant was the $4.1-million that went to incumbents who were unopposed in their primaries and the $2.9-million raised by incumbents who had no opposition at all.
This is why special interests have so much influence. The money they contribute is more decisive than the electorate.
For example, though Democrats and independents account for nearly 47 percent of the voters in the district of House Speaker John Thrasher, R-Orange Park, none has ever had a chance to vote for or against him. After winning his seat in the 1992 Republican primary, Thrasher -- previously a lobbyist for the Florida Medical Association -- has been unopposed since. Term limits may force him out, but the odds against any Democrat running a credible race are so long that few if any will apply.
Eight House members, including Rep. Dennis Jones, R-Seminole, have had no opposition since 1990 or before.
Rep. Joe Arnall, R-Jacksonville Beach, who is BellSouth's chief patron in the House, had a tight primary in 1988. He had landslides in the 1988 and 1990 general elections and hasn't had an opponent since. The lobbies are one reason: the $100,000 he already had in his campaign account sent a powerful message to anyone who might have thought about qualifying against him last July.
Arnall was one of 13 House members who raised at least $100,000 before the qualifying deadline. Democrat John Cosgrove of Miami led with $285,165. Though it didn't buy him a pass, it did scare off anyone who might have a plausible chance to win. He scored 82 percent in the primary and 70 in the general election. Among the other top 12, only three drew opponents, and only one lost.
What money starts, demographics finish
By MARTIN DYCKMAN Associate Editor
© St. Petersburg Times
Since 1978, only two Republicans have run for the seat now held by Janegale Boyd, D-Monticello.
In the 20 years since I moved to south St. Petersburg, I have had only two opportunities to vote for a member of the House: when Doug Jamerson won his seat in 1982 from an incumbent who had been unopposed in 1980, and in a special election in 1994 when Rudy Bradley won the seat Jamerson had given up to be appointed commissioner of education. Neither representative was ever opposed for re-election.
Such statistics could seem to make a case in support of term limits, which will toll on 66 Florida legislators next year unless the Supreme Court discards the initiative voters approved in 1992. But few people in Tallahassee expect term limits to cause more than a momentary blip in competitiveness. If anything, even fewer seats are likely to be contested once the newcomers settle in, so long as the underlying non-competitive influences persist. Potential challengers will be strongly tempted to simply wait out the incumbents' allotted eight years.
But of course not even a glut of vacancies can guarantee effective competition and meaningful choices for the voters. Most "safe" districts will stay safe for the parties that hold them, precluding choices in November.
Special interests will scout for likely winners and move in quickly to pre-empt their loyalties.
Sen. Tom Lee, R-Brandon, who was running a grass-roots campaign in 1996, recalls that he started receiving offers of help from Tallahassee lobbyists "the day after Associated Industries took a poll showing that I was going to win."
For the voters to have choices, profound reforms must take place in the ways Florida organizes and finances its politics.
Voters approved one of the easiest last fall in the form of a constitutional amendment, recommended by the Constitution Revision Commission, that calls for all voters to participate when a primary is, in effect, the election. Had that been in effect last year, it would have opened up another 23 races in the House and three in the Senate to all voters and likely have attracted more candidates as well.
But the implementing legislation failed to pass this year. Conservative Republicans in the House don't seem to want more moderate voters (or candidates) involved in districts such as Thrasher's, Arnall's and Speaker-designate Tom Feeney's. Their bill, by equating a write-in candidacy with ballot opposition, would close a party primary to other voters when a write-in candidate qualifies -- even if that candidate is a ringer who will not be heard from again.
Voters will have another crack at fundamental reform if revision commission Chairman Dexter Douglass and like-minded members succeed in a planned petition drive for an amendment establishing a bipartisan commission to draw legislative and congressional district lines. The commission would not be so likely to design safe seats and protect incumbents. Republican pressure killed this in the CRC last year.
Florida needs to abandon single-member districts, the exclusive election system since 1982, in favor of proportional voting that would give voice to political as well as racial minorities. While single-member districting has succeeded in electing blacks, Hispanics and more women to the Legislature, it has not fostered and may actually have discouraged competition overall. More seats were contested in the 1978 campaigns than 20 years later.
In one common form of proportional voting, to elect multimember delegations, all candidates run against each other, but citizens can cast all their votes for a single candidate if they wish. Critics object that this gives extremist candidates a better chance to win. That may be so, but it is less of a danger to democracy than the slow death it is suffering now.
Despite Supreme Court rulings equating free speech with free spending, something must be done about the dominating influence of money on the Legislature. The legislators elected in 1974 spent only $1.2-million to win. Last year's winners accounted for more than $18-million, some 41/2 times as much in constant dollars, and that doesn't count unreported money the parties spent in their behalf through an advertising loophole. Legislation to shut the loophole passed the Senate this year but was dead on arrival in the House.
