Backroom Briefing: If at first you don't succeed, attack
By BRANDON LARRABEE AND JIM TURNER
THE NEWS SERVICE OF FLORIDA
THE CAPITAL, TALLAHASSEE, September 1, 2016.......... Legendary Notre Dame football coach Knute Rockne once said, "Show me a good and gracious loser and I'll show you a failure."
Several of the candidates who lost Florida political primaries Tuesday appear to have taken Rockne's words to heart.
Less than an hour after the final polls closed in Northwest Florida, and as defeat was already clear, the U.S. Senate campaign of Republican Carlos Beruff blasted out a lengthy op-ed denouncing incumbent GOP Sen. Marco Rubio.
When he began an unsuccessful run for president, Rubio promised not to seek another term in the Senate --- which prompted Beruff and several others to jump into the race. Among the major candidates, Beruff was the only one to hang around after Rubio --- or "young Mr. Rubio," as Beruff described him at one point --- decided to run for re-election.
"I made the miscalculation of taking Mr. Rubio at his word that he wouldn't seek re-election if he lost the Presidential Primary. ... I guess I was silly to believe the words of a Washington politician," Beruff wrote.
The developer did promise to vote for Rubio in November as "the best of the remaining options."
Dena Grayson, running for the Democratic nomination in a congressional district that has been represented by her newly minted husband, also let supporters know exactly how she felt in an email the day after she lost the primary.
"Unfortunately, the results didn't turn out as anticipated, thanks to the nearly $600,000 in sewer money (a.k.a. Super PAC money) that was spent to relentlessly attack me over the past several weeks. ... So, the score for now is Dirty Money 1 -- Democracy 0," Grayson wrote.
Grayson's husband, Alan, who unsuccessfully ran for the U.S. Senate, declined to endorse his primary opponent, Democratic Congressman Patrick Murphy, in the race against Rubio this fall.
Tim Canova, who challenged Congresswoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz in her Democratic primary and had the support of former Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders, did at least make a concession.
"I'll concede that Debbie Wasserman Schultz is a corporate stooge," he said, according to the Sun Sentinel in South Florida.
The common themes through many of the races where the losers were Rockne-esque in their post-election remarks were a vague sense of going up against larger forces or being in particularly nasty races. Beruff and Canova went to war with their parties' establishments --- Wasserman Schultz was the national party chairwoman until July --- and Dena Grayson obviously didn't think highly of her opponents' tactics. Alan Grayson, meanwhile, saw his campaign undone by years-old allegations of domestic abuse by his ex-wife.
CLOUDY OUTCOME FOR SOLAR POWER IN ONE COUNTY
Floridians statewide backed a measure that will extend a renewable-energy tax break to businesses.
An exception, according to results posted by the Florida Division of Elections, is DeSoto County. The statewide vote went 1.97 million for the legislatively created measure, or nearly 73 percent of the total, to 744,455 against.
But DeSoto was the only one of Florida's 67 counties in which a majority of voters opposed the measure. In DeSoto, which is home to Florida Power & Light's Next Generation Solar Energy Center in Arcadia, "no" gathered 2,670 votes to 2,190 in support of Amendment 4. That means voters opposed the measure by a margin of about 10 percentage points.
The proposal exempts for 20 years the assessed value of solar and renewable-energy devices installed on businesses and industrial properties and exempts all renewable-energy equipment from state tangible personal property taxes.
Chris Spencer, executive director of Florida for Solar, the group behind Amendment 4, brushed off the DeSoto vote.
"There are always some outliers," Spencer said. "While anomalies do happen, the overwhelming statewide support by nearly 2 million voters in support of Amendment 4 speaks for itself."
TWEET OF THE WEEK: "I was fearful earlier today that Trump might actually try to win this election. I feel better tonight."---Anti-Trump Republican consultant Mac Stipanovich (@MacStipanovich), on a seesaw Wednesday that saw GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump go from sharing a stage with the president of Mexico to delivering a hard-line speech on immigration policy.
