Florida Congressional District 13 Special Election - What did we learn?

Bill Young, David Jolly and Alex Sink

The Florida 13th Congressional district's seat was vacated October 18, 2013 following the death of Republican Congressman Bill Young.

 A special election was held on Tuesday March 11, 2014 to fill the remaining term (Jan 2015).

The election was narrowly won by former Young aide, Republican David Jolly over Democratic candidate Alex Sink.

With almost 100% of the vote counted, Jolly had 48.5% of the vote to Sink's 46.7%.

Libertarian Lucas Overby had 4.8%. The 13th district is 37% Republican, 35% Democrat and 24% Independent.

Jolly campaigned on repealing the Affordable Health Care law, saying in one ad that Sink would undermine Medicare because of Democratic-passed cuts to programs under "Obamacare."

Sink, Florida's Democratic nominee for governor in 2010, painted Jolly as an extremist saying "He will take us back" to when people were denied coverage. She pledged to "fix what's wrong" with the health care law.

The most interesting thing is the amount of campaign funds that were spent. The combined total raised by both Republicans and Democrats was more than $12 million. Sadly, David Jolly, winner of this special election, will be facing a Democrat opponent again in November when the district will vote to fill the seat for the 2015-2017 term.

What is the lesson here?

 Rosemary Tennis says there are two lessons:

1) Obamacare will defeat the Democrats.

2) Libertarians are NOT Republicans! They are working hard to defeat Republicans!


Ken Gardner agrees with Rosemary, saying:

 "This is an important point. It isn't so much that the Libertarian candidate takes more votes from the GOP than Democrats. The evidence is less than clear that they do. The problem is that they CAMPAIGN against Republicans, and they do so from the right. It isn't that they persuade moderate to liberals to vote Democrat as much as they discourage moderate to conservative voters from voting at all."

David Jolly says:

"Hey, if you like your Republican controlled House....You Can Keep It. . .VOTE REPUBLICAN!"