Pinellas Legislative Delegation and Circuit Court Bench Become More Conservative

By Spartacus Thrace

Elections do have consequences, and one palpable consequence of the November 2 election is that the legislative and judicial branches of government in Pinellas County have gotten more conservative, and more Republican.

In the legislative races, all Republican incumbents were returned and two long-serving “moderate” Democrat incumbents, Janet Long and Bill Heller, lost their seats in the House of Representatives to conservative Republican challengers Larry Ahern and Jeff Brandes. The election of Larry Ahern is particularly significant in that he was in a three-way race against a moderate female Democrat with vastly superior financial support for her campaign and a female candidate from the so-called “TEA Party” who some observers believe was a ringer who entered the race with with the sole purpose of drawing votes away from Ahern.

Ballot-Qualified TEA Party Fares Poorly in Florida Midterms

TEA Party Logo

By Le Corbeaunoir

The ballot-qualified TEA Party, also known by its detractors as the “fake” Tea Party, fared poorly in Florida’s November 2, 2010 midterm elections.

The TEA Party has been thought by some observers to be part of a plot involving controversial figures Doug Guetzloe, Fred O’Neal, Congressman Alan Grayson (who lost his re-election bid) and other notorious figures to siphon conservative voters away from Republican candidates, as discussed in an earlier post on this blog.  In the end, the TEA Party candidates garnered relatively few votes and had scant effect on the outcomes of the races they each ran in. Few of the TEA Party candidates did anything more than qualify for the ballot and after the blogoshere exposed the scheme, it may actually have caused votes that would have otherwise gone to the Democrats to be cast as “TEA Party” protest votes, compounding the overall losses suffered by the Democratic Party in this election.

The results of every contest in which a TEA Party candidate ran, are as follows:

The Smell In the Room: Controversy Over Florida’s New Ballot-Qualified TEA Party

By Le Corbeaunoir

TEA Party Logo

The creation of the TEA Party as a minor political party in Florida in August 2009, its subsequent qualification of federal and state candidates to be on the November 2010 ballot under the TEA Party name, and other activities of people closely connected to that party have sparked a major political row with implications extending to the 2012 presidential election and beyond. At the heart of the controversy is a fight to the finish between members of the new political party and grassroots Tea Party movement organizers over proprietary ownership and control of the name “Tea Party” and other aspects of the Tea Party “brand” in Florida. The controversy is about power, control, and money, and who gets to define what “Tea Party” means in Florida.

FORMATION OF THE BALLOT-QUALIFIED TEA PARTY

The ballot-qualified “TEA Party” and the “Tea Party movement” are not the same thing. They do not share organizations, leaders, or members, and they are ideologically opposed. The movement is decentralized with power diffused among its many factions. The party is centralized, with power concentrated in the hands of a few. The movement has grown spontaneously across the state over the past year-and-a-half or so, while the party was created by a filing with the Florida Secretary of State in August 2009.