The Queen Margarette

Sometime around 2am, I’d finally had enough.  It was mid-May 2018, the first full day of my second trip to The Philippines, and despite a day that started at 6am with a 5K, (after checking into my room at 1am thanks to my host taking me a restaurant where guests dance with the chefs & servers), and ended with a drive to Lucena City - a town about four hours south of Manila, thanks to the noise in the hotel, I couldn't sleep. 

I had traveled 27 hours the day before, and after a second consecutive long day, I was beat, and by beat, I don't mean your garden variety travel tired.  No, I am talking 12 time zone jet lag/Bill Murray wandering aimlessly in Lost in Translation beat (anyone who has ever made the trip to Asia knows this movie is both non-fiction, and a rip-roaring comedy).

Unfortunately, the hotel had other plans.   Just outside my room was the Queen Margarette's pool deck, where “soothing jazz” had blared from speakers near my window since check-in.  My body needed sleep – and the jazz was not soothing as it stood between me and my one immediate goal. So, I walked to the front desk, begged them to let me sleep, but it was made clear to me:  'sorry po, the jazz stays on.'

About two hours later, jazz changed to rock love ballads of the 70s and 80s, as the hotel prepared for the breakfast buffet.  I slept maybe an hour that night, and it took my body a week to recover.  Thank God I'll never spend another night in my life in this hotel, I thought as we pulled out of the parking lot.

Good Riddance Queen Margarette.  

What I didn’t count on was God’s sense of humor.  Two weeks ago, on August 29th, I was back.  Back in Lucena City.  Back, checking-in at the Queen Margarette.

Lucena City is a place most visitors to The Philippines don’t get to once, yet here I was, back in this town for a second time.   I literally laughed out loud when I saw the Queen Margarette on the agenda, and after some protest, was assured I wouldn’t get a pool deck room again.   But as I settled into my room on the highest floor on the opposite side of the hotel from the pool, a room complete with a purple couch, and peeling paint, I found myself confronting a new enemy: A window mounted air conditioning unit that somehow caused the wall to bang on the other side of the room.  Maybe the jazz wasn't all that bad, I wondered, tossing myself to sleep.   

Thus is travel in the developing world.

How does one end up in Lucena City, not once, but twice in their life?

Back in 2013, I was nominated by my friend Chip Burpee to the American Council of Young Political Leaders (ACYPL), a bipartisan group that connects young leaders around the globe.  I was barely, but technically still young, and if I was going to end up on a delegation before I crossed the threshold from young to not young, I would likely have to say yes to the first offer.  

The call came: Philippines and Malaysia – and we are leaving in 2 months.  Now, while I have never shied away from traveling to places most avoid, these were not two countries high on my list of places to go.   I’ll admit, the more I read about Malaysia, the more excited I was (for good reason – it is a remarkable place), but even as I headed off to Manila, I was a still a little unsure about The Philippines.  I’ve written extensively about that trip, but the key takeaway was that for as much as I loved the people I met, other than a steady stream of Jamba Juice, electrolyte water, and Imodium, I basically didn’t eat for 5 days.  It was a slog.

So as I stood at the check in counter at 4:30 AM at Manila Airport (then ranked the single worst airport in the world) on December 12, 2013 to check into my flight to Malaysian Borneo, while grateful for the chance to visit, I was pretty sure I had seen The Philippines for the last time.  

But just like the Queen Margarette, God had another plan.

Four years later, I met Lord Arnel "LA" Ruanto, a young man I was assigned to mentor through the Young Southeast Asian Leaders Initiative (YSEALI), a program ACYPL helps administer.  LA is a bright and ambitious guy.  Elected to office in his hometown of Infanta, some 4-5 hours east of Manila, at the age of 21, at the time we met, LA was a town councilmember (LA now in his early 30’s, and is the recently re-elected Vice Mayor).   He had come to the US through YSEALI to learn skills that would help him in his work to train Filipino young leaders.  

He has nearly unlimited energy, an infectious personality, and through his work training young elected leaders in his own country, has built a network of friends and colleagues across the nation.  He’s the kind of person you want to root for:  innately positive, ethical, hard-working, decent, and loyal. 

During his month long stay in Tallahassee with Nikole and I, he lobbied me no fewer than 2-3 times a day to give his country another try.  “Steve, brother” he would say, “you have to come visit me – you have to let me show you the country. You will love it and The Philippines will love you. I promise.”  He wore me down,  so when ACYPL allowed me to do a follow-up trip, where I as his mentor could see the things he was working on from our fellowship, I said yes.  

Flying into Manila in May of 2018, I was admittedly a little uncertain.  I was excited to see people I had met 4.5 years earlier, and I was looking forward to seeing LA, but what I didn’t want was a repeat of 2013.  So I said to LA, I want to get out of Manila this time - a city I unfairly blamed for my Jamba Juice week.  He took the direction he took to heart, and over some 10 nights, we slept in 8 cities - often met with banners welcoming me to this city or that city, spoke to well more than a dozen groups, and met with political leaders young and old.  

It turns out he was right about his country – I hadn’t really given it a fair shot the first time around, and by the end of my second trip – notwithstanding the night at the Queen Margarette, I was officially a fan.  This time, as I left Manila, I knew it wouldn’t be my last. 

After his first trip here, and my trip to see him in 2018, LA and I stayed in regular contact - him helping me understand his country, and in return, I tried to help him think through strategy on races he worked on. In the summer 2020, LA called to tell me that he and his wife Jenny were having second kid, and "brother you will be her godfather", he declares.   How does one be a godfather to a child 10,000 miles away, I wondered before remembering my wonderful stepfather's solid life advice:  'There are 3 things you don’t say no to: Being a groomsman, a pall bearer, or a godparent.'  I said I would be honored, and in doing so, knew I was heading back.  

In August 2020, Baby Lexi was born, but thanks to COVID, the baptism would have to wait.  In addition to restrictions on in-person gatherings, going to the Philippines for foreigners wasn’t an option, unless I wanted to spend 2 weeks in a Manila hotel quarantine.   

Once the foreign travel restrictions were lifted, this whole christening evolved around my schedule.  Their family is huge, and many had to travel to get to Manila, the site of the baptism, and Infanta, LA’s hometown, and site of the party, for this event.  My initial plan of going in the late spring was quashed by a series of special sessions of the Florida Legislature.

LA offered a date:  August 25^th, Lexi’s 2^nd birthday, and fortunately, it fit neatly into a window in my schedule. Since I was the one thing standing between Lexi and God's blessing of her soul, I quickly booked a flight.  As LA's Mom said to me at the ceremony, "we've been waiting for you to get here," and it was time to get on with it. 

Unfortunately, Nikole couldn’t make this trip, but joining me in Manila would be my dear friend Numan Afifi, a YSEALI colleague of LA, who had also spent a month with us in Tallahassee.  Courage is a word over used in politics, but courage is the only word applicable to Numan’s work.  More on him in a future piece.

This trip had four goals:  Baptize Lexi, visit LA” s hometown of Infanta (more on this in another piece), do a few meetings/roundtables with young leaders, and use the time to be intentional about growing my own network there, and hopefully find a few projects LA and I can work on together in future years.  

The night I landed, at nearly midnight local time, after 29 hours of travel, rains from a nearby tropical system pounded the town.  I was the literal last person off the flying greyhound bus that was my Korean Air flight, and as such, and after an hour of navigating the commotion of Manila immigration - I walked the 100 yards or so to where arriving cars wait, and there was LA, with a small entourage, recording every moment.  We left the airport, and drove immediately into a crush of humanity.  Ah yes, Manila, just as I remembered you. 

Most days were a whirlwind – a mix of reuniting with friends from previous trips and meeting new ones.   We kept a ridiculous pace – smashing what would normally take two weeks into one, requiring us to spend each of the seven nights I was in the country in a different bed.   The only way to pack so much into the schedule, yet deal with the production-choking morning Manila traffic was to start the day close to the first meeting, which meant ending the day somewhere different each night.  It was an amazing trip – but vacation this was not.  

That being said, traveling in The Philippines as an American is a truly wonderful experience.  The ties between our two countries date back well over 100 years, and relationship between our two countries is vitally important to both.  The slogan the US Embassy in Manila uses - Friends, Partners, Allies - is truly more than just words.  There is in fact a deep shared history - particularly between The Philippines and my now home state of Florida, which was founded at roughly the same time, by roughly the same people, as Manila; and which was part of the Spanish empire for nearly as long as The Philippines.  

Sadly, most Americans aren't aware of these ties, but when one spends time there, it becomes obvious just how important the relationship is for everyday Filipinos.  Culturally, the place leans to the west, and with many everyday Filipinos have family in the US, the idea of America is very much the aspiration. 

For LA, a kid from a small, rural, and fairly poor town, being selected to spend time in the US as a YSEALI fellow was a tremendous honor – not just for him, but for his friends, his family, and the place where he was from.  And as I realized over the last few days of this trip, even more than on the last, me being there with him was also a big deal.  Not many Americans show up in Infanta, or Lucena City - and even fewer show up for the reasons I was on this trip.    

After a few nights in Metro Manila, we woke up on Sunday morning, August 29^th in his hometown, after a rager of a party at his house.  Following a night of the local hooch, karaoke, and conservatively a 1,000 selfies with LA's family, friends, and political supporters, we were headed to Lucena City, the capital city of LA’s province, for a series of talks, and for me to meet one LA’s political clients, the Governor of Quezon Province, Helen Tan.   

But before Lucena, it was time for LA to show us his home.  Numan and I were met by a small party at the town's Jollibee, the nation's ubiquitous fast food chain (and of course, banners - apparently roughly 40 in total in the town - see below).   We visited the fishing port, one of the city’s main economic drivers – and the nearby slum where many who work the port live.  We got halo halo at a beachfront stand, toured downtown, and saw the council chamber where he presides over city council meetings (in the Philippines, the Vice Mayor runs the council meetings).  We visited his high school, toured his local cathedral, and visited with everyone he knew.  For 24 hours, Numan and I were minor celebrities in a corner of the world most Filipinos couldn't find on a map.  

I could have stayed there for a week, but the show had to go on.  Four more hours down the road, we arrived that night back at the Queen Margarette, where the next day I would give a talk with LA under an 8-foot-tall banner of my own head – as club music from a fashion show in the next room pounded into our meeting room.  

For me, it was a chance to do what I loved – interact with political types in a foreign land, talk about the country I love,  listen and learn as they talked about theirs, and to brag about my friend.  For LA, this conference was a big deal – a chance to further cement his relationships among a constituency vital for anything he might do politically outside of his town, as well as for him to brag about his friend.  But what mattered -- for both of us, is we did it together.  

Bourdain was right when he said, “Filipinos are probably the most giving people on the planet,” and that spirit is evident in LA.  When I complained to his sister that he was demanding to pay for literaly everything on my trip, she was unsympathetic, told me I didn't get it -- and that one day, maybe I would understand.  It was the least he could do, she said, to show generosity for me making the trip.  When I pushed back, she pushed back 'Get over it Steve - it is what Filipinos do,' she told me one more time, as I sheepishly stopped protesting.  Bourdain, as usual, had nailed it. 

But the funny thing is, I was absolutely the one getting the bigger gift.  My life is fuller in so many ways because of my relationship with the country, and the many Filipinos who have become friends.  The author Miriam Adeney said of travel that "you will never be completely home again, because part of your heart will always be elsewhere.  That is the price you pay for the richness of loving and knowing people in more than one place."   

LA has ensured a small part of me will always be in that corner of the world.   Not only did he help me fall in love with his place, thanks to him and his wife, my own life is forever connected with a sweet little girl who lives next to a rice field in one of the most beautiful corners of the world I've ever seen, an honor I will treasure for as many days as I have left on this Earth. 

The Philippines isn’t an easy place to travel.  Getting there from the east coast of the USA is a 24-hour event if you are lucky.  Manila airport is chaotic, and the chaos only grows when you drive into the city.  Some have ranked Manila traffic as the worst in the world, and while I haven’t yet been to India, it is certainly the worst I’ve ever seen.   The city is gritty, poverty is ubiquitous, and in many places, even little things like brushing your teeth have to be done with some caution.  Tropical it is - Cabo San Lucas it is not. 

