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(light music) - Right now on WEDU, Tampa's police chief resigns and now the search is on for a new chief.

We'll get some analysis of why Democratic turnout was low in last month's election.

The governor uses the term, woke, a lot, what does it mean?

And Florida's new Generation Z congressman is turned down from renting an apartment in Washington DC.

All this and more right now on Florida This Week.

(upbeat music) (upbeat music) Welcome back.

During last month's elections in Florida, Republicans had a series of sweeping victories bucking a national trend.

The GOP wins were significant, all statewide elections including the US Senate, the governor's race and the entire Florida Cabinet.

They won 20 of 28 congressional seats and they further cemented their super majorities in the state legislature, picking up more than eight seats in the state House and five in the Senate.

- Among the reasons Democrats lost so decisively, turnout.

Four years ago in 2018 before the state enacted new voting laws, turnout was 63% among registered voters.

This year, turnout dropped to 54%.

Statewide, nearly two-thirds of registered Republicans did show up to the polls compared to only half of registered Democrats.

Douglas Soule is a reporter with the USA TODAY Network in Florida.

He's been looking into why Democratic turnout trailed Republican turnout this year and he joins us now.

Douglas, nice to see you.

Thanks for coming on the program.

- No, it's my pleasure, thank you.

- So why was the Democratic turnout so significantly lower than the Republican turnout in Florida this time?

- No, well, trail is very complex and analysis really is still preliminary.

There is some visible factors that contributed to all this that even go beyond election laws.

The first factor was that Republicans dramatically outspent Democrats this election cycle.

And big donors who poured money into Democratic coffers in Florida in 2018 contributed far less in 2022.

And that money really was needed, especially considering for the first time, registered Republicans in Florida outnumbered registered Democrats.

Now, there's a little bit of a chicken and an egg debate about whether the lack of enthusiasm in Florida contributed to a lack of money or if a lack of money contributed to a lack of enthusiasm.

I think it's probably a little bit of both.

Charlie Crist is certainly not new to winning state elections having been governor and more in the past.

But as we know, he's certainly not new to losing them either.

And people really didn't rally around him like they did Andrew Gillum when he lost to Governor Ron DeSantis in 2018 by just a sliver of a percentage point.

Now, also going into that lack of enthusiasm, I spoke to some voting rights advocates on the ground and they tell that Governor Ron DeSantis' decision to redraw the map, the election map this past year also had some impact on the enthusiasm in that two voting districts that had large black populations were removed.

And some of the black voters who were previously in those districts were disincentivized to vote from that reason alone 'cause they felt like their voting power had been substantially minimized.

- You report also that some groups were scared, African American groups were scared of voting and some people who had served time in prison, they were scared of voting.

What did they tell you?

- No, yeah, so all that goes back to 2018.

If you recall in 2018, Florida voters, many of your watchers, approved an amendment that restored voting rights to those previously convicted of felonies.

There were some restrictions on that, such as the restrictions of you couldn't have committed a sex or murder offense.

And then the Florida legislature soon after added more limitations on that, such as you couldn't vote until you paid off your legal fines and fees.

And in the years since, there's been a widespread confusion.

People struggle to realize and understand if they were eligible to vote.

And that confusion, voting rights advocates tell me, changed to fear in August of this year when Ron DeSantis got up on a stage and announced that 20 people who voted in 2020 were being charged with voter fraud.

Now, these people were charged following an investigation by DeSantis' new election crimes office which was created through a new voting law.

And all 20 were previously convicted of felonies and they were not eligible because the nature of the felony offense they committed, but it has been reported that most of them believed that they could vote and had been told they could vote.

And all of them had been issued voter registration cards to them confirming they could vote.

So two years later, when police came knocking at their door telling them they're being arrested for that, there's some widely spread publicized videos of the looks of confusions on their faces when this happened.

And voting rights advocates tell me that this created as you mentioned a fear, especially in the black community who is disproportionately incarcerated.

