The Duval County Republican Party recently elected Tom Slade as its chair. Elected Jan. 24, Slade brings over 40 years of political experience and savvy to the local GOP. He was elected to the Florida House in 1962 as a Democrat. He switched to the Republican party in 1964 and was elected to the Florida Senate in 1966. He has been instrumental in many high-profile state campaigns and was chair of the Republican Party of Florida from 1993 to 1999. He met recently with Daily Record staff writer Glenn Tschimpke to discuss local and statewide politics.
Question: You’re the newly elected Duval County GOP chair. What brought you back?
Answer: I really, really did not want to come back to be the chairman of the Duval County Republican Party. It was the last thing on my ‘want-to-do-list.’
Q: Who talked you into it?
A: Some of my old buddies that I have been playing politics with, mostly ladies. Then some of the guys that were really interested that we had an opportunity to elect a quality, individual mayor. It’s enormously important, in my opinion, that we have a continuation of comparable talent to [Mayor John] Delaney because he’s put in place a vision that’s got to be carried by somebody.
Q: What makes a good political candidate?
A: There are three things that create a winning candidate. The first is candidate quality: what kind of feedstock do you have? Can the guy or girl speak? Can they handle themselves publicly very well? My buddy Mike Hightower, he was talking about running for mayor a year or so ago. I told him, ‘If you’re going to run for mayor, you got to learn how to speak without looking at the damn ceiling.’ The second thing is issue dominance. It lessens as you move down to the local level. It’s far more dominant in Washington than it is in Tallahassee and more in Tallahassee than it is in Duval County. The issues have a huge impact upon one’s political success. Finally, resource superiority. That’s not just cash. It is cash and programs. For example, when I first got to be [Florida GOP] chairman, I bumped into an old NASA computer programmer who was working in precinct politics in Escambia County. He was a class act programmer. We now have a program that is available to every county in Florida, with the voter registration list on it. By precinct and by street, I can tell you who lives there, how they’re registered, how frequently they voted.
Q: Who is that program available to?
A: To whomever we want to give it to. It enables you to take your rifle out rather than your shotgun to go to work on the task. If you’re going to go out and walk precincts, there’s no sense in knocking on doors where people are not registered.
Q: We’ve got four Republicans registered right now for the mayor’s race. . .
A: Maybe. There’s at least a basketball team there.
Q: There’s more on the way, undoubtedly. Is that going to be an advantage for the Democrats?
A: What the Democrats would like to do is to wind up with one Democrat and a field of a bunch of Republicans. Then the task on our side of the aisle gets to be the challenge of keeping our guys from skinning one another up to the point where whomever emerges from that primary process . . . emerges for the claim. No doubt, we’ll adopt a procedure that I used in 1994 in the governor’s race. That is, we’ll sign a contract on a code of conduct. We will agree that we will behave ourselves and tell the truth and do right and be good.
Q: Is there a point where you or the Republican party convinces some of the candidates to drop out of the mayoral race?
A: We’ll have enough information to be able to help guide those that might be so inclined. I was talking to one candidate a while back with a couple of campaign operatives and said, ‘You know this is a hell of an undertaking.’ Running for the mayor of Jacksonville is not at all that different from running for a Cabinet position in state government. You have to raise about the same amount of money. You’re going to ask of yourself and your friends that they make an enormous sacrifice on your behalf for you to be a serious candidate for mayor. Before you put yourself or your friends through that exercise, how about taking your legal pad out and write down the names of 2,000 people, who, without exception, will write you a check for $500. One of the people said, ‘I don’t even know 2,000 people.’ But I’d already asked them how much it would take to run for mayor. They said $1 million. That’s 2,000 people donating $500.
We’re going to divide the local party into 14 political districts, which are going to mirror the City Council districts. We’re going to go into those 14 districts with a huge emphasis on the 10 that are more inclined to vote Republican. But we are not going to ignore the four that are, generally speaking, hardcore Democrats. We’re going to build a rompin,’ stompin’ precinct organization that will be able to pick up the campaign of whomever the mayor candidate that emerges from the process and hopefully merge our organization and their organization and go do battle with whomever the Democrat may be. But we can’t do that for any of those candidates until there is one Republican left.
Q: If one candidate comes out in the lead fairly early, would the party want to back that person from the onset?
A: If you’ve got a definite trend occurring, you have to be very, very careful in guarding against conduct that would be unbecoming to whoever the ultimate nominee would be.
Q: Would you play bad guy at that stage?
A: I have. I wish there was some other way to do that.
Q: In the governor’s race, you have said Janet Reno would do well as a populist choice and McBride would do well as the party’s choice.