Getting around the country is even harder - distances that would take an hour or two in the US often take a half a day or longer.  Traveling there requires patience and humility, and the dependence on the good will of  strangers in a foreign land can leave you feeling vulnerable.  It also forces you to deal with your own privledge, and to reckon with the randomness of the birth lottery.  If a walled-off all-inclusive resort in the Caribbean is your idea of the perfect vacation, the Philippines is not your destination.  Those places ensure enjoyment in part by protecting guests from seeing what is around them -- by comparison, The Philippines just smacks you in the face.   

That being said, given a choice, give me the latter every day of the week- and I wish more Americans would do the same.  Perspective is healthy.

I know this:  LA is family.  Watching him shine on stage all week was good for my own soul, and if my presence helped shine the light a little brighter on him, or to validate him in some other way, that is a role I am blessed to play.  God has a plan for him – maybe Mayor – maybe Congress – maybe Governor – only God knows, but I know this, part of my purpose going forward is helping him figure all of that out, and to show up when my presence helps.   If along the way, I get to see a little girl as she grows up...and maybe drink more of the local stuff with the Infanta locals, well, that is all just a bonus.

And since his future will almost certainly run through Lucena City, no matter what he does, I know I have not spent my last night at the Queen Margarette. We’ll be back, both for him, and for me. 

Just next time, I’ll bring ear plugs (and hopefully Nikole).  

Thanks for everything LA.  Love you brother.  I am a truly blessed man. 

(Below - Me, Numan Afifi, Lord Arnel "LA" Ruanto on the beach in Infanta - me wearing the lei I was given before a talk the three of us gave to young leaders in Infanta)

Golf in the Philippines - and meeting Ruthie

Note - This is first of several things I am writing about my recent trip to the Philippines, not all of which will be orginally published here.  I will post a link to the others as they are published.

It started out as a simple ask:  While I’m in Manila, I’d love to play the little golf course around Intramuros.  

Intramuros is the old walled city of Manila, founded and built at roughly the same time as my Florida hometown of St. Augustine.  However, unlike St. Augustine, much of the original wall of Intramuros is still standing, and thanks to lax zoning regulations, a large portion of it is used to frame a small golf course, where the walls are very much in play.   Since they had night golf, I figured we could knock it out one evening after a day of meetings - and maybe I could add Asia to the list of places where I have a birdie.

Early Wednesday morning, on the way to the hotel from the chaos of arrival pick-up at NAIA (the airport), LA - the young man I mentor and reason for the trip says to me that the course is closed the only night we could make it work.

No biggie I say…golf is literally the last reason I’m there.  I had come to give a few talks, for a bunch of meetings, and for his daughter Lexi's christening, for whom he'd ask me to serve as Godfather.  “No, we’ll find time for you to have golf,” he says in response.  I’ve made the trip for him, and LA is determined to make my trip worthwhile.   Golf he promised - and golf I’d play.  At this point, I was his guest, and as anyone who has been to to the Philippines, you'd know that was the end of that.

By Thursday afternoon, the game is set – the next day, Friday morning, I would be teeing off at 630AM at Forest Hills, a Nicklaus design some 15 minutes…no 30…no 45…roughly an hour outside of Quezon City in metro Manila, where we are staying Thursday night (if you have ever spent time in the developing world, you’ll understand).   

LA has actual work to do, so he arranges a car to take me out to the course, and in the predawn Manila night, we head east to the course. 

In that part of the nation, there is a mountain range that runs right down the middle of the island of Luzon – the largest of the 7,000 islands that make up the country.  Driving east from Manila, the course is set just as the land starts to climb vertically from the otherwise largely flat Metro Manila area.  Development continues to move eastward into the mountains, and the course is basically right where development ends and the jungle begins– but getting there requires navigating all of the humanity of that side of Manila.

The region has been trying to widen the roads to deal with an ever-growing population – and an even faster growing infrastructure problem, and on the road to Antipolo – the last town on the Manila side of the mountains, the telltale signs of Manila infrastructure projects are obvious:  a road widened from 2 lanes to 6 lanes, then back to 2 with no warning (or merge zones) – and of course my favorite, new lanes of traffic paved around utility poles that were not moved before widening, making the new lane useless. 

Thank God for Philippines time, I think to myself, because it will be a miracle if we make our tee time.  

A litlte over an hour after leaving the hotel, we hang a left off the main road, climb into a development, and arrive at Forest Hills clubhouse, an imposing, largely open-air structure, and very much the centerpiece of this club.  It is here I meet Roger, my host, and a local contractor who is a friend of a friend of a friend.  I suspect he was as unsure of how he ended up with me in his group, as I was how he ended up my host.

We head to the first tee, me with a dozen used Titleists, and a glove Roger was kind enough to buy for me.  For a few minutes, since we only had one bag, I thought I was playing off Roger’s clubs, but right before we take the tee, a set of clubs arrive – Roger’s son’s clubs I later learn, along with Ruthie, my caddie for the day.   To get a sense of Ruthie, she was barely taller than my driver.  To say I underestimated her caddying skills would itself be a massive understatement. 

Let’s just say my expectations for the day were low.  I hadn’t hit a ball in nearly a month, was still dealing with jet lag, and probably slept four hours the night before.  I memorialized this feeling on Twitter as we pulled up to the club: “It’s 530a, and I’m going to play golf in tennis shoes, whatever rental clubs the local course has, a dozen used (& likely range) balls & no glove. Let’s have a day!,” to which my friend Mark responded, “guaranteed to be one of the best rounds of your life.”  Sure I thought, my main goal at the moment was not embarrassing myself, or any of the people who had gone above and beyond to get me on a course.

For today’s purposes, Roger and I were in a cart with our clubs, and Ruthie was walking.  I stretched for about 60 seconds and shot-gunned what was left of my coffee.  Ruthie hands me a driver I've never before touched in my life, and a plastic tee.  I pegged a ball in the ground, took one uncommitted practice swing, and somehow, fully expecting to make a mess of the tee shot, I hit one about 270 down the right side of the fairway.  Everyone is impressed, no one more than me.  Sometimes all it takes is embracing lowered expectations. 

I get to my ball feeling pretty good about myself.  Ruthie had somehow beaten me to it – and announces I have 130 – even though I only have about 115 according to the yardage marker.  Uphill – and humid she says, and hands me a wedge.  I made a confident swing, and promptly top it about 50 yards – followed by a bladed wedge into the back bunker.  Clearly just need to loosen up, I think to myself jumping into that greenside bunker.  

But alas, it gets worse.. 

I proceed to top my driver on the second hole, followed by topping my second shot – and blading my 3^rd.  I am completely lost.   I’ve topped or thinned 5 shots in a row, and at this point, I am apologizing to Roger and his friend Alan, our other playing partner, for ruining their morning.  I can see a look of fear in Ruthie’s eyes – she knew this was going to be a long day. 

I eventually top my way to the green, leaving myself 20-feet for a double-bogey 6 after not getting a single shot more than 3 feet off the ground.  I read it as just outside left edge.  I asked Ruthie – who shook her head disapprovingly.  She points at the middle of the cup.  I play it straight, and watched it break right as I expected – and just as I am getting ready to ask Ruthie what happened, it breaks back left and drops in the center of the cup.

Damn Ruthie, that’s impressive. I never saw that second break. 

We get to 3, a short uphill par 4, and just like on one, I pound a drive to where I have a short pitch shot.  Then it happened again – I blade the thing over the green.  WTF I say to myself, if anything my misses tend to be heavy – I had no idea what was happening.   Then right there in the middle of a fairway carved out of the mountain jungle, I remembered something – in America, I am an average height guy – but in the Philippines, I am probably 6 inches taller than most.  

Alas, if Roger’s son’s clubs were standard length in the Philippines, no wonder I can’t make any contact – I was playing with clubs a solid inch or two shorter than mine.  Only one way to test the theory:  on the next tee box, the 180 yard 4^th hole,  I pull 7 iron – squat down a lot more than normal in my stance and absolutely flushed one.  Granted it landed 15-20 yards short, humidity Ruthie reminds me (and dead golf balls) as she tells me I should have hit 6, but regardless, I’m fist-bumping Roger for the fact it was airborne. 

Between my adjustment, and a text tip from a professional friend of mine to swing a little steeper, I start hitting the ball well.   I still can’t figure out what irons to hit, but thankfully Ruthie has figured out my game very quickly.   Turns out she’s caddied there for more than 20 years, and when i ask, she admits plays herself, every Monday if she can, when the course is open to employees.  We get on a nice run of pars.  My first impression of her was 100% wrong – she’s an absolute pro out there. 

We get to 9, a 400 or so yard uphill par 4, and I’m feeling it, but I still don’t have a birdie.  After a solid drive, I have maybe 125 in, and as I stand over the ball with a wedge, Ruthie stands there silently with a 9 iron in her hand – close enough that it was obvious she was protesting my club choice.  I hand her back the wedge, grab the nine and hit it about 6 feet from the pin, and after another great read from Ruthie, and I had my first birdie of the day – and first one in Asia.   Ruthie gives me a fistbump.    

I don’t know Ruthie’s personal situation, but I have a hunch.  Given her work experience, I guessed we were roughly the same age.  She told me she lived in nearby town and based on the area we had driven through to get there, her town was like most in the nation:  gritty and poor.  Even middle class in The Philippines would be considered poverty in the US, and I doubted a caddie earned a middle-class salary.    In The Philippines – the reality of poverty is inescapable – there are no walled resorts to hide tourists from it, no barriers to shield it.  For me, when I travel to places like this, it is always the thing I struggle with – balancing my own blessing of winning the birth lottery, with those who have no choice but to hustle day after day, hawking things in the market, or in Ruthie’s case, chasing a guy around like me – carrying dirt in a Hello Kitty bag to fill my divots. 

Roger is a truly gracious host.  Turns out he is from a town I had visited on a previous trip and had been to the US many times.  By the back nine, he’s offering to take me out again before heading home – as is Ruthie, who is clearly a much bigger fan of the second 18 at Forest Hills, a course designed by Arnold Palmer.  I truly hope next trip I can take them both up on the offer.

Other than a single time, a misclub on a long par 3 13^th where I didn’t ask Ruthie first and promptly airmailed the green into the shit at the edge of the jungle (she says “you hit 4 Mr. Steve – you should have hit 5 or 6.), I don’t hit a single shot on the back nine without checking with Ruthie first, her guiding me to 2 more birdies, and keeping me from doing dumb things that would lead to big numbers.  She's easily saved me 5 or 6 shots in this round.

We get to the final hole, and if there was ever a classic “Jack Nicklaus” finishing hole, it is 18 at Forest Hills.  A long par 4, the tee shot calls for a cut, and the second is uphill to a green sloped in a way that a high fade would stop on a dime, and a draw would kick left and down a slope, leaving the player with a tricky chip shot.

I don’t hit a cut, so my high draw tee shot left me with an awkward second, and in my attempt to hit the shot Jack designed, I cold pushed into a deep greenside bunker, where a tough shot still left me with 25 feet uphill from the fringe for par.   I’d spent the last few holes thanking Ruthie for her patience and help, and as she was cleaning my clubs and getting ready for her afternoon group, I realized I needed her help one last time on that tricky green.  A ball right and be sure to get it there, she says.  As soon as I hit it, I knew it was going in. 

Quickly after we all congratulated each other on a nice round, the driver rushed me off.  I had a speech to give in 30 minutes, and well, it was an hour away.  Downtime tends to be non-existent for me on these trips.   But I did ask for a few seconds to grab a quick photo with the best greens-reader that side of the International Date Line.  Fortunately, Ruthie agreed. 

I ended up with a pretty good score for the day, but the score didn’t really matter.  Mark was right – it had been one of the greatest rounds of my life.

The Question of Home

Driving down I-57 last week from Chicago, I became strangely emotional.  I was headed to a place that was part of my life for 47 years -- a place quite literally woven into my DNA, and I was likely going for the last time.  This trip had weighed on me for weeks, and now it was here.  I wasn’t ready, not even close. 

I’ve never had a good answer to the question: “where are you from?”

I was born in Kankakee, a town about an hour south of Chicago, moved to Florida when I was nearly ten, went to school first in St. Augustine – then in Jacksonville (while living in St. Augustine), attended college in Tennessee, then came back to St. Augustine – got married, then moved to Tallahassee.  I am a Floridian, I've lived in Tallahassee longer than anyplace, but I moved here as an adult, and I am not of Tallahassee in any real way. I often answer the question by saying I'm a bit of a mutt. 

