Florida has primary elections next Tuesday for legislative seats and local offices. The mailman must be working triple overtime, to go by the amount of flyers I’ve been getting–and almost all of them are from one of three candidates running in one race.
Heading into Tuesday’s primary, voters in state Senate District 31 have been inundated with mailings and robo-calls blasting Democrats Ken Gottlieb, Eleanor Sobel and Tim Ryan — three former state representatives locked in a tight contest to replace term-limited Senate Democratic Leader Steve Geller.
Which is my district. Being a registered Demoncrat, I’ve been getting them all for a few weeks now. And that’s a lot.
Instead, they have been sent by two electioneering communication organizations, or ECOs, third-party groups that can sidestep contribution limits and have played a major role in recent elections — like in state Sen. Alex Villalobos’ bitter 2006 reelection bid where ECOs mailed fliers pairing the Miami Republican with serial killer Ted Bundy and sent mailings depicting his challenger with rattlesnakes.
”We call it stealth campaigning,” said Susan MacManus, a political science professor at the University of South Florida. “It allows the candidate to be separate from it and let the damage be done by someone else.”
Most of the heavy hitting is coming from a pro-Sobel ECO that has dispatched several attacks on Gottlieb and Ryan along with mailings supporting Sobel; another group supports any candidate but Sobel.
With all three candidates boasting long political resumés and large campaign chests, local political observers predicted the southeast Broward district — which stretches from Hallandale Beach and Hollywood to parts of Plantation — would turn nasty.
All have raised more than $200,000, with new fundraising reports to be released Friday. Sobel leads with more than $272,000, followed by Ryan with $252,000 and Gottlieb with $215,000.
So far, most of the mud has been slung by an innocuously named group called People for a Better Florida Fund, which has generated more than half a dozen fliers on Sobel’s behalf.
And the most prominent and frequently repeated accusation flung at them (including, now, Soble)–THIS CANDIDATE GETS DONATIONS FROM BUSH-BACKING REPUBLICANS!
Accusation: In a race where Democratic Party purity has become a campaign platform, accusations that all three candidates have taken money from Republican Party donors and supporters of former Gov. Jeb Bush have been a mudslinging centerpiece.
Facts: State campaign finance reports show each candidate has received upwards of $15,000 from donors who have given to the Florida Republican Party since 2000.
But most of those contributions don’t come from big-name, deep-pocket donors as the mailings imply. The majority come from lobbying firms and groups with a history of giving to major candidates regardless of party affiliation.
People for a Better Florida Fund, which sponsors the attacks on Ken Gottlieb and Tim Ryan, also has received more than $89,000 from supporters of Bush and donors who have given to the GOP since 2000.
I will, by the way, be voting for Ryan, for the simple reason that his family was friendly with my mother when they worked in the same office building as she did, and not because I can see much difference between any of the three in any meaningful way.