A: Well, far be it from me to be able to look between here and September. But again, if polling data is any decent indicator, and if the Mason Dixon polling folks are even remotely good, what it is saying right now is that Reno is going to beat Bill McBride five-to-one in a Democratic primary. Now I don’t think that will hold. But what it does is that it points out the problem that any candidate has in overcoming a huge positive image that Janet Reno has among hard core, traditional Democrats. They are folks that immigrated into the United States out of South and Central America that are occupying a large population in the I-4 corridor right now. They are traditional Democrats that have an identification with Janet Reno because of her service in the Clinton administration. She is a well-known figure and she walks into that Democratic primary with $10 million worth of name recognition that the McBrides of the world have got to buy. I don’t know where in the world, at $500-a-pop, they’re going to raise the money to buy $10 million worth of name ID. If the party could come in and provide the resources, you can make a candidate far more attractive than they would be able to make themselves. You can’t do that if you have a cluster of Democrats or you have a cluster of Republicans. You have to sit in the bleachers and wait on somebody to get out of the pack. In this instance, it appears that Reno is coming out of the pack as the successful Democrat. As good a candidate as she is in the Democratic primary, she is equally awful in the general election.
Q: Why is that?
A: Marginal swing voters and Republicans won’t view Janet Reno with the same degree of love and affection that hard core Democrats will.
Q: If McBride makes it past the primaries, do you think he’ll do well?
A: McBride would be a better general election candidate than Janet Reno.
Q: Does that worry the Republicans at all?
A: Not as long as she’s beating him five-to-one.
Q: Do you think someone might talk to him and try to cut a deal with him to run for a cabinet position [to clear a path for Jeb Bush’s reelection]?
A: The Bill McBrides of the world — and I certainly don’t want to personalize this — don’t view themselves as Cabinet candidates. They view themselves as using the governor’s mansion as a stop-off place on the way to the White House. Every damn one of them thinks they’re going to be president. It gets to be a little bit beneath those people to think in terms of secondary offices, even though that’s probably the best way for some of them to eventually get to be governor — ever. But that’s, generally speaking, not in their thought patterns.
Q: Do you think McBride is qualified to be governor?
A: He has run the largest law firm in Florida, Holland & Knight. He has dealt with some of the knottiest problems that anyone has ever had an opportunity to deal with because of the size and scope of that law firm. I would certainly think he would be as able and capable as many people who have been governor of our state. I would doubt that he is as smart as Jeb Bush is because damn few people are. He’s got to be bright or he wouldn’t have occupied the position that he’s in. Would he be as good as Reuben Askew and Bob Graham? Probably. He certainly would appear to have comparable experience to most every governor that I can think of that has been in that office since Claude Kirk was elected in 1966.
Q: What about Reno?
A: If I were going to hire someone to run the State of Florida, if it were my business, I would probably hire McBride over Reno. Simply because of what I would perceive of what would be a little more diversified experience. Janet Reno has been a prosecutor and a senior federal lawyer because she ran the attorney general’s shop.
Q: Over the past few decades, there has been a gradual change in Florida voting from Democrat to Republican. Why?
A: In my opinion, the Democrats, first of all, got lazy. Secondly, they were basically issue-less. This made our job a lot easier. They have been smarter in the recent past. As you look at Washington today, it’s not nearly as easy for you to define the difference in the political philosophies of the two parties as it was 10 years ago. The Democrats have been smart enough to move just as far to the right as they could move to bump right up next to the Republicans. So you don’t have the philosophical energy that enables you to define the differences between the political parties.
There are four main issues in the state: crime, education, the environment and the economy. Those issues have dominated the political landscape forever. They will be there forever. The Republicans have traditionally owned the economy and they have owned crime. The Democrats have traditionally owned education and they’ve owned the environment. What enabled us to be so successful was we, first of all, recruited good candidates. Secondly, we put the programs there for them to run their campaigns with. And then we became very, very knowledgeable and very, very involved in the two issue areas that have traditionally been theirs. Until today, the voters in Florida had more confidence in the Republicans being able to fix public education than they do the Democrats. That was not an accident. It was a carefully designed approach to stealing the issue from Democrats. We supported that effort with a continuation with Florida Forever, which is $300 million every 10 years of public land purchases. We designed a clean-up deal for the Everglades, implemented in concert with the federal government. We’ve got a legitimate claim to some green on our side of the aisle. We have made really, really, first class strides in beginning of what will hopefully make a contribution to substantial improvement of public education. It’s a long journey because it has been a very dominant and inflexible monopoly called the public education system that has gone virtually without challenge or change for enough years that moving it is like turning an aircraft carrier on a lake. It’s hard to do but the progress has begun.
Q: Individual campaign contributions in Florida are capped at $500. It’s been that way for over a decade. Do you think there will be a movement to raise the individual donation amount?
A: If [the legislators] can get out of town without skinned heads and knuckles in this session of the legislature, they’re going to be lucky. That environment kind of precludes much new initiative. There may be a time, and probably it will be when you begin to see the impact of what the feds have done on state political parties and campaigns, you’ll begin to see a movement then to probably make some changes in the limits areas and the contributions. Right now, someone can come in and write us a check for a million bucks.
Q: To the Republican party?
A: The only thing we have to do is report it.
Q: How can that be distributed?
A: We can give to political candidates, in direct contributions, $50,000 a pop. We can do huge volumes of activities that really, really benefit the political campaigns of people running for office.
Q: Is that in addition to the $50,000?
A: Yes. So, the ability to raise what is commonly called soft dollars is very, very important to the political operations of a party.