Mitch Perry
There’s less than a week to go in the Tampa District 6 City Council runoff election, and although the race is officially nonpartisan, both candidates are making a partisan pitch to their fellow party members.
“We have a great opportunity one week to make history. I could be the first Republican in District 6 to win this race,” Jackie Toledo told the dozens of members in attendance at the Hillsborough County Republican Executive Committee meeting on Tuesday night at the Museum of Science & Industry in Tampa.
Toledo has been the front-runner for the District 6 race all year long, and almost took the seat outright in her battle against Guido Maniscalco and Tommy Castellano on March 3. Though she had the overwhelming number of votes that evening, she still came up 4 percentage points short of the 50% needed to win the seat outright.
Now with Castellano supporting Maniscalco in the runoff, the race is considered to be considerably closer, though there’s no guarantee that all of Castellano’s voters will switch over to Maniscalco.
“I had my finger pointed in my face one day,” Toledo recounted to her fellow Republicans. “I was told, ‘you’ll never win this seat’ because I’m a Republican. I said I had no idea I’d be making history, because I am winning that seat with your help!” she said to cheers from the crowd, many clad in green for St. Patrick’s Day.
The race has been depicted as being more negative than any recent Tampa City Council election. In Wednesday morning’s Tampa Tribune, columnist Joe Henderson takes Toledo to task for her “aggressive” campaign, writing, “I don’t recall any candidate wanting to win a council seat as badly as Toledo. It is that drive to win and the way she is going about it that is making a lot of people nervous.”
Henderson also notes that the Florida Democratic Party has sent out two attack mailers against Toledo.
“We have the Democratic Party united against me,” Toledo said Tuesday night. “They’ve put out mailers, and spent so much money attacking me, because they do not want one Republican on city council.”
“The Democrats cannot find one issue or one qualification on Jackie Toledo to campaign against, so they are campaigning the fact that she is a Republican,” chimed in Deborah Tamargo, Hillsborough County Republican Party chair.
With so little representation in Tallahassee, state Democratic Party officials and certainly those in Tampa have taken pride that the seven-member city council has been in Democratic hands the past four years. They’d like to keep it that way, which is why they’re devoting resources to get Maniscalco elected next week.
“They’re literally saying ‘we, the Democrats,’ control Tampa. ‘We’ control the city council,” Tamargo said with disgust in her voice. “We as Republicans believe in representational government. We believe that Jackie and others go into government to represent. Not to control,” she scolded.
On Monday night the Hillsborough County Democratic Executive Committee voted to provide $1,500 in party funds to devote to Maniscalco’s campaign in the waning days of the election. On Friday, Florida Democratic Party Chairwoman Allison Tant will come to Tampa to oversee a phone-banking event for Maniscalco as well.