And if you look at the 20 who were charged with voting fraud, 15 of them were black.

So that really compounded onto that.

And voting rights advocates tell me that people especially those previously incarcerated were now looking at their voter registration card with some doubt having seen what happened and transpired in August.

And Mark Earley, who's the Supervisor of Elections for Leon County told me for the first time ever, people came into his office worried that they would be arrested for voting and these people, some of them had clean records entirely.

So this goes beyond just the previously incarcerated community, black community.

I mean, this really was, from what voter rights advocates tell me, a widespread fear that followed those August arrests.

- Douglas, we only have a minute left, but one other group that you write about are people who are disabled and because of the limits on dropboxes, you say that they may have affected family members collecting ballots from people who are disabled.

- Yeah, so, I talked to one representative of a disability group.

And they told me about the effect of one of the new laws passed by the legislature and signed off by DeSantis over the last two years.

It made it a felony to turn in more than two ballots that weren't your family members.

And what they found was that a lot of people who previously relied on those services, a lot of churches and other groups collected ballots and turned them in and a lot of people relied on those especially in the disability community.

But they found that there were so many people who requested help, there just weren't enough volunteers because a volunteer could only turn in two ballots.

And so that also seemed to have an impact on this election according to that official I talked to.

And she also mentioned the fear of what if one of those groups did collect more than two ballots without knowing this new law?

And she worries about could these people now face felony offenses for something they didn't realize?

And so the concern comes from not just the elections office but also the new laws as well.

- Well, Douglas, thanks for coming on the program and thanks for your reporting, too.

- Thank you so much for having me on.

(light music) (light music) - Joining us now on our panel this week, Rochelle Reback is a former attorney, a radio host of Midpoint on WMNF and a Democrat.

Justin Garcia is a reporter for Creative Loafing and Mark Proctor is a political consultant and a Republican.

Nice to have you all here, nice to see you.

Well, the city of Tampa is again looking for a new police chief.

On Monday, the current chief, Mary O'Connor resigned after a video was released showing her and her husband being stopped in Pinellas County while driving a golf cart on a street without a license tag.

In the video, the chief shows her badge and asks a deputy to let her go and her husband go, too.

- [Jacoby] Stopped you because you're driving a unregistered vehicle with no tag on it on the roadway.

- Yeah, we went to the club, it was closed, so we went over and picked up some... - Is your camera on?

- [Jacoby] It is.

- I'm the police chief in Tampa.

- [Jacoby] Oh, how are you doing?

- I'm doing good.

I'm hoping that you'll just let us go tonight.

- [Jacoby] Okay, yeah, you look familiar.

- Yeah, I'm sure I do.

- [Jacoby] Okay, all right, folks, well, have a good night.

Staying over here in East Lake Woodlands?

- We live in East Lake Woodlands.

- Yes.

- [Jacoby] Oh, okay.

All right, well, it's nice to meet you.

I'm Deputy Jacoby.

- Same here, my friend.

Take care of yourself, sorry to bother you.

- [Jacoby] All right, no worries, no worries.

Like I say, we have a lot of problem with the golf carting around here-- - Yeah, we don't normally come out.

- We never come out.

- The club was closed and so we went up to the Greek place to get some food.

- [Jacoby] Gotcha, okay.

All right, all right then, well, take care and it was nice meeting you.

- All right.

- [Jacoby] Oh, all right.

- You ever need anything, call me.

- Tampa Mayor Jane Castor asked for and received O'Connor's resignation after a review by the department's Internal Affairs Bureau found that O'Connor violated the department policies on standard of conduct and abuse of position or identification.

The video of the chief was first obtained by Creative Loafing reporter Justin Garcia and Justin is here with us.

Justin, how long did it take for the incident to happen and the video to be released?

- Yeah, it happened on November 12th and it wasn't until November 30th, the same day that I was told I was gonna be receiving the video from Pinellas County that Mary O'Connor went and let Jane Castor know that it had happened.

