Florida House races: Democrats optimistic

A Pennsylvania high school quarterback named Dan Marino was being wooed by several colleges, though he would choose his hometown Pitt Panthers. And a former CIA director was trying to build support for a long-shot leap to the White House. His name was George Bush.

That was 1978, a great year for Florida Democrats. In that fall's elections, outgoing Gov. Reubin Askew passed the mantle to a fresh-faced Bob Graham, continuing Democratic domination of state politics.

More gratifying to the party was the ability of its candidates to pluck two congressional seats away from Republicans, giving Democrats a 12-to-3 vise-grip in the House delegation. The victories erased the GOP's slight gains from the Nixon years.

Who could have known the lean years ahead? As recently as 1986, in the middle of the Reagan era, the Democratic margin remained 13 to 6 in an expanding delegation. But there the pendulum turned, slowly at first, when one Democrat, Andy Ireland, stunned his colleagues by announcing a party switch.

Then Florida's Democratic lion, Claude Pepper, died just short of his 90th birthday, opening the way for another Republican. By 1990, the Democratic grip slipped perilously, the aftermath of a decade of Republican rule, and the party's lead was 10-9.
The deluge occurred in 1992, a reapportionment year. Such Democratic giants as Dante Fascell, Bill Lehman and Charlie Bennett retired. Stalwarts Larry Smith and Bill Chappell were forced from office in scandal, to be followed by Republicans.

And the GOP, for the first time in Florida history, became a 10-9 majority. After the 1994 elections, in which the Republicans added two more Democratic seats to their list, the GOP owned 15 seats to the Democrat's eight. It was nearly the mirror image of strength less than a decade before.

Democrats' woes in Florida were repeated on the national level, as the House slipped into Republican hands for the first time since 1954. It was, said Newt Gingrich, the beginning of the great Republican revolution.

As 1996 began, there appeared little on the horizon to indicate the revolution was over. Three more of the Democrats' dwindling congressional band in Florida announced retirement -- Pete Peterson in the Panhandle, Harry Johnston in the Palm Beach-North Broward district, and the redoubtable Sam Gibbons from Tampa Bay. No Republicans had similar plans.

And the district of a fourth Democrat, Jacksonville's Corrine Brown, was being challenged in court for being racially gerrymandered.

So with all this, listen to Democratic Party co-chairman Donald Fowler, who was in Miami recently wearing a broad smile: ``The biggest problem we must guard against is being overconfident and complacent.''
If that sounds like a bit of bluster, Fowler's mood is backed by a sea-change in public attitudes. In the weeks after the GOP's 1994 wins, the momentum seemed clearly with that party.

When voters were asked whether they were likely to support a Republican or a Democrat for Congress, this ``generic'' Republican prevailed, 52-45 percent. When the same question was asked last month, the outcome had nearly flipped, with the generic Democrat winning by 50-43 percent.

``A year ago people would have laughed at you if you said we had a shot,'' Dick Gephardt, the House Democratic leader, told me last week. ``What happened? The Republican leadership exhibited behavior that I would call extremist and radical.''

The GOP will challenge that view, arguing that what the Democrats consider extremist was in reality the courage to tackle tough issues, like balancing the budget. But there seems little doubt that Democrats feel better about their prospects in regaining lost ground in Florida and elsewhere -- and probably regaining the House majority.

Gephardt, who has a keen interest in this in that he would become House speaker, believes Florida Democratic candidates have good-to-excellent chances at winning as many as two Republican seats and possibly more. At the same time, he and others are confident that new Democrats will hold on to the seats being vacated by retirements.

That optimism is grounded mostly in the belief that many issues important to Florida voters -- abortion rights, Medicare and Medicaid, the environment, protecting workers, educational assistance and, most recently, raising the minimum wage -- favor Democrats. In addition, the GOP's ties to the gun lobby and radical religious groups don't play well in most of the state.
The biggest targets on the Democratic list are freshmen Republicans David Weldon of Melbourne and Mark Foley of West Palm Beach. Both men, although Weldon particularly, are identified with the most conservative elements of the GOP's House freshmen, often voting against powerful interests in their own districts.

Weldon, for example, twice voted for GOP budgets that would have slashed federal spending for the nation's space program, although his district includes the Kennedy Space Center. He also opposed a veterans' hospital for the district that President Clinton included in his budget.

Democrats also hope that if Clinton builds toward a landslide re-election, he can push out such GOP veterans as Fort Lauderdale's E. Clay Shaw (a hoped-for challenger is former Florida House Speaker Tom Gustafson) and St. Petersburg's Bill Young.

Of course in politics as in nature, the hopes that bloom in May can wilt and die by fall. Gephardt shied away from placing odds on his chances of becoming speaker or on Florida Democrats reversing their 18-year slide.

``There is no certainty,'' he said. ``Things can change in a second. But if the economy can stay on track, I don't see anything standing in our way.''