For me, each trip back to Kankakee is like entering a time warp.   A once thriving, midwestern blue-collar factory town feels to me frozen in about 1985, roughly the time the long promised middle-class prosperity of industrial rust belt America largely disappeared.  Jobs and people went away, and what was left stagnated, then atrophied.  In my childhood, there was a bumper sticker that you’d see around town: “Don’t turn the lights off, I am still here,” but even many of those people eventually moved, or just died.

Kankakee on a paper isn’t the kind of place many feel sentimental about. Charitably, one might describe it as a bit rough around the edges -- though in reality, it is just rough.  Even in her better days, it was a hard-scrabble place, where tough guys did tough work.  But its economy was highly dependent (arguably completely dependent) on manufacturing and industrial work, so when those jobs moved south or overseas, like a lot of midwestern towns, the city really took it on the chin.  A once proud place fell so low it became a joke – a literal joke.  After being named the worst place in America to live in 1999, David Letterman as a joke sent the town two gazebos, so Kankakee would at least be the town of two gazebos.  The bit was funny, but the joke stung, and fair or unfair, it left a mark.

Unfortunately, the Letterman joke, and the image of “worst” stuck – and has proved hard to shake.  In fairness, the data about the town isn’t great: Kankakee’s population is down 20% from when we moved in the mid-80s, median household income is barely half of the statewide average, nearly 30% of residents live below the poverty line, and the violent crime rate is 3x the national average.   The county ranks 88^th out of 102 in Illinois in health outcomes, and both opioid abuse and deaths from drug abuse numbers are substantially higher than the national average – numbers likely even higher within the City of Kankakee.  Driving around town, all my wife could comment on was the number of bars, seemingly one on every corner.   This is not a place that, on a surface level, conveys much sense of hope.   If all you knew about the town was stuff learned in a quick google search, odds are high you aren’t getting off the interstate, and if you do get off, you are locking the car doors until you get back on.

The landmarks of my youth are still there – the places I went to school, the church we called home, the houses we lived in, the YMCA where I played basketball, the golf course where I learned to play, the parks where we played, and of course, the Dairy Queen whose opening each year signaled the start of spring.  They are all a little more worn, but every old landmark is still there, largely – if not completely unchanged.  There are many street corners in town that if you closed your eyes in 1986 and opened them in 2022, other than more modern cars, and sadly, fewer open stores, nothing would really be different.   I remember a window of time between a trip I made after going to the Obama HQ in Chicago in 2008, and a trip I made in 2017, where the same street light post was bent over in the same way – unfixed for a decade (or more).  

One other landmark stood the test of time:  1346 Blatt Blvd.  

The reason why I was there was the same reason I had been coming back for the 37 years since we moved: a single-story brown brick house on Blatt Blvd in neighboring Bradley, the home in the town my grandparents bought in the 50s – the same home my grandmother lived in until her death this year.  

Throughout the 47 years of my life, there was one true and absolute constant:  Marge Ryan, my grandmother, lived in that house, a house that was literally a direct line back to my childhood.

Other than a few pieces of furniture and modernized TVs, the house looked just as it did in my first memories.  Much of the furniture remained unchanged, the stove dated back to somewhere around my birth, and on this trip, just like every other trip since my earliest days as a child, the toys of my youth were on the floor in the basement, waiting for my return.  

We were there as a family to say our final goodbyes to her, to that house, and in many ways, a big chunk of our collective lives.  She was the last of a family to call the Kankakee “metroplex” home, the last string tying me to the town of my birth.

My grandmother was a remarkable lady.  She was the first in her family to leave the farm, first in her family to seek advanced schooling, and later, the first woman in her family to have a career of her own outside the home or farm, and eventually, the first to send kids to college.  At the age of 18, this girl of Cabery, IL – population 300 – started a career in nursing, a career that between actual work, and later volunteering, spanned 80 years.  80 years -- it is hard to wrap my head around that.

My grandfather grew up quite poor, the son of a railroad worker, Papa helped support the family as part of a band in his youth, going on himself to join the railroad – then serve in Iran during WWII, before spending a career as an engineer for the Illinois Central railroad, who for a while piloted the famous City of New Orleans train, memorialized in a song that gave Kankakee a little fame.  They were the quintessential Greatest Generation couple.

They were a two-income family at a time when those weren’t really a thing.  They bought a house and put two kids through college, something my mother often notes wasn't an option for her or her brother -- they were going, and they were finishing.  It isn't lost on me that these two, from their humble beginnings, ended up with a grandson who worked for a President, thus in their cases, proving true the basic promise of America.  

I am fortunate to be old enough to have real memories of my grandfather.  He was a big man, in more ways than one, and other than some competition from his dog, I benefited greatly from being his first grandkid. Once he snuck me on the train for a day, which for a six-year-old growing up in a train town, might have been the coolest thing any kid ever go to do in the history of time (and I am sure completely illegal).  But not long after that momentous day, the cigars he smoked caught up with him, and we lost him to cancer.  My grandmother, then 61 in 1981, and married for 39 years, was a widow.  It was the first death I had to process as a kid.

The next eight years were a whirlwind of change for our family.  We moved to Florida, my parents got divorced, my mother re-married (to an amazing and wonderful man), followed by her brother, my only Uncle, Bob Ryan, contracting, then dying from AIDS.   Staring at 70, a widower in Bradley, IL with her family largely in Florida, and having faced the horror of burying her own child, no one would have blamed her for feeling sorry for herself.   But giving up wasn’t in her nature – and she lived another 32 years, virtually all of it productively and independently - and over those next 32 years, periodically, I would show up in town. 

It was time for one more trip.  Nana passed away in January, but to give everyone in the family time to make the trip, the service was put off until late June.  I planned a week up there to pitch in cleaning the house.  If Kankakee was a time warp, 1346 Blatt Blvd was a time capsule.  It was already of a different era when I was a kid, but time in that house just stopped when my Papa died in 1981.   As an example, when I was there in 2017, Nana asked me to get something down off a shelf in the garage.  When I got on the ladder, I found on a bundle of license plates covered in literally inches of dust.  Turns out my grandfather had saved every license plate from his life and stuck them up on that shelf.  It was as much of a surprise to her as it was to me.

The house was a memorial to their life together, and in many ways, a memorial to him.  The basement – a 1960s/70s version of a mancave, other than being occasionally dusted, was completely unchanged.  Bottles of liquor remained in their 1980 condition.  Reel to reel music tapes on a shelf, and a record player sat behind the bar. Various TVs from different eras littered the floor, and taking up nearly one wall, a display my grandparents had made to memorialize their trip around the world, including a world map plotting all their flights, all their bag tags and boarding passes, post cards from foreign places in foreign times, currency, etc.  I believe my passion for travel to exotic places started by studying that map as a child and looking at all their pictures.

My grandparents were both children impacted deeply by The Depression, and like many of that era, they threw away very little -- you never know when you might need a mason jar – or a hundred mason jars.  For example, they kept every manual from every appliance they bought, including long obsolete things, such as the “Warm Morning Incinerator” in the basement, whatever the heck that is.  

They had unused gifts on random shelves, newspapers from notable dates stuck in rafters and in closets, and I suspect every birthday or holiday card they ever received.  Nana kept all Papa’s railroad logs, every camera he ever owned – as well as slides, slide machines, and dark room materials.  And the house was littered with newspaper clippings, photos, and countless trinkets from a lifetime of travel to places that their parents likely couldn’t have even dreamed of.   I am 100% confident there was some priceless thing we took to Goodwill, but the amount of stuff in that house was too overwhelming to properly process.

Yet despite its dated condition, and general lack of most modern conveniences, there was always something soothing about going to that house.  It was a constant in a fast-paced life, a comfortable place of refuge, a throwback to a simpler era, and as I’ve come to realize as I got older, a guidepost on my own search for home.

On a trip to see her in 2017, I put my Nana in the car, and we spend the day driving.  I wanted to hear her stories, so we just drove, driving to Cabery, to the church where she was married, as well as my great grandmother’s house, another place that is but a flickering memory of my childhood.  We visited the graves of Nana’s grandparents, and the farms of her sisters.   We drove out to her old golf course, past the homes and schools of my childhood, and dropped in on my parent’s old next-door neighbor.  What started out as a trip to get her out of the house and talking, turned into a trip that helped me make sense of my own life.  As a dear friend told me that night over text, at a certain point in life, you have to go back to the beginning to understand your own journey.  

On this trip, I began to understand there was a lot more of that town in me than I realized.   Even though I love the state I call home, the truth is for a lot of reasons, I never really adjusted to the culture as a kid after we moved.  Maybe it was the sentimental thing of close childhood friends I’ve long since lost, or the memories of my father before we moved, or the fact I’ve never really gotten over the fact AIDS stole my only Uncle from me as a kid, but for whatever the reason, for all its rust, there is something about the town.   

For most of my high school, college, and even early adult years, in the back of my mind, I kind of thought I would go back. Maybe, I thought, maybe I could be a part of change, part of a restoring the place I remembered as a kid.  But now with my lone tie to the community gone, so was any reason I ever had for going back.  Whether I wanted to or not -- and I didn't, I was now facing, as a good friend of mine called it, that feeling of finality.

I knew that besides making peace with Nana’s passing, I needed to make peace with my relationship with the community. I walked around the old neighborhood and visited parks.  I went and played golf at the course I grew up at – birdieing the 5th hole that drove me nuts when I was a junior player -- and birdieing the bizarre "island fairway" 17th hole that drove my Dad nuts, and even got out to the course where my Nana played – learning, contrary to my childhood understanding, she played at a truly stout golf course, and after talking to a long time staffer, surprising to me and most who knew her, that she was apparently a rather fierce competitor in the ladies’ league.   

We ordered pizza from the childhood pizza place (this was a mistake), ordered lunch from Nana’s favorite sandwich shop, drove by my dad’s old office, went the places my older brother and sister took me to as a child, and visited my dad’s favorite old Dairy Queen – three times.  My phone is littered with pictures of things and places, weathered memories of both a childhood lived, and a lifetime coming back.   I would find myself getting emotional at the oddest times and places, as I felt a pressure to find that peace, even though I am still not quite sure I am making peace with.   

On my second to last night, we ended up at a new little brewery, located in a rough old building, down by the river.  Inside, the brewery was bright, an old spot reborn, and in it, a young bartender who was optimistic.  She said notwithstanding the admittedly very real problems in town, young people were bringing a new energy to the town, and as I drove around the next day, thinking of what she said, I started to see something new.  

I noticed the pride of a stubborn place showing up in yards that were well-kept, even in communities where the homes were in rough shape.   The city invested in new public spaces downtown, a farmers’ market on weekends, and even hung some of those outdoor party lights over side streets and took some other steps to make downtown look a little nicer.  There were new buildings at an old factory, more businesses downtown – not a lot, but more, and other signs of economic life.  South Beach it wasn’t, but maybe it wasn’t as stuck as I thought.  

Furthermore, thanks to the investment of a good friend of mine, there is a burgeoning solar industry taking shape, creating both predictable income streams for farmers, and jobs for the county’s blue-collar workforce.  Sure enough, looking up some stats, unemployment rates, while still higher than the national average, were significantly lower than a decade previous.    Despite the myriad of problems that remained, things didn’t just look better, they were in fact, objectively better.  The label of 1999 still stings, but it no longer applies.

That last full day felt a bit in slow motion.  We finished packing up the house to the best of our abilities, watching the time capsule of my youth turn slowly empty.   Nonetheless, treasures kept appearing – more from my grandfather’s collection of art from his time in Persia – my great uncle, who died in WWII, his service flag with 48 stars – and we even had our own little Antique Roadshow moment when we realized hidden behind a framed poster were signed photos from a well-regarded photographer – photos none of us had ever seen. 

After dinner, Nikole and I ended up back at that brewery, and eventually, a wine and whiskey bar in downtown – more signs of that youth-driven renewal.   It seems, maybe that is the town’s hope, not a return to industrial glory, but instead as something new – a gritty, yet uniquely authentic, affordable, and comfortably diverse place for younger people who can work remotely from Chicago, as well as a decent place to retire.  Just like so many of the once dying old mill towns of Western North Carolina, the old school nature of Kankakee has real appeal to many.  It did feel like things, albeit slowly, were pointing in a better direction, and for the first time in a long time, I could leave feeling better about Kankakee, even if I wasn't ready to let go myself.

