Peter Schorsch
More than three quarters of Hillsborough County voters say they’re in favor of making countywide constitutional offices nonpartisan, according to a new poll.
The poll of Hillsborough County voters found 76 percent were in support of the change while 13 percent were opposed. It was paid for by Leadership for Florida’s Future, a political committee that supports Republican politicians.
County-level constitutional offices in Florida include sheriff, property appraiser, tax collector, elections supervisor and clerk of the court.
The measure received supermajority support from both political parties, and approval was equally broad among all racial and ethnic categories, none of which dipped below 70 percent support.
Younger voters were even more energized by the idea, with 95 percent of voters under 35 saying they were in favor. In aggregate, more than 80 percent of voters under 50 supported the concept.
The poll’s release comes a week after County Commissioner Al Higginbotham said he would propose a county charter change referendum to make the offices nonpartisan, a move he said would enfranchise unaffiliated voters who are locked out of voting in primary races.
Democrats see it differently, however, with Hillsborough party chair Ione Townsend painting the change as a plan to mitigate the so-called “blue wave” the party expects to hit in the fall.
All five Hillsborough constitutional offices will be on the 2020 ballot.
The Leadership for Florida’s Future poll was conducted via phone Jan. 8 – Jan. 11 and took responses from 401 registered voters with a turn out model weighted to who were sampled through turnout prediction method that weighed how likely they were to vote.
“In lay terms, a voter who is predicted to have a 40 percent chance of voting in the 2018 general election had a 40 percent chance of being sampled,” the poll reads.
The margin of error for the poll is plus or minus 4.9 percent with a 95 percent confidence level.
