Voters assemble in southern melting pot
For there is no town centre or the remnants of what was once a village. If there is a focal point, a centre, it has to be the sea. But even there everything is strung out for mile after mile.
A northern suburb of Fort Lauderdale, the way it has been shaped has relied on three factors: the ocean; the warm climate and the highway. The bluffs overlooking the ocean are ribboned with high-rise condominiums, where rich retirees from New York, Boston and Washington now live.
It’s a bit like LA here. Nobody walks. You drive to shop, be it to McDonald’s or Starbucks or Wendys or Walmarts - the clones that have long strangled every US city of their individualism. As you drive away from the ocean you cross two interstates.
Between the ocean and Interstate 95 you get the neat middle class estates, ample houses with well-combed lawns and a clean, prosperous look. Beyond the Interstate there are warehouses, truck-stops and the shoddier neighbourhoods, where poorer blacks and newer Hispanic immigrant communities live.
Your first impression is money. When you see the kind of dosh that people pay to buy the ocean-front condos, you say this is solid George Bush country.
Not so. Along with the neighbouring counties of Miami-Dade and Palm Beach, Broward gave Al Gore a majority of 200,000 votes in 2000. Together these three Counties combine to edge out the strong Republican vote of the expatriate Cuban community in Miami and the conservative vote in the North of this massive State.
“It’s a mixed area here,” says Barry Dockswell, a Democratic Party activist in Broward, “The middle classes and the newer communities give us a strong majority.”
In 2000, Broward was thrust into the limelight as one of the focal points of the most bitterly- close Presidential elections in history. In a saga that lasted 36 days, America debated over the merits and demerits of butterfly ballots, hanging chads and pregnant chads. But then, the Supreme Court - in a decision that drew derisive reaction - guillotined the process at a time when Al Gore had narrowed his rival’s lead to just over three hundred votes. Thus, with a tiny majority - with thousands of disputed votes unscrutinised - George Bush took the Presidency.
The bitter taste of that whole sad spectacle has never fully receded for Democrats. They point the finger at Jeb Bush, George’s younger brother, the Governor of Florida for what they see as a Presidency stolen from them.
Dockswell says he doesn’t dwell on 2000 much anymore but adds archly. “We call George Bush the President-select rather than the President-elect.”
If Florida was microcosm in 2000, it has the potential to repeat that now. All the signs are of a cliff-hanger. The polls have put it at too close-to-call. The result may turn on a few hundred votes with the courts again deciding the outcome. The two candidates, conscious of that, have each spent a full day here this week, hyping it up at massive rallies.
That makes the changes the State has made in its electoral process critical.
For one, the punch-voting machines have been replaced by electronic voting machines. But they have created controversy because of the lack of a verifiable paper audit.
Florida’s controversial electoral rule that disenfranchises felons has also caused ructions. Felonies in the State have been very widely interpreted and thousands of mainly black citizens - who tend to vote Democrat - have been denied a vote. Each side has drafted in hundreds of lawyers from other States to challenge and scrutinise. The latest row has been over the disappearance of some 70,000 absentee votes, swallowed up somewhere in the postal system.
Even before November 2, Florida is already shaping out to be a mess.
Early polling has been going for over a week and a third of Broward County’s voters have already cast their votes, a sign of a record turnout and also of the clear emotion that still lingers.
This is powerfully illustrated at a municipal library, about a mile inland of Pamplona Beach. Yesterday, the queues stretched right around the block with hundreds willing to wait three hours to press the button.
The Democratic dominance here was immediately obvious. A dozen volunteers held up Kerry-Edwards signs and worked the people in the line, canvassing for a vote.
There was a lone Republican canvasser and she was supporting a guy standing for the obscure office of ‘property appraiser’.
The people in the line represented the eclectic mix of these new communities. There were a couple of perma-tanned pensioners with all the accoutrements of wealth, a lot of blue-collar and middle-class types, plus smaller numbers of Hispanics and African Americans.
They used to say whoever won Ohio won the White House. Florida seems to have taken over that mantle.