"I can assure you that we haven't heard the last of that," says Senate Majority Leader Jack Latvala, who promises an initiative campaign that would bypass the House leadership if they did not agree to compromise.
Florida once limited total spending for candidates, but the U.S. Supreme Court said it couldn't. Florida also forbade candidates to spend money before the mid-summer qualifying date of a campaign year, but the Florida Supreme Court unanimously overruled that, in 1977, "as unconstitutionally violative of freedom of speech rights in that it is designed primarily to be a limitation on the quantity of political speech."
The original campaign spending lawsuit was filed by one of the most public-spirited legislators of all time, the late Bill Sadowski, who argued that the prequalifying moratorium favored incumbents. So it did.
But the ironic consequences came to full fruit in 1996, when Sen. W. D. Childers, R-Pensacola, in office since 1970, raised a record $700,000 and used it to buy up, far in advance, all the political advertising time on television stations in his area. Not surprisingly, Childers easily won.
Term limits or no, Childers says he will run again next year -- as a write-in candidate, if necessary. In a state where money and special interests and party pols are robbing common people of their right to meaningful elections, few people doubt Childers would win yet again.
This is how democracy is dying in Florida. Not by inches, but by dollars.
Making the Case Against Term Limits
By MARTIN DYCKMAN Associate Editor
© St. Petersburg Times, published June 6, 1999
Early in the French Revolution, its leaders decided that the fastest way to a perfect new society was to guillotine everyone who symbolized the old. It didn't work. Radical solutions rarely do.
Florida voters acted in the same fashion, albeit bloodlessly, when they approved the "Eight is Enough" term limits initiative in November 1988. Experienced heads would be purged with no thought to who -- or what -- would replace them.
For those of us who believe the Legislature has fallen on hard times, there is no comfort in the thought that things could be worse. They will be, if the Florida Supreme Court allows term limits to take hold next year.
Few of the court's cases have been as important as the challenge to term limits. Oral arguments are set for Friday. The court should not need much time to make its decision; the issues are simple.
The most important one is not whether the voters, as the initiative's defenders tirelessly insist, have the right to be wrong.
They do, which also happens to be the core of the argument against term limits. If their constituents want to keep re-electing the likes of W.D. Childers, George Kirkpatrick and Jim Hargrett, no voters in other times or places should have the gall to tell them they can't. Rather than be depriving them of those choices, Florida should be pursuing the districting and campaign reforms that would encourage qualified, competitive opponents to these habitually unopposed grandees. But this is of course a political objection.
The constitutional issue, rather, is simply this: Regardless of whether the voters were right or wrong in ratifying the initiative, was the question put to them fairly? Or were they tricked into casting a single vote on multiple subjects -- term limits for both state and federal legislators -- which the Florida Constitution does not allow?
The court's 1992 ruling was advisory, which means the court does not have to treat it as a precedent if it does not want to. In that case, the decision was that term limits were properly a single subject for the 1992 ballot.
But the majority ignored warnings by Justices Ben Overton and Gerald Kogan that if the U.S. Supreme Court later held congressional term limits unconstitutional -- as it did -- Florida voters would be left with something they might not have wanted had the issues been on the ballot separately.
Would Floridians have voted to term-limit only their legislators if congressional limits had not been a part of it? Probably, but there is no way to be sure. FSU President Sandy D'Alemberte, whose friend-of-the-court brief posed these issues, argued that Florida legislators were collateral casualties in a nationwide campaign against Congress.
"There is no evidence of any public revulsion against the state legislators for lengthy terms and there has not been an abuse in the long-term retention of office by state legislators," he wrote. "Indeed, in Florida, the problem may be the opposite -- the rapid turnover in legislative leadership."
D'Alemberte voluntarily left the Legislature after only six years, after having worked to create Florida's current judicial system, but a strong cadre of veteran leaders remained to help Reubin Askew build his reputation as one of Florida's most effective governors.
Term limits mean that very few House members -- those who had left and come back -- would ever have more than eight years of experience. Where half the members of the 1999 House have served only four years or less (already a significant turnover), term limits mean that at least three-fourths of each new House would always be relatively inexperienced. The total turnover, ironically, could turn out to be no greater under term limits and easily could be lower, if they lead to an even lazier, risk-averse political climate. This phenomenon is evident already. Though 63 candidates already have declared for open House seats next year, only five are challenging incumbents who would be eligible to run again. The nine eligible senators are all still unopposed.
The average annual House turnover since 1992 has been 30.4 percent, which is more than the 25 percent that term limits alone would guarantee. The costly difference would come in the toll on experience and leadership. That does not mean power to the voters but power to the lobbyists and staff, who have more than enough of it already.
