The Bradenton Times editor helps make sense of issues, candidates and races.
By Johannes Werner
Original Air Date: June 21, 2024
Host: Manatee County voters are restless, giving incumbents a hard time. That means — even though the county has been under one-party rule for the past quarter century — the next elections may bear a few surprises. Here is Part One of an extended interview we had with Dennis ‘Mitch’ Maley, editor of the Bradenton Times and a long-time observer of Manatee County politics. We first put the focus on the least competitive races: Those for State House, incumbents running unopposed, and the races subject to one frequently used dirty trick to shut out large swaths of voters.
Johannes Werner: In one of the two state house districts in Manatee, incumbent Republican Will Robinson faces off against Democrat Adrian De Villiers. In the other district, four Republicans and one Democrat are angling for the seat Tommy Gregory just abandoned.
These should seemingly be hot races. The Republican supermajority in the state legislature has passed close to 100 laws recently that block counties, cities and towns from designing local policy. Florida laws have empowered developers to the point where resistance seems futile. State legislators and Manatee County have worked hand in hand recently, trying to dismantle three island towns, to impose an unpopular massive parking garage project. The backlash against all this has been quite public, and it’s rising: A bipartisan grassroots movement has begun to form around the slogan “Save Florida Home Rule”.
But Mitch Maley doesn’t think that this has any immediate bearing on State House races in Manatee County.
Mitch Maley: Unfortunately, I would love to say yes to that. But the truth is the state elections get very little public scrutiny. They are probably laden with the most amount of low information votes. And year after year in the cycle, especially in Manatee County, we see Democrats are not competitive in state races. There’s not, at this time, a registration reality where, if they’re able to field candidates, that they’re able to be competitive in the races. That said, at the Republican level, the lack of scrutiny translates to whoever lines up the most dollars wins. And I would love to see one of those Republican primaries prove me wrong on that. I do definitely see some energy for that “save home rule” movement coming from a minority of very active informed voters, but seeing that translate to electoral outcomes? I’m not convinced that we’re there.
The only race there that’s going to be very competitive and unpredictable is the race to fill Tommy Gregory’s seat. And right now you have a number of candidates who are lining up and trying to get what I would call that Republican base support and the money that comes with it. And we haven’t really seen one emerge yet. You can start to get an idea of the players based on who their campaign consultants are, who their treasurers are, “I’m a Trump Republican, I’m a DeSantis Republican and I’m to the right of everybody here.” So I think you’re going to get a candidate out of that race who would be indistinguishable. And then you also have the problem that once you get to Tallahassee, the Republican Party of Florida, it’s everybody marching in lockstep, and it’s very, very difficult to be effective if you’re not completely on script with the party.
JW: Thanks to Florida’s closed-primary rules, many of the races in one-party Manatee County are shutting out non-Republicans from participating in picking their next representative. The party powers-that-be make sure that remains that way by posting write-in candidates that have zero chance to get elected. Mitch Maley:
MM: It’s been pretty consistent. We have two of them right now being closed out that way. That’s the Supervisor of Elections Office, which there is no Democratic candidate in the race. So that should have been an open primary based on Florida’s open primary law. However, in this case, we have an instance where the courts have weighed in and said that, well, when you have a write-in candidate, that is not by technical definition a non competitive race, there is technically an option in the general election — even though in the history of our state, no write-in candidate has ever won a race. So it’s as clear as can be that you essentially cannot win as a write-in candidate. However, that’s where the loophole is created.
What we’ve seen consistently is that special interests will close off those races, and this has been really a phenomenon that we’ve seen for decades since the court decision came down. So we’re over a decade and we’re seeing the same thing where wherever the special interest money is lining up, they get someone to run as a write-in candidate and then they position their candidate to run to the right of everybody. And then that way, what you’re doing in that closed off primary is saying, “Here’s the true conservative. Here’s the person who’s the most to the right possible. And we’re not allowing Democrats to vote because they’ll just vote for this rhino opposition that they have.”
And in the supervisor of elections race, that’s really important because we’ve got a situation where we have an appointee who is completely unqualified, has zero qualifications whatsoever, and he’s running against the Former Chief of Staff, 11-year Chief of Staff of recently retired Mike Bennett, who then also has another decade working as a top election official in Sarasota County. He’s literally one of the most experienced election officials in the state of Florida, if not the most experienced. And you had the political pressure for DeSantis to instead put this political hack in there as the appointment when Bennett retired, and it’s a very important race. So closing off that primary was critical.
And another race that we have is in a district seven race, in which recently County Commissioner Kevin Van Ostenbridge switched races to run against incumbent George Kruse. You have two incumbents running against each other in an at large race, and that’s been closed off as well. And that same playbook will be run there. Ostenbridge will both have an enormous amount of money in their campaign counts. They already do. Plus, they’ll have a lot of dark money PACs working for them. And in the Supervisor of Elections Office, it’s quite interesting. We have one write-in candidate that has been now for over a decade, he has been mounting write-in campaigns and then making no effort whatsoever to run. You’ve never seen a sign or anything like that and his name is Thomas Dell. And what we reported on years back was that interestingly Thomas Dell’s address was a property owned by Carlos Baruf, the Medallion Home CEO and politically influential developer. And that’s been sort of just so on the nose and in which they’ve sort of just flaunted that we’re using this loophole where we’re influencing these elections and there’s nothing you can do about it.
JW: And then, there are the races with unopposed incumbents. First of all, that’s Sheriff Rick Wells.
MM: Yeah, the Sheriff, it’s one of those races where you’re rarely going to see competition because Wells is a second generation elected Sheriff. His father was in for a long, long time. And he raises six figures in the first quarter everytime he files, and then it really scares away any kind of competition. So we haven’t seen competition there.
We haven’t seen it, also, I thought there would be some at the clerk of the circuit court because there were some mumblings because she has been one of the few people that has been trying to hold this sort of developer cabal, as we’ve called it, accountable. And she’s a honorable, well respected Republican that is sort of the last among the old guard, if you will, that is fighting against this corporate takeover that we’ve seen in Manatee County government. So I was surprised that they didn’t run somebody against her.
We do have a race where I would encourage people to really pay close attention to is the property appraiser race, which was also closed off. And you have long time Republican incumbent Charles Hackney being challenged by Darren George, and it’s been closed off with a write-in candidate, so it will be all Republicans, and in the most recent county commission budget meeting, we heard of maybe a tip of the hand from Commissioner Jason Bearden, who is one of the developer puppets on the board, saying, “Well, I want to know, let’s say we had a new property appraiser in here, how would that impact the level of revenues we might be collecting?” And what it seemed to suggest to people was that the plan here — and one of the things we saw in the recent budget meeting, which is very instructive, I think, for Manatee County voters — is that the lack of willingness for this board to collect impact fees from developers is really hurting the budget and our ability to build infrastructure to keep up with the rampant growth that we’ve had throughout the county. And it suggests that the plan might be for a new property appraiser to be, I don’t know, let’s say, more aggressive with his appraisals, and further put the onus on existing property owners to subsidize the true cost of real growth. So that’s going to be an important race that again is closed off to just Republicans.
JW: Coming up on our newscast next Wednesday: the second installment of our interview with Bradenton Times editor Mitch Maley about Manatee County elections. We will serve you the main dish: The county commission and school board elections. Stay tuned!
You can find a summary of Manatee County races on the WSLR website.
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