Big money couldn’t keep Jacksonville City Council seat in Democratic hands

ROI: Big-spending, small returns for Tracye Polson?

If a Republican red wave is coming in 2022, Duval County may have offered an early sign of what’s to come.

Republicans flipped the Jacksonville City Council at-large Group 3 seat in a million-dollar Special Election last month despite the Democratic candidate holding a substantial cash and voter registration advantage.

Democrat Tracye Polson received roughly 48% of the vote in her failed bid to fill the unexpired term of Tommy Hazouri in February, despite raising and spending roughly $650,000 in her campaign for the citywide seat. A lot of that spending came down the stretch ahead of her loss to Republican Nick Howland.

Polson spent $530,000 from her campaign account, and February offered an acute illustration of her self-funding, with $90,000 of the roughly $117,000 raised coming from personal funds.

The Better Jacksonville political committee was also a source of self-funding, with a little more than $122,000 raised in aggregate, and nearly $100,000 since the beginning of the year. A lot of that money came from inside the cushions of the proverbial couch. Polson’s husband, Kevin Clair, put $60,000 in the political committee in January and February, more than half of the total raised in 2022.

Howland, despite winning with roughly 52% of the vote, was outspent. His campaign raised less than half of Polson’s haul, with just over $240,000 brought in overall. He raised roughly $98,000 in February, with a lot of political committees with the same address (115 East Park Avenue, Suite 1 Tallahassee, FL 32301) donating, along with lobbyists like Ballard Partners and The Southern Group chipping in.

Howland’s Florida Freedom PAC political committee only brought in $16,000 in February, meanwhile, with the Jacksonville Jaguars donating $15,000 of that. The committee raised roughly $212,000 and retains roughly $60,000 for future use. Howland will have to run for election for a full four-year term in 2023 if he wants to stay on the Council, so that money will be deployed sooner than later.

All told, more than a million dollars went into this race, and both candidates attacked each other for their fundraising in a heated debate just before the election, with Polson defending her self-funding as a counter to “dark money” backing Howland.

“About 56% of the money I have spent on this campaign is my money,” Polson said at First Coast Tiger Bay. “When you run for office, what you have to do is raise a lot of money, unfortunately. I have friends and family and colleagues all across this country and they gave me money.”

She argued that developers, lobbyists and others who will “have business before the City Council” also support him.

“We all know, if you read the finance reports, Mr. Howland has dark money. What that means is he’s accepted a lot of money from what we call PACs, political committees that go to the same person and the same address,” Polson charged.

“There’s nothing dark about that money,” Howland countered. “You can look up every single PAC that contributed to my campaign and find out who contributed to those PACs.”

The “dark money” argument ultimately was a non-starter for Polson, who contrasted her outsider campaign to the “corruption and cronyism” of Lenny Curry’s City Hall. Only one Democrat of the five on the Jacksonville City Council supported her bid, however, and she failed both in the First Election and the General Election to drive turnout in majority-Black areas successful Democratic candidates need to win.

Three major Democratic candidates for Governor (Rep. Charlie Crist, Agriculture Commissioner Nikki Fried and state Sen. Annette Taddeo) all endorsed Polson, coming to town to campaign for her, but that didn’t help shore up weaknesses either. Meanwhile, Gov. Ron DeSantis offered an emphatic Election Day endorsement that could only help widen Republican margins.

Polson’s defeat, meanwhile, was an occasion for Republican celebration well beyond the borders of Duval County.

“The (Joe) Biden buyers’ remorse tour just went live from Duval County with announced stops throughout the country come November,” asserted RNC spokeswoman Julia Friedland.

“Things are not looking good for Florida Democrats in November if, as confused Charlie Crist put it, ‘the most dynamic candidate in the history of Jacksonville’ just lost a City Council seat they held for years. Duval County is also one of the few remaining counties left in Florida with a Democrat voter registration edge. Last night’s devastating loss is a bad sign of what fed-up voters throughout the country have in store for Joe Biden and Democrats in November,” Friedland added.

“Indicators of a Republican wave continue to grow: in Jacksonville, a City Council seat went from Democrat to GOP with a 20-point swing in the vote,” tweeted former House Speaker Newt Gingrich.