Good Monday morning. 🏆 — ICYMI, each week the Florida Politics team picks the Winner and Loser of the Week in Florida politics. Sunday's edition crowns FAMU President Marva Johnson, whose school climbed 12 spots in the U.S. News rankings while UF, FSU, UCF, and USF all slipped. The loser is Rep. Fabián Basabe, who answered a $450,000 jury verdict with a Miami New Times essay that did him no favors. Also inside: the race-ratings shift toward Florida Democrats and a Governor's race that could go without a debate for the first time in more than half a century. Read this week's column. 🗳️ — Election Day in St. Pete is basically now. Overseas ballots are out, Pinellas mails the domestic batch Tuesday, and the mayoral race has turned nasty without anyone airing a negative ad. My five things: Ken Welch did fine on home turf at the Tampa Bay Breakfast Club and still couldn't say one nice thing about Charlie Crist; the "he doesn't call people back" complaint now has names attached; no debate is going to save Welch, or anyone else; the Tampa Bay Times just gave Democrats permission to "unelect" him; and, believe it or not, Welch's committee outraised Crist's last week. Read my column before your ballot lands in the mailbox. ⚡ — The AI boom has a shipping problem. Every data center America is racing to build needs power, and the transformers that deliver it are mostly made overseas. Lead times now run 128 weeks and up, prices on some units have jumped as much as ninefold in five years, and Hitachi Energy recently put two transformers weighing more than 80 metric tons each on one of the world's largest cargo planes because a hyperscale customer could not wait for a ship. JAXPORT wants a piece of that trade and is pitching its Blount Island heavy-lift berth to anyone moving oversized electrical gear. René Rabeder and I trace the line from Jacksonville's docks to a Polish factory to an emergency order from President Donald Trump. Read our latest for FloridAI before the next 230-ton transformer rolls down a Florida highway. ___ One sentence flips support for Amendment 1, the measure that would expand Florida's rainy day fund, a new Sachs Media experiment finds. Half the 1,000 voters surveyed Sept. 23-24 read only the ballot language and backed the amendment 63% to 35%. The other half first read a single sentence: the fund holds about $5 billion, the constitutional maximum, and it is full. Support fell to 50%, with 44% opposed and 7% unsure. Republicans went from 75% to 60%, Democrats from 57% to 41%. Independents were under 50% either way, and their "definitely no" share nearly doubled to 27%. 
Support for a rainy day fund amendment drops when voters learn the fund is already full. Only 20% of voters knew the fund was already at its cap. "We didn't make an argument for or against," said Sachs Media partner and Chief Research Officer Karen Cyphers. "We stated a fact about the current balance of the fund, and 4 in 5 voters were hearing it for the first time." Gov. Ron DeSantis is urging a no vote and calls the amendment "a solution in search of a problem." The Republican Party of Florida endorsed it. No political committee has registered on either side, and Cyphers doesn't expect anyone to spend money informing voters, with Amendment 3 and pricier fights on the same ballot. "Absent someone spending to inform them, voters will decide this on what they assume," she said. ___ Homeowners are more worried about their insurance bill than their tax bill, and most see no sign that the market is improving. A new poll from the University of North Florida's Public Opinion Research Lab, conducted with the Orlando Sentinel and South Florida Sun Sentinel, found 63% of homeowners are more concerned about property insurance than property taxes. Just 36% picked taxes. That held across party lines, even with Amendment 3 on the ballot. "Even in a rhetorical environment that would otherwise prime Floridians to think heavily about property tax, nearly two in three still said property insurance was the greater concern," said PORL Faculty Director Sean Freeder. 
Florida homeowners tell pollsters property insurance costs worry them more than property taxes. More than half (54%) have switched insurers at least once in the past five years, and a third have done so twice or more. Of those who switched, 47% said they were dropped, most often by Citizens. Nearly half said premiums have risen by at least 50% in the past five years. Asked about the 2022-23 reforms, 55% see no signs of improvement, 26% say the market is getting worse, and 18% think it is improving. And 69% say the insurance industry benefited most, versus 16% for consumers. |
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