Is there any editorial board in Tampa Bay — make that America — more in love with its hometown mayor than the St. Petersburg Times?
On the day after its candidate, Mayor Rick Baker, won a lopsided re-election, the Times weighed in for the last time in a race that saw the paper repeatedly put down the opposition while offering readers unquestioning accounts of Baker's first term.
"Don't mess with a good thing," the editorial began. "That is the message St. Petersburg voters delivered in Tuesday's election. So Baker has a mandate, if you want to call it that, and he earned it."
For some observers, however, the election sent a different message.
"It once again demonstrates the extraordinary power of the St. Pete Times in the local elections process," said Darryl Paulson, a political science professor at the University of South Florida in St. Petersburg. "They never like to talk about it, but they were 5-0 in terms of their endorsements."
The Times editorial credited Baker for his allies' wins. "While none of the candidates ran openly as a team," the editorial continued, "it was pretty clear who Baker favored."
But in Paulson's view, it wasn't the mayor's clout that ensured a victory for his allies; it was the clout of the Times.
"I don't think there are coattails in local elections," Paulson said. "They just don't have enough information about who's with whom. That's why the Times endorsement is so influential. Low turnout indicates not a lack of interest but a lack of knowledge."
Only 17 percent of St. Petersburg's voters actually bothered to cast ballots. One reason was that most of the races received scant attention from the press. For instance, the Jeff Danner-Jamie Mayo City Council race drew almost no news coverage, and subsequently garnered the lowest number of total votes.
Then, as Paulson points out, there is the case of Darden Rice, a progressive Sierra Club organizer whose first-place primary victory over incumbent Earnest Williams surprised many.
Williams is a staunch ally of Baker's. But more importantly, Williams got unprecedented air cover from the Times' editorial department. Its two editorial endorsements were augmented by two other strong messages of support, including one right after the primary that sounded suspiciously like advice from a political consultant. Before the general election, when the outcome was in doubt, the Times portrayed Rice as "theatrical," "unready" and lacking political experience. The news department gave less coverage to her campaign issues than to flak she received from one African-American activist for being a lesbian, and to criticisms from other black observers who questioned the ability of a white candidate to represent a majority-black district.
After Williams won, the Times' view of Rice shifted, and its post-election editorial referred to her as "spirited newcomer Darden Rice."
"I clearly don't think he would have won without the Times endorsement," Paulson said. "Without that endorsement, I think she might have won by a 55-45 kind of thing, because she had the organization much more than he did. She ran a very impressive race, especially for a first-timer."
Two days after his crushing defeat, Baker's opponent could only shake his head.
"I guess I was surprised at the dissonance between what I've seen reported as to the state of people's happiness and what I've heard on the campaign trail," a hoarse and tired-sounding Helm said. "From fancy houses to mobile home dwellers, [they are]… very, very concerned and nervous about the permanence of their home."
Ed Helm was disconnected from the city's voters from the start. He made a mistake picking a fight with mainstream Democrats who supported the Republican Baker. And he acknowledges that not polling was a key error, leaving him no ammo to refute Baker's internal polling that showed him with a 70 percent favorability rating (though judging by the election results, those polls now look pretty accurate).
All in all, Nov. 8 was a bad day for progressives in St. Petersburg. Helm had campaigned as an unabashed Democrat in a nonpartisan election, hoping to cash in on the fact that the city voted for Kerry in 2004; Rice had hoped to turn her grassroots organization, developed during the Kerry race, into a real machine; progressive Eve Joy hoped to unseat incumbent John Bryan.
While Democrats enjoyed gubernatorial victories in New Jersey (big deal) and Virginia (impressive), there was none to be had in Democrat-majority St. Petersburg, despite statewide and national attention from party regulars.
To be fair, the Baker-coalition opponents had problems of their own that contributed to their losses. Incumbent Virginia Littrell lost big to former Councilwoman Leslie Curran; Littrell's ill-conceived attack mail likely backfired, and her reputation as bristly and unpleasant caught up to her. Rice made mistakes, too: her attack on Williams' travel as a City Council member was poorly executed, and after the revelation that her campaign had swiped the Internet address www.earnestwilliams.com, Rice's cavalier attitude about it at the televised Suncoast Tiger Bay forum didn't help.
For Helm, his campaign was way too little, way too late, and way off target. But he promised he and his supporters would be back.
"The progressives are not going away," Helm said.
Political Whore can be reached by e-mail at wayne.garcia@weeklyplanet.com or by telephone at 813-739-4805.
This article appears in Nov 16-23, 2005.