The next morning, we said goodbye to Nana.  The preacher kicked off the service by noting that Nana had lived so long that she was alive from day one of the lives of everyone in that room, a remarkable testament to her longevity.   We all told our stories, went to lunch with distant cousins and old friends, and then drove by 1346 Blatt so I could walk through the house one last time before heading to the airport. 

Driving north, I thought back on the smart observation from the friend mentioned above – that at some point in life, you have to go back to understand your own journey – and what is true is so much of who I am points back to that house on Blatt Blvd, and the example of a lady who had her own career -- even when society told her that wasn’t her place – someone who was comfortable with who she was and could hold their own almost anywhere.   She loved a son who was gay, at a time when too often that wasn’t the case – and bounced back from the trauma of losing him.  She was tremendously resilient – living longer widowed than she was married – and she was married for a long time.  She was fiercely independent, quietly competitive, blunt yet supportive, and wonderfully adventurous in her own way (even if I still struggle seeing Marge Ryan in India or Thailand).  She didn’t march to the beat of a drummer – she was, in fact, the drummer.  

For me, celebrating her life was easy, even if saying goodbye is hard– she lived nearly 102 years, almost all of it with health and independence.  You can’t ask for anything more than that out of one life.

Yet at the same time, that peace I was hoping to find, the peace to leave the town behind proved elusive.  

Maybe one day, I'll go home again to make sense of that.  Maybe.

All along the southbound odyssey, the train pulls out at Kankakee, rolling along past houses, farms and fields, passing trains that have no name...  

Good night, America, how are you?  Say, don't you know me? I'm your native son.

Dear Florida Democrats, 2022 Version.

Dear Democrats:  

Let’s have an honest conversation about 2022 here in Florida.

I get asked all the time how I feel about Florida.   In a lot of ways, it feels rather deja vu.  Fifteen years ago, I got the same questions, phrased the same way, because well, we were in the same place.  

In 2002, Republicans swept the Cabinet, followed two years later by a 5 point Presidential loss, a US Senate loss, and Democrats at their lowest points in history in both chambers of the legislature.  I’ll never forget my then incredibly able deputy, Tara Klimek, pointing out to me that the share of Democrats in the legislature then in Florida was actually lower than the share of Democrats in the South Dakota legislature.   That was bad.

It should also be noted that soon thereafter Tara went to law school, and now is an incredible lawyer.   Maybe I should have followed…but, I digress.

We came out of 2004 and had a pretty good run, winning 3 of 6 statewide races in 06 and 08, including the Presidential, and picking up 10 GOP seats in the Florida House, and seats in both the Florida Senate and in Congress.  2010 sucked everywhere – but then we did pretty well again in 2012.

Back in 2005, I went over to the Florida Democratic Party and ran the State House caucus, and as you can imagine, I got a lot of advice (politics is not a career that is low on outside input), most of it lining up in the bucket of “Democrats need to think outside the box more to win.”  But here was the problem:  the issue wasn’t that we needed to think outside the box – the issue was we didn’t even have a box to think outside of.  By the way, if you think the Democratic Party is a mess now, you should have seen it in 2005.   We literally needed to build a box. 

Longtime readers of this here ole blog wouldn’t be surprised to know that I wrote like a 50-page memo of things that I thought we needed to do, because that is what I do.   I sent it to my dear friend/mentor/old boss/guy I used to talk to on the phone 12x a day Dan Gelber, who read it and said “that’s great Steve – no one will read it, and no one could actually do all those things.  So go pick 3 things and let’s figure out how to do those things right.”   He was right – all we could do was to put ourselves in the best place to succeed by building our programs on a solid foundation – and giving ourselves a chance to win.  And that’s what we did.   

And that is kind of where we are today.  Notwithstanding the hard work of people who have taken on the absolutely miserable and thankless task of being Chair or working the Florida Democratic Party – nor the people who work for and fund the various outside groups, we are once again at a place where the question isn’t so much how or can we win in 2022, but what do we need to do to put ourselves in a competitive position.  

This blog is my attempt to lay out those things that I believe we need to do to put ourselves in a place to succeed – and I couch it this way because in politics, there is so much you can’t control – and often in midterms, the most important factor will likely be the standing of the President.  For example, do I think either Sink or Crist wins in a world where President Obama is at say, 46, 47, or 48% approval, compared to the low 40s in 2010 and 2014?  I do. But those aren’t things you can control, and when you are losing in states like Maryland, you are probably losing almost everywhere.  

So back to focusing on what we can control.  I believe if we get these things basically right, Democrats will put themselves in play with opportunities – and if we don’t, well it will be a hard year.  

(and before someone e-mails me/tweets me with the “why are you giving away the plan” – first, this isn’t a plan, and secondly, the Republicans already know all this stuff).

One other caveat – I will use the word “party” a lot – but in our case, I don’t just mean the Florida Democratic Party or the Democratic National Committee – I mean literally everyone engaged in the effort to help elect more Democrats in Florida.  

One – Change the Electorate. 

If we as a party literally only did one thing this year, that one thing should be register voters.

Seriously, this is a really long blog, so you can quit reading here and get to work if you want. It’s Number 1 for a reason.

Longtime readers of the blogsite dot com know, outside of poor play at the quarterback position by the Jaguars, there is nothing that has driven me crazier over the last decade than my party’s relationship with voter registration numbers (you can read previous versions of this here, here, or here).   Listen, if politics was rocket science, I wouldn’t be doing it – and while I am certainly no rocket scientist, I do know that when one side has more in their column than the other, that increases the likelihood given said side will get more votes. 

Between 2004 and 2008, the number of Democrats registered to vote in Florida grew by roughly 478K voters.  Over the same window of time, the number of Republicans registered to vote in Florida grew by about 152K voters – or a net increase of about 326K voters to the home team side. 

Barack Obama won Florida by about 230K votes.  #math

Now, if I told you that between 2008 and today, the share of non-white voters would grow from 31% to 38.5%, most people – including (while they won’t admit it) many of my Republican friends, would believe that the Democrats advantage among voters would increase.

Well, that didn’t happen.

In fact, between 2008 and early summer 2021, the total number of Democrats registered in Florida has grown by about 467K voters – in other words, a smaller number over 13 years than was done in the 4 between 2004-2008.  

At the same time, the number of registered Republicans has grown by 1,071,416.  So, while the state’s ethnic make-up is trending in a way that should work to our favor, registration is going the other way.  In fact, the nearly 700K voter advantage we had in 2008 – which was still north of 550K in 2012 is basically down to zero.  Without a full-frontal, professional and accountable partisan effort to turn it around, sometime before the end of this year, there will be more Republicans registered in Florida than Democrats – that has NEVER happened before. And, given their voters have higher turnout scores – this isn’t a great place to start. 

Other than the candidate-driven registration that’s been done on a few limited state and congressional races, and the presidential campaigns – most of the registration done over the last few years has been done by non-partisan organizations – but I think it is fair to say, the most successful registration that has been done over the last twenty years has been partisan-organized.  Since at least 2012, there has not been a statewide, sustained professional partisan Democratic registration operation – and the numbers confirm that reality. A professionally run permanent partisan registration effort will change that and have other impacts:  they will serve as party organizing, and allows additional opportunities for real outreach into key communities, and secondly, the organization needed to support such an effort will provide a career path for rising operatives, who often find themselves in search of new careers after each cycle.  

I’ll go so far as to say there is no question Democrats win the 2018 Governor’s race, and Bill Nelson is re-elected if either of them are given an electorate that looks like 2012 – in which case, the narrative on Florida looks a lot different.  

TWO – Miami Dade and South Florida in general.

Donald Trump won Florida in 2020 by 254K more votes than he did in 2016.   Joe Biden won the three big SE Florida counties: Broward, Dade, and Palm Beach, by 224K fewer votes than Hilary Clinton.  In other words, if SE Florida had performed for Biden as it did for Clinton, 2020 is basically a carbon copy of 2016 – and that is with the voter registration issues mentioned above.

Let me put this another way.  If Biden and Trump got the same vote share (percentage of the vote) in these three counties as Clinton and Trump did in 2016, under 2020 turnout, the Trump statewide margin would have only been 50K votes.  Are the Clinton 2016 numbers a little optimistic going forward?  No question.  Can we win without getting the South Florida numbers back to something that looked closer to Obama in 2012, or even Crist/Gillum in 2014 and 2018?  It’s tough.  Really tough.  FSU beating Alabama tough.  The Jaguars beating Alabama tough.

Two things – no one election is a trend – just as too many Democrats bought into the idea that demographics is alone destiny, I suspect the 2020 Dade GOP numbers are as much an outlier as the 2016 Dade Dem numbers.   In fairness, I also think the decision by the Biden campaign to not do in-person campaigning due to COVID-19, which I am in no position to, nor will I criticize, likely had an oversized impact in South Florida, particularly in Dade, where campaigning is a hand-to-hand sport.   Was it the entire factor?  No.

The drop of support among Hispanic voters does not alone explain the change in South Florida margin.  The truth is a lot of things are going on at once – all of which need attention:  Hispanic persuasion, African American persuasion and turnout, and Caribbean persuasion and turnout – not to mention my party’s struggles with non-college white voters, which is one of the reasons why we have not done as well in Palm Beach County as we had in the past, a county home to a sizable non-college white population, particularly among retirees.

Misinformation most definitely played a role, but so did, candidly, a failure to call out bull shit.  There have been a lot of lessons “learned” from Barack Obama – some of them not accurate – but one that would be useful when dealing with misinformation during the campaign is never to let crap just lie, and that campaign immediately hit that stuff with a baseball bat.  A lie without a response becomes a truth.  For example, only one of the two candidates for President actually proposed cutting funding for police, and it wasn’t Joe Biden.  But truth doesn’t matter when lies are left on the dock.

There is one other key lesson of Obama:  Barack Obama tapped into the aspirational immigrant story, because that story was his own.  Yes, many people came here to escape socialism and lawlessness – but all who came here did so because of the sense of opportunity that is at the root of every immigrant story.   America is that shining beacon on a hill – and have to be the the party that embraces that story.

THIRD:   We have to win the battle of the margins.  

With exception of one or two places, Florida doesn’t have battleground counties – Florida is just a battleground.  The side that can win the margins game – running up the score on their turf and keeping the race closer on their opponent’s turf wins.  It is a state where a winning candidate wins both the turnout game – and the persuasion game.

In 2016, Hillary Clinton hit every mark you’d want to see in a Democratic county.  She did not lose Florida because of turnout.  

Let me point out two counties that illustrate this story.

Pasco County.  Pasco is a growing, exurban county just north of Tampa.  It is huge, and has a higher population of residents without a college degree than the state at large.  Despite being the 12^th largest voting county in Florida in 2020, more people voted in Pasco than voted in Wyoming.    Barack Obama lost Pasco in 2012 by roughly 14K votes.  Hillary Clinton lost it by 52K votes.  Joe Biden saw his margin push up to nearly 61K votes. 

On the flipside, just south of Tampa is Sarasota County.  Similarly sized to Pasco, it is home to one of the larger populations of voters with a college degree – a demographic that generally my party has been doing well with around the country. Since  2012, the Republican margin has grown from 15K votes, to 26K in 2016, and 28K in 2020 – not as eye popping as Pasco, but margins that are growing from cycle to cycle.

It is hard to see a scenario where a Democrat is going to win without seeing these margins start to work back the other way – as they did from Gore/Kerry to Obama – which goes to one key point:  We have to start meeting voters where they are. Too many Democrats assume some “modeling score” is concrete evidence some voters either absolutely will – or won’t vote for us and we ignore them – guess what, we prove the model and they don’t vote for us, or they don’t show up because we assume they will vote.  Republicans do not operate that way. They go after “our voters” aggressively and the results speak for themselves.

Now before some of you all start @ing me on twitter, no, I am not saying we are magically going to start winning the classic Trump voter that has been profiled in a wings & beer bar by every news station in the history of humanity – but I am talking about making a real effort to connect to voters that are up for grabs.   I absolutely refuse to believe that any voter that voted twice for America’s first Black President – himself a first generation American with an admittedly not-made for classic American politics name – is a voter who is somehow lost to us forever.

