Orlando still does not know when its next Mayoral election will occur. Just to bring you up to speed, here are the facts: Orlando used to hold its elections in the Spring every two years. Often (as in 2000 and 2004) this corresponded to the Presidential Primary in early March.
Just to refresh memories, the Orlando Election which first seated Mayor Dyer was a Special election to fill out the term of Mayor Hood, in 2003. He had just lost a race as the Democratic Candidate for Attorney General against Charlie Crist and Democrats were wildly enthusiastic about his race, volunteering in large numbers. The election was two tiered, with the candidate Dyer getting 33% of the election in round 1 and 57% in the run-off.
Two years later, in 2004, the election was held on the same day as the Presidential Primary and the Mayor was startled to find that he faced a Republican businessman opponent who had not lived in the City of Orlando until about a month before the election, but was running with good funds. Mayor Dyer carried the vote with just over half the votes, allowing him to avoid a run-off with this opponent, but he was clearly given a scare. Some people noted that his army of Democratic volunteers from 2003 had melted away.
Dyer was determined not to have that sort of situation emerge again and he changed several things. Principally, however, he introduced residency requirements at a high level. And he also began to move around the date of the election.
In 2006, the elections occurred under the old law, in early March. In 2007, things changed. A new law was adopted in 2007, which required that any candidate for Mayor (OR City Commissioner) needed to live in City AND in the Council District from which they were running at least ONE FULL YEAR prior to the DATE OF FILING for office, which is a date sixty days before the election. Only Commissioner Sheehan voted against the proposal. That law is hard to enforce, because it requires bunch of paperwork and that paperwork can be pretty sketchy as everybody found out when Juan Lynum filed to run in District 5.
Anyway, in 2008, there was a hot Democratic AND Republican Primary and the legislature had moved the date up by a month and so Orlando and other municipalities held their elections along with the Presidential Primary in early February. Dyer won 60% of the vote and there was a run-off in March in District 2, which Tony Ortiz won by 42 votes. But the turnout for that election (thanks to interest in the PPP) was in excess of 42% of the voters in the City. Dyer’s strong win gave him a real mandate. In 2010, the City elections were back in early March and only one City Council seat was contested. 2800 of the eligible 22,000 voters went to the polls, about 13%.
In 2012, the Legislature, again fiddling with the national picture, moved the Presidential Primary up to January and Orlando gagged. Ocoee and other Cities with strong Republican electorates were fine with the shift. Since there was no real Democratic Primary, only Republicans were likely to participate and Democrat Dyer did not want to face a strong Republican turnout when he ran for re-election, for obvious reasons. So the Orlando municipal elections were moved off of the January date and moved to a special election date, on April 14th, just as people were filing their taxes. The turnout for the race in which the victor spent $1 Million was predictable; the lowest in Orlando History for a city-wide election….about 16%.
Now we see that in 2016, the State has decided to go with a PPP in March, but it is uncertain what will be the nature of that vote. Democrats are locked in to the probable candidacy of Hillary Clinton and not much of a Primary, but Republicans may have a hot one. What will Orlando do now? Anybody who has not yet moved into the City and District from which they might run is already too late to meet the filing requirement for residency, though the date of the election is not yet known. And nobody really knows what the PPP picture will look like in 2016.
