La Florida se escapa entre las manos

While McCain Looked Away, Florida Shifted

Stephen Crowley/The New York Times
Gov. Charlie Crist, left, joined Senator John McCain on a tour of Florida this week, but their relationship is reportedly strained.


new_york_times:http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/25/us/politics/25florida.html

By ADAM NAGOURNEY
Published: October 24, 2008
MIAMI — For Senator John McCain, it was not supposed to be this way. From a commanding lead last spring, in a state where Senator Barack Obama did not campaign in the primaries and only hired a state director in June, Mr. McCain is now locked in a neck-and-neck race for a trove of electoral votes that is vital to his hopes of victory.

His once-close relationship with Gov. Charlie Crist is reportedly strained. And Mr. Obama has blanketed the state with advertising and built a huge get-out-the-vote operation — on vivid display this week in the long lines for early voting. The sight dispirited Republican leaders here.
Even as state Republicans sent up flares over the summer, warning that the Florida of 2008 is not what it was in 2004, Mr. McCain yielded the airwaves to Mr. Obama, focusing his attention, money and energy on other states. Mr. McCain’s campaign waited until Sept. 1 to begin a serious round of advertising.
Mr. McCain clearly could still win the state’s 27 electoral votes. But the battle in Florida is offering — on the widest stage of any of the contested primary states — an object lesson in the disparities in the resources, aggressiveness and political cunning that Mr. McCain and Mr. Obama are taking to contests across the country.
It is a case study of the troubles of the McCain campaign, the problems of its own making as well as those caused by forces beyond the campaign’s control, including a deeply troubled economy that is sharply driving up home foreclosures in many areas of the state. And it provides vivid evidence of the Obama campaign’s success in using its money and organizational skills to put Republicans on the defensive in once-safe states.
“He has the best political organization for a presidential campaign that I have ever seen here,” Tom Slade, a former state Republican chairman, said of Mr. Obama. “Bar none. He has run a phenomenally good campaign.”
Mr. Obama’s huge financial advantage has turned out to be more lopsided here than in any of the other contested states, displaying, in an outsized way, what Mr. McCain is facing in states like Colorado and Indiana.
For the week that ended Thursday, Mr. Obama spent $4.2 million on advertisements, compared with $1 million by Mr. McCain, according to Campaign Media Analysis Group, an independent group that monitors campaign advertising. It was almost impossible to turn on a television this week without seeing an Obama advertisement showing Mr. McCain saying he had voted with President Bush “90 percent of the time.”
Mr. Obama’s campaign moved to exploit this state’s increasingly popular, and relatively new, early voting program in a way Mr. McCain did not. He came here for two days this week — as did Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton — using high-profile appearances to hand out literature and urge supporters who turned out to vote, often right up the street from the rally. The result could be seen in long lines of people at early voting sites.
Mr. McCain’s advisers said they had put far less effort into the early voting program, instead sticking with what has worked for Florida Republicans for a decade: building up their margin with absentee ballots. But several Republicans said they were afraid that emphasis was missing the way voting behavior is changing here.
Mr. Obama has used sophisticated measures here to find and register new supporters. And Florida statistics this week, which sent a shiver of fear through Republicans, attest to his success: Democrats now have a 660,000 edge in voter registration over Republicans in the state, compared with a Democratic advantage of 280,000 voters in 2006.
Buzz Jacobs, the southeast regional manager of Mr. McCain’s campaign, suggested that Democrats would have trouble getting all those new voters to the polls. “They traditionally have a better voter registration system, and we have a better turnout operation,” he said.
But even several state Republicans said they saw evidence that Mr. Obama was bringing new and highly effective methods to the state to find voters and turn them out.
“I’ve gotten seven calls from live Obama volunteers — and the reason I’m getting calls is because I signed up on their Web site to get notifications from their campaign,” said Sally Bradshaw, a Republican who was a senior political adviser to Jeb Bush, the former governor.
Ms. Bradshaw, who supported Mitt Romney in the primary, had signed up for the list to keep informed about a rival. “I haven’t received any McCain calls,” she said.
Mr. McCain is in this spot today in part because of the conclusion by his campaign this summer that Florida, if competitive, was not as tough as it once was, and that there were more pressing states. Mr. Bush won here by five percentage points in 2004. The Democratic Party had earned months of bad publicity by pressuring its presidential candidates not to campaign in the state before its primary because Florida scheduled its vote earlier than party rules allowed.
Political history suggested that Mr. Obama, as an African-American, would have trouble winning support from two of the state’s key constituencies: Hispanics and Jews. And this is the state of one of Mr. McCain’s great primary triumphs: His decisive victory here in January effectively handed him his party’s nomination.
Mr. McCain’s advisers decided to focus on other states, limiting spending in a very expensive state. His chief strategist, Steve Schmidt, said he was not surprised to see things get tight, particularly as the housing market collapsed here, putting the economy front and center. “We always suspected that would happen,” he said.
The developments have forced Mr. McCain’s campaign to devote precious candidate time and dwindling resources here in the final days of the campaign, at a time when Mr. McCain is facing pressure to shore up his position in other states Mr. Bush won in 2004. He spent a day here on Thursday traveling the state, and will be back next week; Gov. Sarah Palin, his running mate, will be here Sunday.
“It was a strategic error on their part,” said Mr. Obama’s campaign manager, David Plouffe.
Here as in much of the country, there have been strains between the local Republican organization and the McCain campaign about how to run in the state. Until Thursday, Mr. Crist, a Republican whom Mr. McCain said he had considered for the vice-presidential slot on the ticket, kept what appeared to be a definite distance from the McCain campaign, and made remarks — including one disputing Mr. McCain’s contention that the voting process here was subject to fraud — that were clearly unhelpful to Mr. McCain.
In an interview, Mr. Crist disputed the notion that he was anything but whole-hearted in his support for Mr. McCain, and noted that he was accompanying him on a trip he was doing across Florida this week.
“I really don’t know what that’s derived from,” Mr. Crist said. “I’m doing everything I possibly can. I’m excited about his candidacy. I love the guy.”
Still, Mr. Crist’s associates said he had been irked that after everything he had done for Mr. McCain — many Republicans think he would not have won Florida, and thus the nomination, without the last-minute endorsement of Mr. Crist — the McCain campaign, at the last minute, had refused to broadcast a seven-minute video introduction he had prepared for the convention.
From a more pragmatic point of view, Mr. Crist’s associates said he was concerned about becoming too closely identified with Mr. McCain’s campaign, worried that he would hurt his own standing with what one aide described as “Crist-Obama voters.”
Some leaders said they had been stymied in their efforts to get help from the McCain campaign, though they said that was now beginning to change.
“I did have and do have a frustration about getting people here to keep South Florida in the thick of things,” said Chip LaMarca, the Republican chairman from Broward County. “We had numerous telephone conversations and conference calls. We look forward to having more support here.”