But again, in the mythology of Barack Obama, one piece of lore that is often forgotten was in addition to being a generational candidate with his ability to inspire, he was also a magician at talking to voters where they were – not only about his and their hopes and dreams, but also in a way that reassured swing voters:  lofty oratory that was matched with practical ideas communicated clearly:  reducing middle class taxes, and protecting those with pre-existing conditions.  He had a plan for the space industry, talked about fisheries in North Florida, and traffic on I-4.  He went directly into Jewish communities and confronted the lies said about him, and he did the same in exile Hispanic communities. He understood that to win, you had to appeal to 50%+1.  You get the point.

Republicans figured out after Obama that to ease their path to winning in Florida, they had to change the math and trajectory of the Hispanic vote – not necessarily to win it, but to keep the margins in check, which in turn, keeps our margins down.   We have to do the same in Florida’s rural and exurban counties, that is, if we want to win elections again. 

BONUS FOUR – Recruitment of candidates. 

This last little bit is less about whether or if Democrats can win statewide, and more about how we win down the ballot.

Back when I was recruiting candidates for the legislature, it seemed like everyone had a buddy who would be the perfect candidate, and 99% of those suggestions had a “but” – and that but was usually “well, they can’t raise money.”  If in the first sentence of someone’s description of a candidate includes the word “but,” well sorry, they aren’t a great candidate. 

Candidates matter, and particularly when you consider that most competitive places that Democrats have to win in down-ballot races are districts that start out with a Republican lean, and where we are automatically going to get outspent. 

The party’s job isn’t to run candidates everywhere, or support everyone that raises their hand – their job is to win elections – to find the best possible people, who have the most currency in their communities, with the ability to raise money and connect with voters.   Sure, it is always great to find that popular city commissioner with great name ID and a fundraising base, but there isn’t an archetype of a perfect candidate.  Take Anna Eskamani for example, who I am proud to say I’ve known since she was literally still a kid.  She doesn’t fit the “prototypical candidate” on paper, but she was strategic about her career, she put in the work, built relationships and political capital, so when she became a candidate, she was already a force.  And once she became a candidate, she was tireless on the phones raising money and at the doors talking to voters, and she got a win.   She also didn’t expect someone to come in and do the work for her.  She did the work. 

Some cycles, the party recruits aggressively and well, but many cycles, recruitment isn’t much more than waiting for someone to raise their hand, then hoping for a good outcome.  Back in the dark ages when I did this work, our team picked up nine GOP seats, and kept in Democratic control, two competitive open seats.  Of those eleven wins, seven of the candidates were current or previous officeholders in the district, one was a legitimate community legend, and three ran remarkable grassroots efforts while still raising significant dollars.  No one was lightning in a bottle.

We need a year-round, party-centric recruitment effort.

FIVE – If you can only do one of the previous 4, do the first one (again, it’s number 1 for a reason).  

Registering voters is, by far, the least “sexy” and most essential element to winning – it is the foundation. In 25 years of doing this stuff, a couple things largely ring true:  Politics is about timing and opportunity – but it is also about fundamentals and preparation.  Just like football, good preparation, sound fundamentals, and talent will win more than it loses.  On the flipside, not preparing, ignoring the fundamentals, constantly taking unforced penalties, and not putting good talent on the field – sorry, this is digressing into a Jaguars rant, but you get the point.

Secondly, things are rarely as good, or as bad as you think.  

They are almost always going to have more money, and more resources.   We are always going to have to choose between competing interests.  Our coalition is more diverse, more challenging, and harder to turnout.  Nothing here will ever be easy.  But that doesn’t mean it is impossible.  Now is the time to do the work.

There is no secret. Just work.  We don't need to think outside the box.  We once again, quite literally, need to build the box.

Pro Politics Podcast

Friends -

One of my friends and longtime fellow colleagues in the world of political hackery Zac McCrary has started a new podcast that interviews longtime operatives about their careers, and about advice they might have for those starting out in the business.

Clearly lost for ideas, Zac interviewed me for this week's podcast. 

You can check it out here, as well as the other interviews Zac has done

https://propolitics.buzzsprout.com/1704139/8779788-steve-schale-obama-man-biden-man-florida-man

Steve

What Georgia can teach us.

I started writing this the night that Georgia Democrats won both of the United States Senate special elections, with the thought I would hit "publish" sometime on Wednesday.  Then the insurrection happened.  The time in this case has been useful - a chance to reflect on this piece again.  

So here goes.  Point one: They did the work.  Actually, that is the only point.

The work that has been done in Georgia over the last few years didn't guarantee success - but it did create opportunity.  Nothing in politics is a sure thing, and the results often don't mean as much as people think.   In addition, good campaigns lose, and bad ones can still win.  That being said, winning requires playing on a field where you can win:  if you are a Democrat, a perfect campaign probably isn't going to win in Wyoming under any circumstance - and a lousy one still beats a Republican virtualy every day in a place like Oregon.  

What they did in Georgia was move the window enough to allow good campaigns to take adavantage of good atmospherics and to get a win.  Here is the awesome news:  it is 100% replicable - and I would argue, is something we actually did here before.

And here's the secret to how they did it - and how we can do it again here...

...actually there is no secret.  It is just hard work.  

So let's start with some facts. 

Between 2004 and 2008, the Democratic advantage in voter registration grew from 375K voters to over 680K voters.  Over that period of time, Democrats won 50% of the statewide races in Florida, and picked up significant number of congressional, legislative, and local races.  

Since 2012, the Democratic advantage in voter registration has dropped from about 558,000 voters, to just over 100,000 when the books closed on the 2020 election - and it dropped to under 100,000 by the end of the year - and I don't need to tell you what the record has looked like since then.

Yes, twitter observers, some of that advantage back in the day was old North Florida Democrats who haven't voted for a Democrat for President since Kennedy - but most of it is just Republican growth.  This at a time when the state is getting more diverse, where one logically might assume that Democrats would be in a place to see growth.

So let's take a look at what happened in Georgia, the effort spearheaded by Stacey Abrams. 

First of all, it didn't start after her race in 2018.  Abrams has been in the fight to fund registration and organizing efforts for several cycles now, starting with the New Georgia Project, and now with Fair Fight, the organization she founded following her 2018 campaign.  They raised money and built confidence among donors.  They leaned into organizing, focused on registration and voter engagement, trained leaders to work within their own communities - giving more people ownership over the work, and they stayed focused on the work.  

If you look at Georgia, just between 2016 and 2020, more than 600K new voters joined the roles, and over 80% of them were from communities of color.  This is 100% a result of a laser focused, extremely well-funded, locally-organized voter registration effort.  That registration took a state that was just outside the window of being competitive, and made it competeitive. 

We did this between 2004 and 2008.  With help from the DNC's 50 state project, the Democratic Party had organiziers who trained leaders in registration.   In addition, as the Presidential campaigns ramped up in absentia in Florida (remember Florida's primary was boycotted), the grassroots voluneers of both campaigns focused on one thing: registering voters.  And the Obama campaign came in with massive boots on the ground to help organize all those volunteers - and focused on, you guessed it:  registration.  

And while the registration numbers came down after 2008, the advantage remained significant through the 2012 election, thanks to the DNC, Organizing for America, and eventually the re-election campaign's work.  

In the years since, well, the numbers speak for themselves. If the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again with the same result, well, when it comes to our organizng model, it is time to shake it up - and by shake it up, get back to what we know works. 

So let's take a few lessons from Georgia.

1.  Someone has to lead the thing.  In the Obama years, the power of the candidacy and the White House meant that organizing ran through us/them.  Sure there were outside groups doing good work, but the vast majority of it ran through the various Obama organizing entities.  

In Georgia, Abrams had a plan.  She took her plan to funders - she found money - built an organiztion and supported others - but in the end, there was a sense she was accountable for it. 

In my view, the party is the natural place for this work.  Now I get it, the party is a dumpster inferno at the moment, but I have a lot of confidence in Mayor Manny Diaz and Judy Mount - and here's the truth:  the Florida Democratic Party can be whatever fundraising allows it to be, and it has never had the resources to do real work.  The party is an empty vessel - but with real resources and leadership, it is the right ship to lead this effort.  This doesn't mean that the organizations outside the party who are doing good work shouldn't continue to do their work,  but the reality is the party can deliver partisan and candidate messaging, and can coordinate with candidates.  

I know plenty of folks disagree with this, but in 2005, we went into a party that was deeply in debt, and couldn't even get a credit card - and got that ship oriented in a way that allowed us to take advantage of 2 good cycles.  I never truly understood why we moved away from a model that was working (2006 and 2008) to one that was untested.  Again, this doesn't mean that there isn't vital work that the outside groups do -- they absolutely do vital work - just that the core organizing functions of the party shouldn't be outsourced.  

There are literally a million things we could complain that the Florida Democratic Party should do - honestly if they did two things well:  register voters, and recruit high caliber downballot candidates, we'd win more races.  Full stop.

2.  Organizing leads to regsitration - and registration leads to organizing:  Putting people on the ground to organize solves two problems:  the lack of a sustained, real, and partisan-oriented registration effort. - and the sesne that the party and its candidates aren't in communities in enough.

The latter criticism is true.  People say to me all the time "hey Steve, why don't we see the campaign like we did when Obama ran and was in office" - well. the answer is simple:  we had hundreds of organizers, which led to tens of thousands of essentially full-time volunteers.  

We don't need that kind of effort year round - but if you put enough organizers out there, they can build meaningful relationships in communities, and train volunteers to drive the essential converations that are needed.

3.  Ownership matters.  People need to have the ability to do the work in their own way, ane be accountable for the work by knowing the effort is counting on them.   Florida is a big, diverse state - and while you need to teach organizers good fundamentals - you have to let people figure out their own communities.    Take the Georgia special election - what worked in rural Georgia wasn't necessarily the same thing as what worked in Atlanta - but taken together, well, it all worked.

I used to tell our staff that everyone on the campaign was counting on everyone else - no one job was more important than the other.  If we all owned our own work, we would do just fine.

4.  Nothing about this is cheap, and it doesn't make for cute viral twitter content.  This is hard work.  To put 100, well-trained organizers on the ground (which isn't enough), it is an investment of at least $6 million a year - and the work they do will largely take place in silent - managing volunteers, and driving conversations with community leaders.  Real organizng also builds an aparatus that can help push back on misinformation at a community-based level. 

Moreover, while there is a place for paid canvass type operations, it isn't here.  You need people who wake up every day thinking about the work, learning the community and growing into the job.  You also create a pipeline for political talent to learn and grow, something we desperately need here in Florida (and everywhere). 

The special elections in Georgia cost hundreds of millions of dollars.  Put 20 million a year into party organizing (which is far more than has ever been spent on a consistent basis), and you will see real results.

5.  It won't happen overnight.   This isn't about registering X number of voters by next year.  Georgia had a sustained model, not built cycle to cycle, but instead, they worked cycle after cycle.  We can change the weather if we can expand the electorate.

People ask - "is Florida still winnable" - and the answer is, of course...IF we do the work.  Kerry lost Florida by 5% in 2004 and we won it by 3% just four years later.  Just as Florida was never trending as Democratic as my Democratic friends wanted to think - it is never as bad as it looks either.  

I also recognize, as I am sure will get pointed out on Twitter, that this work has been done before - which I will acede, and there have been plenty of good folks who have done good work (there has also been a lot of money spent here with not the kind of organizational results we should expect).  My point on all of this is this - these efforts have not been consistent, sustained, or centralized for many cycles.  In my honest opinion, if we want to right the ship and put the state in a place where it is in play:  consistency, sustained effort, and central/accountable leadership are key. 

if you are a Democrat, we need Florida to do better - as the upper midwest shrinks in terms of its electoral college rerpresentation - and those states remain razor tight, we need to expand.  Nothing about what happened in Arizona or Georgia is a guarantee going forward - and Texas isn't there yet either.  While I am beyond ecstatic - particuarly as a Biden loyalist, that we won in November - November also identified some real issues in our path to winning going forward.  We aren't in a place where we can write off anything. So yes, Florida is still vital. 

But the work has to get done.  And if we don't get back to the basics, it is going to be a long winter.

