Graphic shows results before and after Sarasota Primary Day votes were counted. Courtesy Sarasota County Supervisor of Elections.

Nothing makes a political observer miss equal views on vote-by-mail like watching election returns. This Tuesday looked like it might be a good day for Democrats running for nonpartisan School Board seats. In the morning, that is. But everything would change as a flood of Republican voters who didn’t feel moved to vote early or to send ballots in through the post office hit precinct locations in every part of the county.

Through SRQ’s Where The Votes Are presentations for more than a decade, I have often looked to when people vote as a sign of momentum. Partisan attitudes about mail voting changed significantly the last few years and I’m no longer quite sure that still applies. But at least the change firmly lets us see the difference in energy between Republican and other voters. This year, that provided a chance to see the intensity surrounding school races in vivid color.

What do I mean? After watching the voting patterns reported on Aug. 23 by the Supervisor of Elections office, I took an early snapshot of returns shortly after polls closed. The office after 7 pm released results that included only early voting and those mail ballots received in enough time to count during the day.

At that point, Dawnyelle Singleton led Republican opponent and incumbent Bridget Ziegler by more than 52% to less than 48%. Democrat Nora Cietek had an impressive lead of more than 14 percentage points on Republican Tim Enos. Likewise, Democrat Lauren Kurkov led Republican Robyn Marinelli by more than 11 percentage points. 

But then came Tuesday, when all the bottled up enthusiasm of the GOP, maybe ignited by Gov. Ron DeSantis bringing an education-focused pre-primary tour to Sarasota, unleashed. Starting the day with low numbers made a wide array of local Republican leaders nervous how the races would turn out. But those fears were assuaged before the end of the business day. Ultimately, nearly half the voters participating in the election, 48.6%, were GOP voters, in a county where 43.5% of eligible voters are registered as Republicans.

What resulted from this high partisan performance? The School Board races completely turned around. Ziegler won with more than 56%, and Marinelli and Enos won with almost 53%. 

For sentimentality’s sake, let’s consider the old idea that the voting method measures momentum. Based on that, the Democrats were early overperformers, with upward of 10,000 more registered Democrats putting ballots in the mail than Republicans. Things turned around when Republicans outpaced Democrats in early voting more than two-to-one. But the real story comes on Primart day, when more than 28,000 Republicans cast their votes and less than 9,000 Democrats did the same. That’s called a strong finish.

But we know Republicans, since Donald Trump disparaged the practice, have grown distrustful of mail ballots in general. In a real sense, the double-digit swing in advantage in the school board races simply reflects the level of energy around a supposedly non-partisan issue with education. Was it in masking policies during COVID-19? The intense noise around issues like the parents’ bill of rights or critical race theory?

I argued ahead of the Primary this election would test the power of a partisan Governor to rally voters in a nonpartisan election when he wasn’t even on the ballot. I meant that in the truest form. This race would show us something we didn’t know before. The Governor proved his ability to energize voters around something besides himself, a challenge many presidents fail to meet.

The race also showed just the level of frustration that exists around parents’ voices in school, whether you feel that’s justified or not. Groups like Moms for Liberty, which lists Ziegler as a co-founder, charged voters up about school contests in the wake of a pandemic that turned all politics upside down. Now we will see what governance results.

 Jacob Ogles is a contributing senior editor for SRQ MEDIA who has been covering business, politics and community issues for SRQ Magazine and SRQ DAILY since 2008. He also contributes the Under The Hood column which appears in the Saturday Perspectives edition of SRQ DAILY offering a twice-monthly analysis of the driving forces behind Sarasota-Manatee politics.

Graphic shows results before and after Sarasota Primary Day votes were counted. Courtesy Sarasota County Supervisor of Elections.