Mory Blaine, 67, retired to Fort Lauderdale, Fla. from Secaucus more than 15 years ago. “The pace of life just is not the same here,” he said from his Florida home last week. “People don’t drive as fast and are not in the same hurry to get places as they are up north. But there are just enough Yankees to keep us transplants happy.”
Last week, those Yankees were scrutinized by the rest of the country after it was determined that Floridians held the “Keys” to the presidential election. The outcome of the battle between Democrat Al Gore and Republican George W. Bush was not determined by as late as Thursday, and it seemed that Florida’s 25 electoral votes would make the difference. Whichever candidate won Florida would also win the nation’s highest office.Talk of recounts and election irregularities abounded. And in Florida, a battleground state, Hudson natives endured the scrutiny.
“This state has been so crazy the last couple of months,” said Jersey City native Nelson Cordone, 65, from Miami Beach, Fla., last week. “They keep peddling everything to everyone. There are so many different groups in the state. There are Cubans, Puerto Ricans, farmers, Snow Birds, big city folks and small towns. They come in promising too much, but I guess that’s what they have to do to win.”
(For those unfamiliar with local lingo, a “Snow Bird” is someone who relocates to Florida only for the winter.) Secaucus’ Blaine said that the older he gets, the more active he becomes in politics because for him it is extremely important that Social Security is stable, and that prescription drugs are affordable and available. “I have always voted Democrat for as long as I can remember,” he said last week. “In the past, it was because they were better for labor and the unions, but now I trust that they will keep my medication affordable.”
The Northern and the Cuban votes
“Florida is really a strange contradiction in a lot of ways,” said retired Florida State University political science professor Ken Ivey from his home in West Palm Beach, Fla., last week. “The further you go south, the more northern the people get.”
Over the past couple of decades, a huge migration of retirees from the north have filled the coasts of Florida, from Boca Raton to Fort Myers. According to Ivey, this influx has affected the voting psyche of South Florida in several ways.
“You have the person who has lived in a big city for his entire life and then retires to the South,” Ivey said. “So not only is this person going to care about urban issues, but he is also going to care about senior citizens issues such as Medicare and Social Security. It is a new kind of voter that the South has never had before, and that is what makes the state so hard to campaign in.”
According to the latest U.S. Census, there are 125,000 Cuban-American registered voters in New Jersey, with the vast majority living in Hudson County. This is second only to the massive Cuban presence in Miami.
“The Hispanic population of Florida, and especially Miami, is striking,” said Ivey last week. “Where as the non-Cuban Hispanics traditionally vote heavily to the Democratic side, the Cuban population almost always fall to the Republicans.” Ivey said that to court the Cuban-American vote, candidates must be anti-Castro and pro-embargo.
Raul Fernandez, a second generation Cuban-American who lived in Hoboken for 18 years before returning to Miami, said last week that he believes that the Cuban vote in Florida is crucial to the outcome of the election. “I almost always vote Republican,” Fernandez said last week. “But if the Democrats are right on their issues, they can still get my vote. But I feel that Gore is not firmly committed to doing everything possible for the liberation of Cuba. I feel that to most Cuban-Americans, that is the one issue we put above all others.” However, the line drawn between the two candidates is thin, and the Cuban vote in Florida was one of the major points of contention in the election.
In the past, the Republican Cuban base has been firm. In 1980, more than 80 percent of Florida’s Cubans voted for Ronald Reagan, but the Republican hold on the group has dwindled. In fact, it has dwindled so much that in 1996, Clinton received 58 percent of their vote.
Rep. Robert Menendez of Union City (D-13th Dist.), a Cuban-American, endorsed Gore and said last week that he believed that Florida’s Cuban votes might be some of the most important swing votes in one of the most important swing states.
A microcosm
Ivey said last week that part of the reason that so many people were focused on Florida last week was that so many people have a stake in that state. “Some visit there, some move there, some have family there,” Ivey said, “but almost everyone has a tie to the state.”
He went on to say that Florida represents a microcosm of all the political stresses in America packed into one peninsula.
“Florida really isn’t that much different than anywhere else,” said Blaine, the 67-year-old Secaucus native. “Sure, the weather is nicer and the golf is great, but the politics are the same.”