Fortunately there is a model.  

Here we are.

To:        To everyone who doesn't work in the Jaguars front office

From:    Lilly and Shadow's human

Date:     53 days left in the Christmas shopping season

Re:        The 2020 politics of the state that actually brought you Thanksgiving

It has been a long ride.  557 days ago, Joe Biden launched his bid for President.  369 days ago, I was part of a team that launched Unite the Country, a SuperPAC to support Joe Biden's bid for President.  And it has been 50 days since the Jacksonville Jaguars won a football game - and it may be well into the next administration before we see them win again.

Honestly, when Joe Biden decided not to run in 2015, I figured my days doing this stuff were over, and between the us, that was OK.  I had a good run.  

Then Trump won.  Then the boss started talking about it.  Then Charlottesville, and everything changed.  The early primaries - the night of Nevada when I felt we were going to be the nominee -- South Carolina, Covid...and now, well, here we are one day out.  I am tired (no human should do three presidentials), anxious, and ready to get through tomorrow.  

Before we get into Florida, I want to take a second and just walk through the map.   For Biden, winning the Clinton states gets him to a base of 232.  The fastest way to 270 is this:  Wisconsin (10 - 242), Michigan (16 - 258), and Pennsylvania (20-278).  If that happens tomorrow, nothing else will matter.  For Trump, getting to 270 starts with winning, what we will say for these purposes, are the Romney states + Ohio, Iowa, ME 2, and FL.  That gets him to 260 - and then has to win one of those upper midwest/rustbelt states to win. 

If Trump doesn't win Florida - he has to win all three of those states to win -- or he has to find wins in one of the Clinton states, all of which are well positioned for Biden wins.

In other words, if he wins Florida, the map gives him a chance to win Pennsylvania and get re-elected.  If he doesn't win Florida, it is over.  As President Obama said the other day in Miami, if Biden wins, we can all go to bed early.

For all the frustration about Florida that exists, particularly over on the ole hellsite dot com, that is the reason to play here for Democrats.  They have to win here.  Best case scenario, a win gives an early in the night fast pass to Casa Blanca, but worse case, you force the Republicans to bog down here to get a win - or as I used to tell our organizers on Obama, our job was to run the ball, keep getting first downs, and wear down the defense. Never let them off the field.  My team doesn't have to win - but my team should want to win. Win here, and you end it.

And going in to tomorrow, they have every shot to win here.

So here we are.

Nearly 9 million ballots cast, and with VBMs that come in today, we will almost assuredly enter Election Day over 9 million ballots cast.   Total turnout is over 62%.  For comparison sake, 51% of registered voters voted before Election Day, and total turnout was 75% in 2016 -- and that was a good year for turnout.   A big day tomorrow might lead to an election with 12 million total votes, which would put total turnout at 83%, tying the 1992 election as the highest voter turnout in the modern era of voting. Basically any way you look at it, at least 75%, and probably closer to 80% of the likely electorate has voted. 

Not surprisingly, partisans are voting at even higher rates. So far, roughly 2 out of every 3 registered Florida Democratic and Republican voter has voted.  Honestly, there aren't that many more people left to vote.  In terms of actual voters - I suspect Democrats will go into Election Day (including today VBM) with a lead somewhere between 110-115K voters.  Republicans have about 150K more high propensity voters than do the Democrats left to vote (voters who voted in the midterm in 2018 and/or the 2016 Presidential).  Democrats have 150K or more low propensity voters to vote.  Where all that lands tomorrow is the difference between winning and losing.

Some big picture stuff:  Of the 9 million pre-Eday voters, nearly 52% of the votes were cast by mail - and Dems have an edge of almost 664K.   Early voting made up just over 48%, and Republicans have the edge here by about 556K.   

The early voting electorate, by registration, is 63.7% white, 16.3% Hispanic, and 12.7% Black.   The Hispanic and Black numbers trail their registration shares by a little.

As for the nearly 2.1 million voters who have no party, or minor party affiliation, they break out: 58% white, 22% Hispanic, and 7.5% Black.   This cohort also has more voters under 29 than the electorate at large.

One thing before we go on - much has been debated about the Latino vote, where Trump has worked very hard to make inroads.  The reality is Biden doesn't need Clinton numbers in these communities - if he is getting the kind of support from suburban whites and white seniors.  I do think if Biden is above 40% with whites, he is likely to win Florida, notwithstanding any gains Trump makes with Latinos.

While I think it is hard to compare this electorate to the last one, for benchmark purposes, Florida had about 6.6 million early voters in 2016 - which ended up being 68-69% of all voters.  Compared to 62% of all Florida registered voters voting early this year - in 2016, the percentage of all registered who voted early was about 51%.   In other words - this election is far more cooked than the last one.  How does that matter?  Well, we have to play the. game to see.

Before we get into this election, let's review how Trump won last time -- and how that differed from Obama in 2012.

First, lets' think of Florida on macro-scale.  For that, I tend to break the state down by media markets.  

Obama won Florida in 2012 by roughly 74,000 votes, and Trump won it by about 113,000.  In other words, there was roughly 187,000 vote change in the margin from Obama to Trump.   

There are 10 media markets in Florida, eight of we can categorize as base markets for one of the two parties.  Democrats typically win four pretty easily (Tallahassee, Gainesville, West Palm and Miami), while Republicans typically carry with ease (Pensacola, Panama City, Jacksonville, and Fort Myers).  For all the buzz around Trump running up the score in his base -- and Clinton struggling with turnout, what is interesting -- if you compare the 2016 performance in these markets with the 2012 performance - you see almost identical numbers.  Clinton won her markets by 79,000 more votes than Obama – and Trump won his by 76,000 more than Romney.  In other words, relative to 2012, the base markets were a push.

As stated above, in 8 of the state’s 10 media markets, the Clinton/Trump election was pretty much the Obama/Romney election.  Clinton ran the score up in her counties, and Trump jacked up his numbers, particularly in the Fort Myers market, but the final result in these places was almost identical to 2012 -- which leaves us Orlando and Tampa.

n 2012, President Obama lost the two media markets by a combined 56,575 votes – and four years later, Secretary Clinton lost the same two media markets by 247,118 – a total shift of 190K votes.   

But what is remarkable is how Trump ran up the score in these markets, given that Secretary Clinton won the urban Orlando counties (Seminole, Orange and Osceola) by almost 70,000 more votes than Obama.  

In 14 counties within the I-4 markets, Trump set the modern era Republican Presidential percentage margin of victory, and in 15, he set the record for largest raw vote margin of victory – in virtually every case, breaking the numbers set by Bush in 04, in a year when he won by five points.  In fact, statewide, Trump’s percentage share margin was better than Bush’s 04 margins in 48 counties, and his raw vote margins were better in 55.   If Bush had seen Trump like numbers in those counties, he would have won Florida by 8-9 points.

But it is important to keep this in mind -  he set records all over the state, and yet only won by a point.  This shows how structurally stable is - that as I joked to a reporter early in the week, you could put "going in a tropical vacation" and "stubbing your toe on the couch" and both would get to about 47 as a baseline.   The idea that anyone thought Florida wouldn't be completely in play was kind of nuts.  It is very much in play.  

No two elections are ever identical - and given an election where 2 to 2.5 million more people will vote than 2016, this is no exception.  The other thing about this election - it will be more diverse.  In other words, just the basic math of the Trump win - if nothing changed but the ethnic and racial make-up of the electorate - would look closer than four years ago, simply because whites will make up a smaller share of the electorate.  For folks who talk about 2016 polling misses, remember in 2012 when most of the polls thought Romney had it locked up -- they missed the growing diversity of the state.  The polling miss in Florida was bigger in 2012 for Obama than it was for Trump in 2016.   

That being said, there are markers to a win.   Because this is my blog, and Biden is my guy, I will look at it from that lens.   Obviously - Biden will want the biggest margins possible in the base counties - and given Clinton's win in Dade was without precedent, it is likely we will need larger margins in places like Palm Beach, Orange or Broward County to make it up.  I think all are quite possible.  A win will also include a larger win in Hillsborough (was +6.9 last time) - winning three to four Trump counties:  Pinellas, Duval (Bluuuuuval), which hasn't happened since 1976, winning Seminole (not sure that has ever happened), and probably winning St. Lucie.  

I suspect a win also includes doing marginally better in a few really GOP counties that have higher than average population of college + voters:  Collier, and St. Johns come to mind.   Trump is going to win by huge numbers in both -- but can Biden cut those margins a point or two?  

In addition, a win is going to have better Democratic margins - closer to 2012 in places like Sarasota, and Polk in the Tampa media market.  A win is also going to mean marginal improvements in a whole bunch of places that went really south in 2016:  Volusia (Daytona), and Pasco (north of Tampa).    Finally, a win will have North Florida look like it did four and eight years ago.  Give me anything inside of 19-20 points in the five markets stretching from JAX to Pensacola and I will feel pretty decent.

So here are some things I am going to watch for tomorrow.

First - the "swing counties."  There were four:  Jefferson (rural North Florida), Monroe (The Conch Republic), St. Lucie (Palm Beach media market), Pinellas (St. Petersburg/Clearwater).  Beyond this, there are two counties that I suspect will flip if Biden wins:  Duval (Jacksonville), and Seminole (suburban Orlando).    I will likely go look at Pinellas and Duval first - mostly because they both have a history of returning VBM/EV pretty quickly.  

Next:  the "base counties" - I want to see how Dade is doing.  I don't expect Biden to hit Clinton levels, but I would like to see him hit margins around Obama 2012.  I also want to see Broward next door.  I think there is a decent chance Broward hits margins enough to make up any loss from Clinton in Dade.   Palm Beach is usually slow to report - but they have changed some things up, so hopefully we will get an early read there. 

"Red Florida" - Sumter County is hard core red - it is home to the Villages.  Trump won it by 39 points in 2016.  Almost all of its vote will report early - so I will be curious as to the margins.  Same for Pasco, a bay area county that Trump won by 53K votes in 2016 and returns results very quickly.   Do the margins look the same, or do they look different.  Volusia on the east coast is similar - it moved hard from Obama to Trump -- can Biden claw some of that back.

Sarasota is sometimes fast, sometimes slow in returns.  I want to see it before making any judgements.   Then what is the lead in the eastern time zone before the central time zone votes come in?  Trump should win those central time zone votes by a max of 150,000 votes -- so are we up by enough to absorb that around 8pm?  

Last time, we had a pretty good read on it before 8pm.  I don't know how that changes with so many more votes - but I suspect we will know pretty early in the night.

Basically it comes down to two things:  Can Democrats somewhat keep up with turnout tomorrow -- and are the NPA and partisan votes breaking as the polls suggest they are (Biden winning NPA, and winning a bigger share of GOP than Trump is of Dem)?  If the NPA/partisan breaks hold, Biden can very much win without a partisan lead.  How much?  Well that depends?

For example, if the GOP has a one point advantage among all registered voters, under a model where both candidates get the same percentage of their own partisan vote (let's say 90-10), Biden would need a 5 point NPA lead to win by something close to the recount margin.  But let's say Biden win's 11% of Republicans (89-11) compared to Trump getting 10% of Democrats (90-10), Biden will win by almost a point.   As the GOP partisan advantage grows in turnout - these margins go up as well.   That is why - in my super high-tech hack analysis, well, it comes down to turnout tomorrow.

I'll close with this.  This is a hard race for me to analyze.  I am too close to it.  While I always want my team to win, I have been emotionally invested in this for several years now.   That is why in the above, I am not trying to draw conclusions - and merely laying it out.   Also tomorrow, I may not be super active in real time on twitter - I have a lot of states to watch - as my PAC has been running TV and digital content over the last three weeks in 8 states.

I don't know how much longer I will do these things.  This has been a long cycle.  I definitely feel like it is time to go open a bar on the island of Borneo.  We'll see.  I'll likely do some kind of a recap in a few weeks. I also might throw my phone in the St. Marks River, build a lean-to in the Everglades, and open a python rescue - I do have mutual friends on Facebook with Carole Baskin after all, because well, Florida.

Truly at this point, really anything is possible.

Until then, as noted Florida Man Jim Morrison once said "this is the end, my only friend. The end."   

Thanks to all for reading - and Will, we are going to try to win this for your dad.