So it took 18 days.

I had been making their public records request for about close to two weeks.

And it was closed multiple times on me and I kept pushing back and finding more information until I was able to obtain the video.

- Could I ask whether or not you got a tip that this was out there?

- Yeah, I got two different sources and at first, they were saying different things.

One was saying it was on the day before it happened and I had to narrow it down and work with Pinellas County to eventually pinpoint when it happened and get the deputy's name and then from there was able to obtain the video.

- And one of the questions is we don't know how Chief O'Connor got the word that this video was about to be released.

Do we know anything about how she got that word?

- So that's what I'm looking into next.

Essentially, I found out on the 30th that I was gonna receive it.

I was told it would take a day for them to get it to me and so O'Connor goes to Castor on that day, tells her that I'm gonna be getting the videos, what I assume happened, and then the next day, I receive it and about 30 minutes after I get the video, TPD somehow miraculously has it as well right when we're publishing the story about it.

- So Mark, what does this look like to you, I mean the way the chief handled this?

- Well, first of all, the old do you know who I am trick never works with elected officials.

That's a very poor attitude to get into.

The fact that she didn't...

If she had just called the mayor the next morning and say, hey, listen, here's what happened, it probably would've gone away.

It was her husband driving, who is by the way also a city employee.

But the fact that she was not well-liked, Delgado was really liked much more in the community and the mayor went with O'Connor who was in the department, was out of the department, back in the department and out of the department when she was hired back as chief.

So she'd already had some issues with the police department.

So it's a very unfortunate situation, but this is the what, fourth or fifth time the mayor's had a new police chief in Tampa.

- And Shelly, the Tampa Police Department has a problem when it comes to black bicyclists.

- Yeah, Mary O'Connor never should've been hired.

She had so much baggage.

She was instrumental in the Biking While Black scandal, which was investigated by the Department of Justice.

She was instrumental in the anti-crime, multi-family housing project, which I think is still under investigation.

You know, it's one thing for her to be hired back when she had this problem as a rookie, it's one thing for her to be hired back as an officer, that may be okay, but to be the face of leadership of the police department is something completely different.

I know if I was still a practicing criminal defense attorney and every one of my cases particularly those involving a battery on a law enforcement officer or assault or resisting arrest, I would be telling every judge, Judge, you know the chief of police and the former chief, our mayor both say how important it is to give people second chances.

Is it only good for them, but not my client?

- Justin, your newspaper's also reporting that people within the department are laughing at O'Connor now that she's exited.

- Yeah, they were a number of memes shared around the department making fun of the situation.

But I will say it speaks to this larger issue.

We also reported that the Pinellas County deputy, Deputy Jacoby will not be reprimanded for letting her go.

And it speaks to this larger issue.

We had a sergeant go on CNN talking about how this happens all the time and openly bragging about how police officers treat each other a different way than they would the general public.

And that's the bigger conversation that it's opened up now is there's this rule for you, but not for me.

So it makes people who have been disproportionately targeted through whether it be Biking While Black, whether it be Renting While Black, look at this and go, wait, we didn't have a second chance.

And now you get a second chance and who knows what else went on behind the scenes.

So we're still digging into more details about what actually happened in this scenario.

- Okay, well, let's go to an issue that might be related.

At many of his campaign appearances, Governor Ron DeSantis has touted his opposition to wokeism.

On election night, he said Florida was the place where woke goes to die.

At some campaign stops, he repeated the term over and over.

- We will fight the woke in the businesses.

We will fight the woke in government agencies.

We will fight the woke in our schools.

We will never ever surrender to the woke agenda.

Florida is the state where woke goes to die.

- What does the governor mean by the term?

He hasn't answered directly, but at that trial of fired Hillsborough State Attorney Andrew Warren last week in Tallahassee, two of his aides did offer a definition.

His communications director, Taryn Fenske said, "Woke was a slang term for activism, progressive activism "and a general belief in systemic injustices "in the country."

