[The Man]

I live in Sarasota County, which, up until tonight, had elected exactly one Democrat in the last couple of decades I've lived here (namely, the tax collector, Barbara Ford-Coates, who's been here since before I can remember - probably before I even moved here).

Tonight we elected Democratic candidate Margaret Good to the state House of Representatives in a special election after the freshman incumbent unexpectedly retired. This wasn't the hugest shift we've seen in a special election recently, but it was still a twelve-point shift: Good won by seven percentage points; Trump had carried the district by five. Good was up against James Buchanan, son of the current U.S. representative Vern Buchanan, who has been in office since 2007.

As a result, there was a fairly vast political machine backing the younger Buchanan in this race. I didn't follow the last few days that closely, but evidently there was a Trump-style rally on Sunday featuring a guest appearance from Corey Lewandowski and "lock her up"-style chants.

I didn't see a single poll about this race, but Good's victory didn't surprise me, though I was mildly surprised that it was by as comfortable a margin as seven points. Evidently a poll a few days ago had Good up by three points, and it was clear to me that the Buchanan campaign was panicking. It was also clear that the headwinds were against them, even though I hadn't read a single news story about the election since the primary.

I was actually somewhat surprised that I got a primary ballot in the mail when my parents, who are both registered Republicans, did not. (Both my parents voted for Good in the general despite their party registration - at this point I suspect they are only hanging on to their registration out of a probably futile hope that they can serve as a brake on the Republicans' worst excesses in primary elections. They certainly didn't vote for Trump either.) The fact that the Democrats had two people - both women, incidentally - running for a vacant seat, while the Republicans could only find the scion of the current U.S. rep, certainly struck me as curious.

The second indicator was yard signs. I want to be clear: these aren't reliable evidence, particularly if you just look at them without context. In order to be able to read yard signs as an even remotely reliable indicator, you need to have familiarity with their distribution in past elections. If you see a lot of signs for a Democratic candidate in areas that didn't have them in the past, that's probably a good sign for the Democrat. But they have to be evenly distributed - if one house has twenty signs for the Democrat, that's almost completely irrelevant. It just means the Democrat had more signs printed. But if they're widely distributed in places where they weren't in previous elections, that's likely to be positively correlated with voter enthusiasm, possibly by a fairly substantial margin. Strong supporters of a candidate may be willing to put up yard signs; those who are too unenthusiastic to risk arguments with their neighbours almost certainly won't.

This election cycle, I'm not exaggerating when I say I could probably count the number of Buchanan signs I saw on one hand. Good signs were everywhere. In previous elections, the signs were usually roughly evenly split between the parties. I saw more signs for the lolbert, Alison Foxall, than I did for Buchanan. (Foxall didn't get enough of the vote to serve as a spoiler - I think it must've been about 3%. Good, from my understanding, got around 52%.) When the lolbert has more yard signs than you, that's usually not a good...erm, I'm sorry. I can't think of a way to avoid this that doesn't sound more awkward than this disclaimer. Usually not a good sign.

The third indicator was the last election combined with general trends. Trump won the district by 5% in 2016. Democrats have typically moved the needle at least 10 points in their direction. This time they moved it from -5% to +7%. That's perfectly in line with other special elections we've had.

But the fourth indicator. My god, the fourth indicator. The fourth indicator was the fucking advertising. The fucking advertising was everywhere, and it was completely one-sided, and it was absolutely fucking awful. I'm just going to copy and paste this from a comment I posted to BJ/LGM because I can't bear to think of this a second time:

...the sheer desperation and ineptitude of Buchanan’s advertising. They blanketed everything, and they did so incessantly. I have an ad blocker on my computer, but there were ads for Buchanan here, on BJ, on YouTube videos for Colbert, Trevor Noah, The Opposition. Everywhere. Constantly. Seemingly half the videos I watched had the same damn ad. All shows/sites with largely liberal audiences, too.

And it was awful. I never watched the whole thing, but it opened by name-dropping Rick Scott in a positive manner. I haven’t checked in the last couple of months, but the last time I saw, Gov. Voldemort’s approval rating was in the toilet. That seems like an enormous unforced error. They also referred to Good as a “Hillary Clinton clone”. Granted, I’m not exactly the middle of the road voter they aimed the ad at (something like that reads to me as a ringing endorsement), but… she’s hardly massively unpopular. They didn’t even open with an attack on Pelosi, whose approval rating is way lower. Amateur hour.

And then they blanketed the ad so heavily that I’m sure it just pissed off people who were on the fence. It was always the exact same ad, too. Just terrible, shoddy work.

The sheer amount of advertising read as a move of desperation to me. Like they had internal numbers that indicated they knew they were down in the polls, and they were panicking.

By contrast, I didn’t see much advertising from Good. Some people might’ve read that as a sign of weakness, but it didn’t read that way to me. They emailed me to make sure I’d voted, and there were a couple of fundraising appeals, but it was a perfectly reasonable number. If I were apolitical, I could easily see myself voting for Good just on the basis of her campaign being so much less annoying. As it was I found myself grumbling out loud at my phone in annoyance at the YouTube ads at least five times.

And I'll just close out with what I wrote there as well:

Good ran a (pardon the pun) good campaign. I didn’t see any clear unforced errors. I could easily see her going places in the Florida Democratic Party. She’s certainly done Sarasota proud.

For the first time in awhile, I have a political reason to feel proud of my hometown. This certainly bodes positively as a barometer for the future of Florida politics.