Sirened

Last night Hillary Clinton scored a big victory in West Virginia, winning the state by a whopping 67%-26% margin. A 41% victory by someone trailing nationally in polls by 4% to basically the presumptive democratic nominee.

Obama currently sits at 1,882 delegates, just 143 delegates short of the 2,025 needed to win. Of course, the Clinton campaign argues that he needs 2,209 delegates to win because of Florida and Michigan.

The Clinton campaign keeps stressing that even though Florida voters knew their votes wouldn’t count, the state democratic party had a record turnout. That’s an incredible overstatement and I haven’t heard or read the mainstream media calling them out on it-and they damn well should!

The reason turnout was so high in Florida was because of a statewide property tax amendment to cut homeowners taxes (at the expense of schools, fire departments, county jobs, etc.) This was a big issue in Florida and Gov. Charlie Crist was a big advocate of the tax cut, even appearing on billboards stating vote yes on the tax cut.

The amendment needed 60% to pass and it got it. Since then, the state universities have been scrambling to cut their budgets while at the same time raising tuition for students; fire stations have closed and state employees have been laid off. This was a tough issue and opponents of the tax cut (like myself) were against it because of the negative impact to the community.

Along with the property tax amendment there was something else on the ballot for Florida voters to decide on January 29th-the democratic and republican primaries. Since Florida is a closed primary, independent ballots only had the property tax amendment on them.

Sure, some people showed up mostly to vote for the candidates, but to say the record democratic turnout in Florida was because of them is a complete lie-but it’s the Clinton’s so could we possibly expect more?

photo credit: personal collection

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