The legislative process is complex and subject to manipulation at scores of places in dozens of ways. Not knowing how to do this, and having only eight years to make their marks, the newcomers will depend on those who know the tricks.
The problem will not be in the Senate, where most term-limited seats are likely to be taken by term-limited House members, but in the House, where term limits will empty 55 of the 120 seats. Only the court-ordered redistrictings that ended rural control turned over more.
But even then there were still plenty of senior members to provide leadership and advice, and the same was true after other substantial turnovers in 1978, 1982 and 1992. This will not be true after November 2000, and choices will be skewed in strange ways. The speaker Republicans have chosen to install then, if they keep their majority, is one of their more extreme members, Tom Feeney of Oviedo, who left and came back and will have a rare edge in seniority. The speaker after him, Johnny Byrd of Plant City, will have been a Floridian for only 15 years and a legislator for only 6 when he is installed in November 2002 Such people used to be called carpetbaggers.
How About a Single-House Legislature?
By MARTIN DYCKMAN
© St. Petersburg Times, published August 24, 1999
They said Jesse Ventura couldn't possibly get himself elected governor of Minnesota, but he did it anyway.
Now, he's trying something that really ought to be impossible. He wants Minnesota to have a single-house, nonpartisan legislature.
I wouldn't bet against him even if nothing comparable has happened anywhere in the United States since 1934.
That's when Sen. George Norris, a self-described "New Deal Republican," persuaded Nebraskans to trade in their conventional bicameral legislature.
They had voted no to that several times before, but on the last try, Norris' popularity, the prospect of saving money at the depth of the Great Depression and two other hot ballot issues won unicameralism nearly 60 percent of the vote.
No other state, however, has come even close to following Nebraska's example, though several, including Minnesota, have flirted with it.
It is, obviously, not the sort of reform that legislatures will wish on themselves and it's too complex, mechanically, for voter initiatives.
The Florida Constitution Revision Commission toyed with the idea in 1997 before voting it down, 19 to 14.
But in Minnesota, Ventura has already succeeded in getting people to take it seriously. The House speaker, a Republican, is backing him. Opponents, including three former speakers and an ex-governor, quickly organized a political committee to fight him.
"With Jesse," said one foe apprehensively, "it's got legs."
The Minneapolis Star-Tribune conveyed grudging respect with an editorial that fairly breathed fire.
"A big-budget campaign to eliminate one house of the Minnesota Legislature began in earnest this week," the newspaper complained, "with a rush of rhetoric that would do an old-time medicine show proud. A single-house legislature is being sold as the cure-all elixir for everything that ails state government . . . ."
But it acknowledged that "people of talent, good will and deep pockets are lining up on both sides."
From afar, I'm not sure what I think about one house instead of two.
Way back when Florida's Senate was the roadblock to a progressive, trustworthy House of Representatives, unicameralism seemed like a grand dream for this state. Now, the roles are nearly reversed and the House inspires only nightmares. To contemplate Tallahassee's lobbying corps feasting on a single-house legislature is to recall University of Florida professor Ernest Bartley explaining why, as a consultant to the Alaska statehood commission, he did not advocate unicameralism on their blank slate: "Too much to steal."
Yet Ventura is right when he points out that the bicameral system gives legislators cover to behave irresponsibly. In a single house, he argues, "every vote will have real consequences, and as a result, legislators will carefully weigh issues rather than simply fall in line behind their caucus."
So here's hoping he makes enough of a fight of it to make other states at least take notice.
Especially about the nonpartisan bit.
Florida's Legislature, for one, would be well rid of the petty fights that the Republicans and Democrats put on only because they think they have to.
Best of all, it would put a quick stop to the soft-money scandal. Without party leaders to grease with unlimited contributions, the lobbyists would have to go back to buying votes the old-fashioned way: one member at a time, $500 at a time. Truth is, many of them would be happy to see the extortion disappear.
That may be the only way to ever be rid of it.
After the House killed his bill putting a $5,000 annual limit on soft money donors, Senate Majority Leader Jack Latvala vowed to organize an initiative campaign.
"You haven't heard the last of that," he told an applauding St. Petersburg audience. "Whether we do that in the Legislature or whether we do that at the ballot box through an initiative, I'm not going to quit until we reform that process, because it's not a good process."
Last week, however, Latvala said he's been so busy trying to "make a living" and convince Senate President Toni Jennings to run for insurance commissioner that "frankly, I haven't had the time."
Meanwhile, both Florida parties have been bagging faster than they did early in the 1996-98 cycle. Since the election, at least 42 donors have already given more than $5,000 to the Democrats and 142 have given at least that much to the Republicans.
If only there were twin Jesse Venturas. Florida sure could use one.
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