Though polling suggested a lead for incumbent Mayor Rick Kriseman over former Mayor Rick Baker, the heartbreak of November 8, 2016 was still raw. Plus, Baker’s challenge was well-funded and aggressive. And — another grim reminder from 2016 — voter polls don’t always reflect reality.
After polling places closed Tuesday, Kriseman supporters spent the next 35 minutes or so huddled over high-top cocktail tables at Nova 535, the same place Kriseman held his 2013 victory party, refreshing the browser windows that displayed the incoming election results on their smartphones and laptops, precinct by precinct. Fingers crossed, said the likes of St. Petersburg City Councilwoman Lisa Wheeler-Bowman, one of the five members of the council to endorse him.
When it appeared that Baker didn’t have a path to victory, Kriseman supporters were practically pinching themselves. It didn’t really become real until, via a Bay News 9 feed projected on a large screen behind the stage, Baker took the stage at his own watch party at 400 Beach Seafood & Tap House to give his concession speech.
Ultimately, Kriseman had won by more than three percentage points, 51.64 to 48.36 percent — not bad for a guy who won the primary back in August by just 70 votes, especially given the slew of vicious attack ads aimed at him around the time voters were starting to fill out their mail ballots.
So how did it happen? And what now?
All about Trump?
As analysis of this election whirs on, a common conclusion is going to be that Kriseman won because Donald Trump is so unpopular in the city, and a barrage of ads equating Baker to Trump helped drag Kriseman over the line. Endorsements from Democratic heavyweights like former President Barack Obama, former Vice President Joe Biden and U.S. Senator from New Jersey Corey Booker may have helped give Kriseman a boost.
Yet it’s really not all that clear what difference, if any, nationalizing the election made. Or whether Baker could have offset the controversy by more vocally condemning Trump and saying he didn’t vote for him (whether that’s true or not, we’ll never know) rather than trying to convince a city of Democrats that party affiliation doesn’t matter in local elections. Whether that would have worked, given how a lot of his GOP backers also backed Trump, Governor Rick Scott, and ultraconservative House Speaker Richard Corcoran, we’ll also never know.
But to say anti-Trumpism is the sole reason Kriseman won oversimplifies the calculations thousands of voters make in their heads before casting a ballot — even if Democrats in Virginia and other places also had good reasons to celebrate Tuesday night.
Forward, not forward-ish
While many local pundits (many of them Baker supporters) will try to say that this election’s outcome was a case of voters weighing in against Trump, our faith in humanity, what little of it that’s left, tells us it goes a little deeper than that.
In many ways, the election was a referendum on the direction the city’s going in. Kriseman supporters repeated that mantra from the beginning. Unwittingly playing into the message was the fact that his major challenger was a former mayor who reigned at a time when St. Pete was still shaking off its “God’s waiting room” label and hadn’t fully blossomed into an artsy, diverse up-and-comer; there were few murals and rainbow flags then, even fewer vegan restaurants. And while Baker had pursued economic development in the city’s poverty-stricken and predominantly African-American areas, Kriseman seemed to have a knack for reaching out to all, be they members of local mosques, the LGBTQ community, or small business owners.
And it wasn’t just on diversity
Consider curbside recycling. The city’s program rolled out for single-family residences under Kriseman in 2015. Baker backers made a huge stink about it at the time, and Baker never committed to keeping the program if elected. Doing away with the program would likely have been an embarrassment for a city that seeks to call itself green.
The nationally known Democrats the party brought in to stump for him — Julian Castro, Martin O’Malley, both of whom are possible 2020 contenders — worked “forward, not backward” or some variant thereof into their rationale for showing up.
Baker, meanwhile, promised to move the city forward in his own way, namely by promising quick fixes to the city’s wastewater infrastructure. But the city’s sewage woes, decades in the making, weren’t as visible as in prior years, which Kriseman said was due to ongoing upgrades.
Yet given the divisions between Baker and Kriseman voters in some areas of the city, perhaps a better proxy referendum on the city’s direction was the race between Council Chair Darden Rice, a progressive Democrat who had an obscure challenger in newcomer Jerick Johnston. Rice won by more than 45 percentage points.
So, sewage didn’t work, then?