And as General Counsel Ryan Newman testified, "It means someone who believes "that there are systemic injustices "in the criminal justice system which need to be addressed."

Newman added that DeSantis doesn't believe that there are systematic injustices in the US.

Mark, this term, woke, fires up the Republican base a lot.

Why does it do that?

- It's the red meat for the base.

But I'm gonna give you a parallel.

I think it's the same thing with the MEGA, MAGA Republicans is for the Democratic base.

What it's saying is this is the extreme at both ends of the political spectrum.

When the woke term was first used, it was about social injustice and racial equality and then now it's expanded by perception that it's everything about change with someone who was MAGA, which was Make America Great better than America is now against everything change.

So I think those have been some key words that are being used by both parties.

And I think that's part of it.

And it's unfortunate, but that's one of the reasons we've got these strong divides on both ends of the political spectrum.

- And Shelly, we just talked about an incident in Pinellas County where one sheriff's deputy seemed to treat the chief of police of Tampa with kid gloves.

And I wonder if that goes back to this question of systemic problems in our system.

- Yeah, I mean, if you believe DeSantis' own people, he does not believe that there are or were or continue today to be systemic injustices in our society or in our country.

It's ridiculous, it's ridiculous.

It's like when Trump said he had the largest inauguration crowd in history.

Who are you gonna believe, me or your lying eyes?

Of course, there are systemic injustices in this country and it's dangerous that he denies that.

It's dangerous for people who are living in situations of challenge, people in poverty, racial minorities, religious minorities.

It's dangerous to deny the fact that there are systemic injustices in this country.

And it's particularly dangerous for a politician of his power.

- And Justin, by getting the video out there, it seems to indicate that there is something going on underneath, that there is a privileged group of people in the US.

- Yeah, and we just talked about in Tampa alone there was the Biking While Black and the Renting While Black scenarios just in the past seven years.

And that's part of the systemic problem is that people can be thrown out of their houses for even allegedly committing a crime without even being found guilty in court.

90% of those people targeted were black people.

That's proof, that's hard evidence.

And about the definition of-- - [Rob] You're talking about the city of Tampa.

- Yeah, well, I'm saying it speaks to the larger issues of the systemic injustices in Tampa or in the country in general.

And the literal definition of woke is the past tense of wake.

And I prefer to be awake.

I don't wanna be sleepwalking through life and pretending like these things don't exist.

So I would rather have my eyes open and know what's going on and being to try to change things because you can never create change or make a country better or improve on problems that actually exist until you open your eyes and see it in the first place.

- Okay, well, Maxwell Frost, a 25-year-old Central Florida Democrat who made history last month as the first Generation Z member elected to Congress has been turned down from renting an apartment in Washington DC.

Frost was elected to District 10 near Orlando last month.

The former gun reform activist was rejected for an apartment in DC this week because he had bad credit.

Frost says he ran up debt for the past year and a half while running for Congress and for most of that time, he had no income.

The Constitution requires that he must have a residence in his home state and he must also live in DC, in the DC area for his congressional work.

Frost says there are lots of barriers for working class people running for office.

And Shelly, what does this say to you if the guy who's gonna make $174,000 a year next year can't afford to rent an apartment in DC?

- Well, of course, he doesn't get paid until February, a month after he starts work.

So he's still living in whatever financial condition he had when he got elected.

But the point is that it's past time for us to be electing Americans who represent young people, working class people, people who are not millionaires.

And also, it's so expensive to run for office that we wind up having a Congress full of people who are themselves millionaires or who are beholden to millionaires.

And that is the lens through which they view the world and that their priorities are ranked.

And therefore, we don't have enough of the voices of young people and people in poverty and working class people on that ranked priority list of what Congress cares about.

And so it's also a need for...

It expresses a need for campaign reform.

Because without campaign reform, more people of working class background cannot afford to compete and cannot afford to get elected without being so beholden to special interests.

