The Tampa City Council race's District 1 has several talented candidates in the race, and even though Mike Suarez swept many of the newspaper endorsements and is leading in the race at 9:00 p.m.- but not by much over Tampa City Council District 3 interim member Curtis Stokes.
With 90% of the votes in, Suarez has 30.45%, Stokes 26.24%.
Cl intern Brittney Bagiardi spoke with Suarez at Rick's On the River earlier tonight. He told her about the run-off that "no one scares me, but I will say right now we have a sitting city councilman that is in this race. In that way he does have some of the power of incumbency. We're hoping we can make a dent in his incumbency."
CL saw Curtis Stokes at his campaign event at Malio's in downtown Tampa, where he sounded extremely confident about his chances in three weeks. "There will be significant differences between me and my opponent." When asked what those differences were, Stokes wasn't that specific, instead mentioning the Republican National Convention coming to town. He also said that said that he planned on working on gaining the support of the other candidates in the race, like Tom Slaughter and Guido Maniscalco and Rick Barcena.
