Saturday, May 22, 2021

Governor DeSantis did not have a majority.

 One of the current Republican claims is that Governor DeSantis won the 2018 gubernatorial election with, depending on who is telling the tale, 270,000 votes, or 320,000 votes.  They're wrong.  Governor DeSantis didn't even have a majority, let alone a large majority.  


The expressly nonpartisan site, Ballotpedia, tells the actual story:

https://ballotpedia.org/Florida_gubernatorial_and_lieutenant_gubernatorial_election,_2018


The TLDR is that DeSantis didn't have a majority at all.  He won with 49.6% of the vote, so he had the largest plurality, but not a majority.  Taken as the difference between DeSantis' plurality, and the next largest, Democrat Andrew Gillum, DeSantis won by 32,463 votes.  In fact, the difference was so small that the third largest plurality, that of Reform Party candidate Darcy Richardson, was larger than the difference, at 47,140 votes.  


Any way you slice it, DeSantis' election win was a squeaker, not a landslide.  If Florida had a sane electoral system then we would have had a runoff election between DeSantis and Gillum, and voters would have had another crack at them without the alternate parties.  If we had used ranked choice voting then the outcome might have been different.  


Finally, I'll repeat my observation from the 2018 campaign: If these two mooks are the best our political parties can come up with then we're in real trouble.  

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