And so I think that's the main point.

- Mark, you have more experience than all of us running elections.

You worked for so many elections over the years.

What about that?

And I know that Marco Rubio and others in the Republican Party talk about the working class and trying to make the Republican Party appeal to the working class.

When you hear that this guy can't afford an apartment in DC, what does it say to you?

- Well, first of all, you have to live in your district and have a place.

It's very expensive.

And his almost $180,000 a year, I guess what concerned me was the fact that the DC landlord knowing this guy's gonna have a pretty good income, why he would deny him the rent, but there are some cases that I recall where four or five congressmen would get together in one apartment and share.

So there are some ways that you can get around that.

It may not be the most comfortable thing in the world, but clearly, money is the mother's milk of politics.

- For sure, Justin, for Generation Z, I wonder if this turns people off to politics if they see that Maxwell Frost can't get a place to live.

- Yeah, I'm technically a millennial, but I'm friends with a lot of Gen Z people and even my generation, even in Tampa, in Florida, I've seen friends have to move away and their livelihoods be upended by the recent spike in rents and the housing prices.

So it's not just there, but it's extra amplified there.

It's all across the country and we're at a time right now where we're coming off the heels of a pandemic and it's actually still going on in a lot of ways and the economic crisis that followed.

And a lot of people came in and made a lot of money, an atrocious amount of money off of the suffering of a lot of people in our generation.

So we're gonna be feeling that for the rest of our lives.

- Well, before we go, what other news stories should we be paying attention to?

And Shelly, let's start with you, your other big story of the week.

- My big story of the week is the lack of transparency by the mayor of Tampa regarding the PURE or Toilet To Tap project.

Something smells really fishy about this.

All along, the mayors Castor and Buckhorn before her have been saying we must go forward with this project to inject highly treated wastewater into our drinking water because there's a state law that requires that there be some sort of beneficial use disposition of your wastewater by the year 2032.

So all along, the city has been saying, we have to put it into the Hillsborough River, which is the source of drinking water for the city of Tampa.

Well, we recently find out that in fact, the city was instrumental in if not drafting, at least contributing to the legislation that they're now claiming is tying their hands and requiring that we do this particular project rather than go through Tampa Bay Water for example and come up with a way to inject this highly treated wastewater into the wetlands where it could be further filtered before it gets into the aquifer and our other water systems.

So it's so interesting that the Tampa Bay Times, Charlie Frago I believe wrote this article exposing that they had been instrumental in working on this legislation.

And then just today a couple hours ago, the city released a statement saying that the Tampa Bay Times misrepresented their involvement in drafting that legislation, but at the same time, they disclosed that when they did contribute to the legislation, they got a million dollar allocation from the state legislature that has never been disclosed to any of the stakeholders who've been objecting, which pretty much represents all of the people in the city of Tampa to this particular plan.

- All right, Mark, your other big story.

- So there's a move with the agriculture commissioner, some legislators to put a bill into action that we cannot have foreign governments buy agricultural land in Florida.

I think it's happening all over the country.

Personally, I'd like to mention if I can that this marks the third anniversary of me being cancer-free having been cured of pancreatic cancer.

I'm just so pleased and honored to be on this show as a result of that.

- It's great to see you and congratulations.

That's quite a mark.

Justin, your other big story.

- Well, this week, we found out that the author of the Don't Say Gay bill is actually a con man, so there's that.

And I know we're tight on time, so I'm not gonna go further into it.

- He resigned from office, the state legislator from Ocala.

- Hardy from Williston.

- All right, well, thank you all.

It's great to see you and thank you for joining us.

Please send us your comments at FTW@wedu.org.

You can view this and past shows online at wedu.org or on the PBS app.

And Florida This Week is now available as a podcast.

And from all of us here at WEDU, have a great weekend.

(upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music) - [Announcer] Florida This Week is a production of WEDU, who is solely responsible for its content.

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