It did, sort of. But mostly in the primary.
Whether they admit it or not (and most of them don’t) much of the local commentariat probably knew Baker was going to run against Kriseman long before he announced. Not long after Republicans won big in the 2014 midterms, he seemed to be getting very busy behind the scenes, be it on the St. Pete Pier or the Tampa Bay Rowdies or city council elections in which one of the candidates would have aligned quite well with his agenda if elected in 2017. And in September of 2016, at an overtly politicized hearing in which local Republican lawmakers grilled Kriseman and staff over the sewage issue, Baker was on hand to watch the proceedings, a highly visible presence in a pinstripe suit. We knew then that he’d be announcing his run when convenient.
And neither did bad ink
One thing that stuck out for us (and many Kriseman supporters) was how some local media outlets were dogging the mayor — none more aggressively than the Tampa Bay Times. Granted, newspapers are supposed to push for transparency (something the Kriseman administration hasn’t always been good at). But when an unfavorable headline, a critical editorial and a painfully inaccurate attack ad all come out at roughly the same time, it smacks of an agenda.
In a break from its editorial pages’ normal leftward lean, the Times seemed to be gunning hard in support of Baker as well as City Council candidate Justin Bean, a young newcomer and Baker ally who lost to Gina Driscoll, a Kriseman ally who — nothing against Bean — had a much lengthier resume and history of civic engagement.
But two Baker endorsements and countless critical headlines and editorials didn’t effectively sway the voting public in St. Petersburg.
That the Times was so in the bag for Baker led some to question their motive, especially given a recent bailout from wealthy investors, the bulk of which are as yet undisclosed (though Baker’s boss, billionaire Bill Edwards, has said he is not one).
To think your influence is potent enough to get a conservative Republican mayoral candidate (albeit a somewhat popular one) elected in progressive St. Petersburg — a far cry from persuading moderate Pinellas to ditch its anti-fluoride commissioners — could have been flying a tad close to the sun.
Trump wasn’t the only supervillain in Kriseman’s crosshairs.
The other? Hurricane Irma.
Ahead of the storm, Kriseman was filling sandbags and urging people to get out if they can, especially as a direct hit from a Cat 4 seemed imminent. He headlined multiple press conferences updating residents on the storm, in which he urged those who didn’t leave to stay safe.
Afterward, as locals were stuck without electricity and with yards full of debris, the city opened doors to some recreation centers, where those without power could cool off in the A/C and charge their devices.
While massive sewage dumps into the bay seemed likely ahead of the storm, given how inundated the city’s wastewater system would likely be, that didn’t happen. The city reportedly had to discharge about 15 million gallons of partially treated water into an injection well, which Baker and other Kriseman foes tried to make a stink about, but that’s a far cry from hundreds of gallons of water going into the bay, and it didn’t stick.
So what now?
Well, the election was good for Kriseman in more ways than one. With the election of Gina Driscoll and the reelection of Council Chair Darden Rice, Kriseman has held on to the number of allies he had before the election. And while Brandi Gabbard, who was elected to the council’s District 6 seat, didn’t express support for either candidate, as a Dem she still appears to embrace many of her colleagues’ values.
This means progress on climate change preparedness, worker protections and efforts to fight the GOP Florida Legislature’s attempts to strip local control from cities and counties.
Plus, if anti-Trumpism is remotely as much of a factor as they say it is, what happened in St. Petersburg and Virginia and New Jersey and many other places on Nov. 7 could be just the beginning. 2018 is just a few months away, and primary battles for the governorship as well as cabinet and legislative seats should heat up by spring. In the meantime, the Florida legislative session gets underway in January. With its Republican supermajority, they’re likely to take up potential laws that will leave Dems fuming, such as an effort to abolish local tree ordinances, multiple measures to restrict women’s access to healthcare, and open carry.
Republicans typically dominate in Florida’s midterm elections, even when other states are trending blue. That’s largely because Democrats don’t turn out, not because Florida is a red state (it’s a purple state).
Yet if the Dems can infuse the 2018 races with the same energy and resources that helped them fend off a monied Republican challenger in St. Pete, perhaps they have a shot at getting some significant gains at the state level for a change.
This article appears in Nov 2-9, 2017.