PS - As the subject said - Florida is the reason you all have Thanksgiving.  We had it first - some 100 years before it was a thing in the NE.  Oh - and they had alligator.  Remember that when you do your Thanksgiving shopping this year

2 Days Out

To: America.

From: Your old friend Steve

Date: "Time is a storm, in which we are all lost" - William Carlos Williams

Re: You know.

With two days to go, I would like to start with an explanation. 

When I started doing the early vote notes years ago, honestly, it was a way to share some thoughts on how at least this hack would view them - not from the perspective of spinning the media one way or the other, but the things that I liked and things that I didn't - and how I would be thinking about this if I was in the cockpit of a campaign.  Along the way, if I could help educate people on how Florida worked, well, that was the goal.   It isn't to try to predict things - or to be therapy for anxious members of my own party.

I've blogged a lot less this year because - one, my plate is already over-flowing, but secondly, there is a lot we don't know.  People are voting in ways they have never voted before - both in terms of volume, as well as mechanically. I said on a press call, when you look at this election, it is like cats and dogs have changed places. People keep trying to divine outcomes based on this data - which in itself is fraught with peril - but in this cycle, people are trying to do it with no baseline for comparison.  

So again, if you are reading this hoping that I am going to tell you something you want to hear, well, just like the Jacksonville Jaguars, prepare to be disappointed. 

As we begin this note, i want to start with two basic foundational things:

1. The number of Democrats and Republicans in the state is pretty much equal.
2. All things being equal, if only high propensity voters vote, Republicans will have more people vote than Democrats.   

These things were true when absentee ballots went out.  They were true when Democrats had a big lead in the initial VBM returns.  They were true as Republicans started to vote in person early.  And they are true now.  

One of my frustrations, which some may have picked up in my first memo, or on twitter, was the way that people talked about the initial vbm returns, in which Democrats ran up a big margin.  Why did Democrats run up such a big lead:  Well, high propensity Democrats voted by mail in larger percentages than ever before -- and those ballots were returned before in-person early voting began.   In other words, it wasn't a real lead - which leads to my other frustration:  the voting isn't trending Republican, nor are Democrats struggling with turnout.    People are just voting. 

Why have Republicans dominated in-person early voting?  Well, their pool of available voters was larger when it started -- and their voters, thanks in large part to the President, have chosen to not utilize vote by mail -- so they are voting in person early.   These voters were always going to vote -- just as in the past, when Republicans ran up early big leads in VBM returns -- and Democrats played catch-up:  high propensity voters vote.  This year, the thing is reversed. 

Which is why I am no more or less confident or worried about where things stand today, than i was when Democrats had a 500K voter lead.  I also think if we all do the work over the next few days, Florida can shut the door on the Trump Presidency.  But it won't be easy -- nor is it a sure thing.  It may be trite, but it literally comes down to turnout

So with that prelude, man are people voting.  It is pretty nuts.

Statewide voter turnout is over 60%.  Democrats and Republican turnout is roughly 64%, with NPA's a little lower, but starting to catch up.   One thing that is similar to previous cycles:  real partisans have quickly jumped on the opportunity to vote - and the less partisan, less politically active (but still serious voters) are coming towards the end.   I think between now and the election, the electorate will get more NPA -- and probably a little more diverse.    

For comparison, just under 52% of all registered voters in 2016 voted before the election which ended up being about 68-69% of the total turnout. 

To set the table on where we are:  Democrats have about a 95K voter lead through Saturday.  Today is the last day of in-person early voting, and though VBM ballots will be accepted until 7:00 PM on Election Day (please drop them off, don't mail them).

There are not quite 3 million voters who voted in either 16 or 18 left to vote.  Republicans have a slight edge, maybe 150K voters - and nearly 28% are NPA.  Given how active this election is, I think it is safe to assume most of these will vote.

Out of the nearly 1.7 million voters who did not vote in 16 or 18 (new registrants + sporadic voters), Democrats have the slightest of edges, but for the most part, it is pretty darn even:  34% D, 33.3% NPA, and 32.7% GOP.   If you are a Democrat looking for good news, 27% of these voters are under 30, and 45% of them are non-white.  But again, the story is the same:  voters are fired up and ready to vote.

Before i get into much else, i want to bring up Dade County.  Much has been written - and even more tweeted about it.  The challenge with being worried about turnout is, well, until 100% of people have voted, there is a turnout problem.  As I have said on the record, I would like to see more turnout in Dade -- but honestly, I want there to be robust turnout everywhere my people live.

But I want to remind folks (or inform) of two pretty basic facts:  More Hispanics in Dade are Republican than Democratic registered - because of the influence of the Cuban vote -- particularly the older Cuban vote.  Secondly, Republicans outperforming Democrats in terms of turnout percentage isn't a new thing -- it is actually a feature of the county.  In 2008 - a year that worked out OK for us, Republicans had a 5% edge in terms of partisan turnout rates (75% of GOP voted, 70% of Dem voted) -- in 2012, it was 3.5% - in 2016, it was 3%.  

I would also say to reporters who are writing criticisms about Dade should also point out that Broward is cooking with propane.  I feel pretty confident in thinking Joe Biden will carry Broward with record margins.  I can't remember an election ever where Broward turnout was higher than someplace like Pinellas on Day 3.

Also, one other rule:  Republicans just vote better than Democrats.   We can argue why that is - or how we change it, but that is the case.  

In the end, more Republicans are likely to vote than Democrats -- though Democrats do have a larger universe of sporadic voters out there - and if both parties end up with even registration, I feel very strongly Joe Biden would win here.  So if you are a Democrat, there is your challenge.

Couple of other notes:  Because so much of the electorate has voted, it looks pretty close to your run of the mill Florida election.  Orlando continues to be a bigger piece of the statewide pie.  Republicans are voting in big numbers where they should be.  Democratic turnout is also robust. 

If you believe the exits from four years ago, Trump won NPA's by 4.  Given where votes came in around the state, this is very believable.   Now one thing with the exits, they use self-party ID, which can be tricky to use as a comparison for this memo, since Florida does have actual party ID on the file.  According to the self ID, the electorate was +1 GOP, which is pretty close to what it was in reality, and both parties had essentially identical partisan loyalty (Clinton was +82 with Dems, Trump +81 with GOP).   To show how close that election, if you flip the +4 NPA from Trump to +4 to Democrats - Democrats carry Florida.

In other words, if Trump is holding his coalition with what will likely be a marginally, but not overwhelmingly GOP electorate, he will win.  If Biden is cutting into GOP and NPA support, then he's got a damn good shot here.

I'll take a deeper dive Monday - look at the final numbers, out what I will be looking for on Election Night - and offer some final thoughts.

One last thing, just as I did four years ago, I want to take a second and recognize the people who are actually turning out the vote - the organizers around the state.

There is no harder job in politics than that of a field organizer.   Not the managers, not the ops people, not even my friends in comms (sorry guys).   A lot of people who analyze this stuff over on the twitters have never pulled an 18 hour day in a field office in Polk County.  It is absolute grunt work - grinding out long hours, spending most of their day dealing with people being annoyed about this, or that - OK, being annoyed about yard signs - and now, they have the added joy of reading everyone's feedback about their work over on the ole hellsite dot com - typically with a boss like me telling them to focus on their work, and not engage.

These kids -- and I say that because honestly, most of them are kids still in college, or right out of it -- are hard working, loyal, resourceful, undercompensated, and driven by the chance to be a part of something bigger than themselves.   Most of them will never meet the candidate, most will never go to the White House if their candidate wins, and as I said four years ago, for most of them will do something different in the next chapter of their lives.   I still try to keep up with my organizers from 12 years ago, and it is really remarkable to see what they have done with their lives - and how many found their spouse on that campaign.  I think Team 27 2.0 is now north of 20 children.  I know in 08 and 12, when I needed an energy-boost after a tough day, spending 10 minutes in the field office surrounded by the energy and enthusiasm of organizers was usually all i needed.  For me, not being around this has been the hardest part of being on the IE side of the wall. 

But this year is even harder for the organizers.  The best part of the campaign, quite honestly, is the family that you become.  Your crew is more than just your co-workers:  they are your brothers and sisters, bonded together by the common experience, molded over bad coffee, cheap beer, leftover pizza, and those cupcakes and brownies that a volunteer brought in last month.  This time, the organizers have all of the headaches, without nearly as much of the fun.  Most of them are working on zoom, disconnected from their teammates, working remotely in their apartments, and without the moments that make you forget the long hours.  

So do this - if you appreciate these notes from me, take a second to find an organizer online, and thank them for what they do.  They are literally on the tip of democracy's spear.  And from this old hack, to any of the organizers reading this, know I do respect the work you do. 

With that, I will see you all on Monday.

PS:  Congratulations to the Jacksonville Jaguars for not losing today. 

7 Days Out

To:                   Friends, countrymen, Florida Man

From:              A tired, 46-year old hack on his third Presidential questioning his life and career choices

Date:               March 239, 2020

Re:                  One week to go – and a bye week for the Jaguars

As we enter the bye week in the Jaguars schedule, two things are dominating the mind of your average American:  with 30 million unemployed, how do Doug Marrone and Todd Wash still have a job in Jacksonville when literally any two random people would give the Jaguars a better chance at winning, and what is happening in Florida in the election?

Honestly with a week out, I probably have a better answer for the first question than I do the second.

Before we get into things, I want to remind the World of the ole Twitter dot com of four facts:

• In the current political alignment of battleground states, Florida is not only the biggest, it is actually the closest.  If you add up all the people who have voted for President since Florida entered the coterie of battleground states in 1992, roughly 51 million ballots have been cast in the last seven elections (1992-2016) – and the total pot of Democratic and Republican votes is separated by just under 20,000 votes.
• Florida had seven statewide elections between 2010-2018 decided by less than 1.2% -- three of which were decided by 0.4% or less.
• Republicans have more voters who are certain to show up cycle to cycle.  Democrats have more who have sporadic history. 
• I am writing most of this after midnight, so please be extra forgiving of my already only marginal use of the English language.

The point is this:  Florida is close.  It will be close in 2020, and absent a shift in voter attitudes within one of several demographics, it is likely to remain close for the next few cycles. Florida is going to -- always, pull a Florida.

It is also important to understand why Florida is close – literally the dumb luck of population trends and demographic shifts that have led things to just cancel each other out.  These dynamics essentially have created a state that is structurally very close – where the smallest of shifts sometimes matter – and sometimes get cancelled out by an equally sized small shift another direction.

A great example of this is Orlando.   George Bush beat Al Gore in the Orlando media market by nearly the exact same margin (2.9%) that Trump beat Secretary Clinton (3.3%) – but the wins couldn’t have looked more different.  Bush’s win was mostly evenly distributed across the market, whereas Clinton crushed in the urban counties, and Trump crushed in the coastal and exurban counties.  The shifts in urban Orlando – diversification and growing Democratic support among college-educated whites was cancelled out by Trump’s strength among white seniors and non-college whites outside of the urban area.

I know this is obvious to the 11 readers of my blog (who I do appreciate – truly), but I think it often gets lost elsewhere – Florida is just never going to be easy, for either side.  It will always be a slog.  The reason both sides fight so hard here is simple:  Republicans have to win it for their math – and Democrats know that, and the goal is the ole land war in Asia helps make the rest of the map smoother.  

One other thing before we dive in – I haven’t written as much this cycle for two reasons:  one, I just haven’t had as much time, and two, we are watching voting trends change in real time, so I’ll be honest, I’ve been intentionally cautious.  For example, readers of the first blog piece will remember I was pretty careful in characterizing the early VBM leads as a sign of things to come – because of the aforementioned GOP advantage in more certain voters yet to come.  

Now that you have read 600 words or so, if you are reading this because you want Steve’s prediction on the race, you can now return to your regular programming.  This note, like all the other ones, is to try to add some context to raw numbers – some things I like, some things I don’t.  If you are looking for this memo to allow you to tweet “See, Schale says it is awesome - boom, this thing is over” or “Man, Schale sounds depressed - MAGA” – unless you are tweeting about my depression as a Jaguars fan, that is not what this memo will say.

That being said, as bad as we've been the last 25 years - at least we haven't been as bad as the Cowboys (we have nearly twice as many playoff wins). 

Now for the main attraction.

