SHARE:
Tallahassee Trend
Marian Johnson is a political 'guru'
After five decades in the Florida's political trenches, the grandmother of three shows no signs of slowing down. "If I retired, I'd go bonkers," she says.
"My husband calls me an analytical nut. Very seldom a day goes by that I don't look at who's filed to run, look at how many signatures have been turned in to the Secretary of State for the constitutional amendments."
— Marian Johnson, senior vice president/ political strategy, Florida Chamber of Commerce
Big Picture
Among the major electoral trends Marian Johnson has seen in her career:
Changes in swing districts. One example: "Pinellas County, between the mid- to late '90s to around the mid- 2000s, you had an older, conservative population there … more Republicans than Democrats, and now that Pinellas area is one of the hardest areas (to predict). That's where you fnd all of your swing seats."
The emergence of independents: Among the 11 million registered voters in Florida, "you've got about 4.6 million Ds, 4.1 million Rs, but you've got almost 3 million other voters. They give up their right to vote in primaries, but if they had a really good strong leader, and I don't mean Tea Party kind of stuff, but some good structure, they'd take over this state. In 1984, anybody that was a No Party Affliated (NPA) voter, if you could get them out to vote, they were very conservative and 90% chance they would vote Republican. You can't do that now. Those 3 million voters – which include about 2.7 million NPA and 300,000 (registered) minor parties, such as the Surfers Party and the Pirate Party – can sway the election in any of these districts. So you've got to watch the mood of those people. You've got to see which way they're going, what issues are most important to them, what they believe is the right thing to do."
