Within hours of the resignation last month of Hillsborough County Democratic Representative Mike Scionti, South Tampa Democratic activist and fundraiser Janet Cruz-Rifkin (right) announced her campaign to succeed him. She released a statement announcing not only that she was running for Scionti’s District 58 seat, but that a list of high-powered Tampa Democrats like Jim Davis, Kathy Castor and Alex Sink were endorsing her campaign. The Democratic primary is Tuesday, Jan. 26.

With the seat already heavily Democratic, Cruz-Rifkin (who’s running as Janet Cruz in the election) was soon jetting up to Tallahassee to fundraise and, critics joke, begin measuring the drapes for her new home in the state capitol.

But a funny thing happened on the way to her coronation: Hillsborough County Democratic Party Chair Pat Kemp declared two weeks later that the district ought to be represented by someone who actually lives in it, and that person was Pat Kemp. And prior to Kemp’s announcement, 33-year-old attorney Gil Sanchez said he too would like to try for the seat, though he, like Cruz, resides outside the district. (He lives in Channelside.)

(State election law allows legislative candidates to run for office without living in a district, but if elected, they then must move there. Cruz has since begun renting in District 58.)

But if Pat Kemp was the only indigenous candidate, she soon came under fire from some of her opponent’s supporters, who asked, somewhat stunningly, whether she was the right ethnicity.

This article appears in Jan 20-26, 2010.