Floridians are voting.  It is really remarkable.  As of this morning, more than 50.6% of Democrats have voted – and overall, turnout is 44.5%.   (GOP is 46.2% and NPA is 34.2%)

In total 6.45 million voters have voted. By comparison, the total who voted before Election Day in 2016 was about 6.6 million voters.  There is a decent chance by the time I hit send on this memo, the state will pass that number.   I now believe turnout will be north of 11 million people – which is roughly 76%.  How much north of 11?  Ask me in a week.

For comparison, Florida hit 77% in 1980, 79% in 1968, and 83% in 1992. It was 75% in both 08 and 16. Overall, I fall on the side of thinking that the higher the turnout, the better it is for my team – and while this isn’t a hard and fast rule, higher turnout in a state that is getting more diverse should mean an electorate that is overall younger, and more diverse than a typical election – and even if that doesn’t change the overall R vs D make-up – because so many younger voters of color register as NPA, this should be good.  Again though – no guarantees in life.

As of this morning, Democrats hold a 302K voter margin.   The Democratic lead is all in vote by mail returns.  The Republican advantages come entirely from in-person early voting.  This is the cats and dogs have switched places side of this election.  It is like when the Jaguars are good, and nothing seems normal.

As you may have noticed if you follow me on twitter, I haven’t gotten into the day to day reporting – not when the Dem advantage was climbing in early returns, and not as the GOP has chipped away at it – because neither number really tells much of a story – because of voting trends.  

What I am watching is more basic:  who has actually voted – who has not voted that we know will vote – and who is voting that we didn’t or might not expect to vote.

So, let’s look at this a little.

Among Democrats:  85% of those who have voted showed up in 2016 and/or 2018.  

Among Republicans, it is 81%

Among NPA’s, it is 79%

To look at this a different way, among the universe who showed up in 2016 and/or 2018, Democrats have seen 59% of their vote already cast, Republicans 48% and NPA 47%.

I basically assume in a massive turnout election; these people will show up. If only these people show up – the voters who voted in 2016 and/or 2018, Republicans will have an advantage among all voters.   Can Democrats win if the GOP has an advantage?  Yes, if one or both of these conditions are true:  more Republicans split off for Biden than Democrats for Trump, and/or, Biden wins the NPA vote.  The scale of both of these things will determine how much of a GOP edge in registration Biden could overcome.

Here is a little math on this.  Let’s say for arguments sake NPA voters make up 24% of the electorate – and the GOP has a 1% advantage in turnout (it was 0.6%) in 2016.  If both sides got 90% of their own vote – meaning the opposite gets 10% (I know there are third party candidates – just play along, please) – Biden would need a 6% margin among NPA voters to win the state by just outside the margin of a recount.   Let’s say the NPA split 50-50, then Biden would need to get 12% of Republicans compared to Trump getting 10% of Democrats to win by the same margin.

The one condition that would give me a high confidence that Democrats win Florida:  one where turnout is basically at parity when everything is counted. To get there, Democrats need to turn out more infrequent voters.   To date, Democrats have more new and infrequent voters who have voted – but a larger share of the GOP vote so far comes from infrequent and new voters.  That is one of the main story lines to watch over the next week

Let’s look at a few things a week out that I like, and a few that I would like to see get better.  For people over on the ole hellsite dot com, when I say things “I would like to see get better,” this does not mean flashing siren – Schale is freaking out - nor when I say "I like this" does it mean I am supremely confident about the outcome.  The words mean exactly what I write - this is what I think.  I know I shouldn’t have to waste words typing these things, but if you lived with my mentions, you would understand why I have to do that (and why I question my decision of ever setting up a twitter account).

Things I like as a Democrat:

• Turnout.  Y’all are killing it.  I did not think over 50% of Democrats would have voted with still five days to vote in-person, and seven days until Election Day.  This number is good for a lot of reasons:  the obvious one, but also you all have made the job of Biden organizers far easier, as now they can focus on an ever increasingly smaller funnel of voters – and they can focus on broader universes of sporadic voters.  If you live in Florida and you have not read this – and you want my guy to win:  do your local organizer a favor, and go vote, so they can take you off their list.

• Duval.  Duval Dems are guarding the house like they are those Jags fans when the Seattle Seahawks’ Quinton Jefferson threatened to climb into the stands in the whatever that stadium is called now.  Duval Democrats have a roughly 12-point advantage among people who have voted (compared to a 6% voter reg advantage) and are leading in both VBM and in-person voting.   Unless something really goes south, Joe Biden is going to win Duuuuval.  

• Dems in red counties:  Turnout and VBM return rates have been very strong in places where Democrats need to cut the margins.  If Clinton had maintained anything close to the Obama 2012 margins in red counties, she would have won.  A Biden win requires both doing well in base communities, and keeping margins close elsewhere.  

Things I want to see improve:

• Continued increase in turnout in communities of color.  The upside is Black and Hispanic shares of the electorate are higher at this point in the cycle than they were four years ago – meaning more are voting earlier.  That being said, both Black and Hispanic turnout are lagging white turnout.  For example, turnout among White Democrats is 58%, Black Democrats 44%, and Hispanic Democrats 42%.   That being said, to show just how important the higher than average at this point turnout among Black Democrats is to the math:  Whites make up 65% of all votes so far, and Republicans have a 542K advantage among these voters.  Black voters make up 12.4% of all voters so far, but the Democratic advantage is 676K.  In fairness, a lot of history suggest these voters are more likely to vote closer to the election and on election day. 

• Democrats returning their ballots:  Come on now.  196K more Democrats have ballots sitting on their kitchen tables than Republicans.  If you are reading this and you can see your ballot, immediately close this screen, and look up the nearest drop box.  Every day you wait just means some organizer has to call you when they should be calling someone else.  Don't be that person.

One additional note – Dade County.    It is important to remember for those who are tweeting at me about Dade that is basically a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma, stuffed into a empanada, doused with hot sauce, and barreling down I-95 at 90mph in a Honda Civic in the emergency lane with the driver leaning out the window holding a couch that is tied to nothing yet somehow balancing on the car roof in a driving rain storm with no windshield wipers, or functioning turn signals.   Yes, I am still not sure how I survived that one time when Caputo took me to the Miami airport. 

I get the concern about Dade from Democrats.  I also get it is a place that beats to its own drummer.  The bad news:  GOP turnout rates are higher than Democrats.   The reality:  that doesn’t overly worry me as a single data point.  The GOP machine is very good in Miami – and particularly in the Cuban community, there is a real effort to get people to vote by mail and vote early.  And Democrats tend to catch up over time.  

Keep in mind a few things:  there are more Republican Hispanic registered voters than Democrats.  I think folks often forget this.   Both parties are turning out a fairly equal percentage of new and sporadic voters – so a lot of their advantage is just a function of their voters voting earlier – just like that is benefiting us elsewhere.  Also, I looked at some similar data from 2016 later in this same week – and the registration spreads between the two parties were pretty similar.  So yes, I would like to see turnout increase – and yes, we need improvement.  

Couple more thoughts.  People keep comparing this to 2016, and I beg of you:  stop.  

First, there is very little rhyme or reason to the voting trends compared to earlier cycles, nor is there some magic number for Democrats to be ahead for me or anyone to feel comfortable.  

Secondly, every race is different.   That race was rocked by the Comey memo that changed the trajectory of the race nationally – which obviously impacted things here.  Everything broke towards Trump late – including virtually every late decider – as arguably happened late in 2012 with Obama, where if nothing else, all Romney momentum stalled.  The race this time is far steadier and has been for months.  I will also say this – sure there might be a “secret” Trump vote (I don’t really buy this – I think there were a lot more people who just didn’t care for either candidate and they all broke Trump  late) – I would remind folks than in 2012 – the polls thought Romney was going to win. There is no guarantee either will happen this time.  In other words, focus on turning out our vote.  That is how we win.

Two final things – One: Remember the limited predictive value of these voting trends.  The Romney folks and most Republicans thought the early voting numbers spelled doom for Obama in 2012.  Most Democrats, including me, thought Clinton was in a good place going into 2016.  Maybe because I am old and tired, I’m not trying to read tea leaves this year – and again, am focused more on trends.  Honestly, notwithstanding all of the analysis provided here and by everyone on-line, I don’t think Florida will be an outlier this year.  In other words, if the home team does well in the upper Midwest, I think Florida falls our way as well.  If Trump turns it around up there, I think he also wins Florida.  Just my hunch. 

And secondly, if Republicans weren’t still worried about the state, Trump wouldn’t have visited Pensacola, Ocala, and The Villages in the last week – and if Democrats didn’t think Florida was winnable, Biden and Obama wouldn’t be on their way here this week.  The most valuable commodity on a campaign is time – and campaigns have far better data than us – or even twitter – so keep that in mind. 

For Democrats, I get this state causes heartburn – trust me, I live it.  I know people want certainty – well, you aren’t going to get it from this memo, other than my confidence that the Jaguars will continue to suck.

My plan is to take another look at the end of the week (meaning probably the weekend), and once more on Monday.  On Monday, I will lay out what I am looking for in certain counties for Tuesday as a viewing guide.

Also, as a fair warning, I may not be as active on Election Night trying to dissect Florida as I was in 2016.  I will try, but as a reminder, I run an organization who is currently active in a number of battleground states, so I may or may not be in a place where I can focus entirely on Florida at exactly 7:03 PM.  I will try though.  More to come. 

Thanks, as always for reading.  And again, thank you to everyone who will point out where I missed a comma. 

14 Days Out

To: Anyone, but for today, mostly Democrats

From: Steve, your friendly Florida Sherpa

Date: No clue

Re: What will likely happen this week.

Friends, I do not plan on writing these daily (though I might), but thought it would be useful to take a minute and share a few thoughts.

Couple of quick toplines:  Florida has now topped 3 million total votes, and yesterday was over 500K total votes between VBM and In Person Early (that from this point on will only be called Early Voting) - over 366K who voted early, a record for Florida.  I don't know if the 500K votes combined is a record - but it is, what us hacks might call, a sh*t ton of votes.  Well done Florida.  Keep it up. 

I did not expect more Democrats to vote than Republicans yesterday, for one simple reason:  the funnel of Republicans who are certain to vote who have not voted yet is bigger than that of the Democrats -- and the Democratic funnel includes a lot more people with VBM ballots in their hands.  In other words, the likely audience for early voting is substantially bigger.  

Needless to say, I was surprised when Democrats narrowly out-voted Republicans on Day 1 -- and when combined with VBM, had a pretty solid day.  

For historical purposes, yesterday:

VBM: 150,907 votes (Dem +12,132)

Early: 366,406 votes (Dem +261)

In total, 3,025,778 have voted, and D's hold a 482,762 voter edge.

The purpose of this note is simply to prepare you for two things over the next few days that are highly likely to happen.

One:  Vote by mail numbers should really jump from the drop box collections.  At the time I am writing this, north of 54,000 VBM ballots have been processed today in just Pinellas and Hillsborough counties (anchor counties of the Tampa media market) - far more than any day since VBM ballots have started being returned to election offices.  Dems have a 320K ballot advantage among people who have not returned their ballot - so should continue to "win days" - but given the GOP return rates have been slower (49% Dems have returned, 44% of GOP), it can be expected that these daily gaps will not be as robust.   

Two: Republicans will "win days" in early voting.  For context, there are about 450K more GOP voters with voting history in the 16 and/or 18 elections than there are Democrats left to vote in that cohort.   In other words, their pie of certain to nearly certain voters left to vote is simply bigger - so it becomes a math question more than anything.  

*Quick note for Democrats (everyone else skip):  This does not bother me.  It is baked into the electorate.  What you need to do is keep turning out voters.  Don't play prevent defense with the lead.

For fun, lets assume turnout surpasses 08 and 16 - so let's say 76% (I am not ready to predict that - this is just for fun), then we are about 27.5% of the electorate having voted.  Right now, as a percentage of all active voters, turnout is 21%.  Democratic turnout (% voted among all registered Democrats): is: 27.3%.  GOP turnout is: 18.6%.  NPA turnout is: 15.6%.

As I said to the media yesterday, keep in mind we are living in unique times.  This election has no model.  In the end, the goal for Democrats is to equal or better Republican turnout.  Republicans are going to vote - the question is if Democrats can match them.  If we do that, I believe Biden will be in good place here.

But it is a long long ways to go.