Kevin Hyde slept better than he expected.
“We were up making pies until 10:30 or so,” he said. “Family coming for dinner. Maybe that took my mind off things.”
A year ago, he decided to run for City Council. Tuesday, that long year ended. He was one of over 50 candidates who spent the day waiting and wondering as the voters decided their fates.
We decided to follow a candidate through the day. Why Hyde? Random selection. Don’t construe this as an endorsement; we could just as easily have chosen his opponents in the Group 4 At-large race, Kevin Sanders, Tiwana Flagg and Domonique Torrence, or any of the others.
Almost every day, Kevin Hyde gets up at 5 a.m. and leaves his Avondale home. Wife Kathy and their two daughters are still asleep, and he makes a 6-mile run that takes him into Ortega.
This is not a usual morning. It is election day and Hyde is almost at the end of a long and arduous effort. He has been campaigning for a year, slowly at first and very fast since Jan. 1.
On this day, he thought about campaigning early in the morning instead of running.
“Lad [Daniels, an incumbent Council member] called me last night and said he was going out at 5 a.m. to put up 200 signs, and did I want to go? Wow . . . you’d think he would be taking it easy, but he’s got opposition, too.”
Hyde decided to stick with the run.
“I decided I’d try and keep the routine as closely as possible,” he said. ‘There’s not much I can do now.” He runs with a man who he only knows by the first name: Charles. “He’s a good companion. We’ve become friends,” says Hyde. “Funny not to know his last name, huh?”
He gets back home, showers and, at 7:30, he and his father-in-law, Bill Smith, having breakfast at the Fox restaurant. The restaurant is in the middle of the Avondale shopping center and is a neighborhood stop. It fills up and Hyde knows almost everyone.
“I should,” he says. “I live right behind this building.”
Eggs and bacon finished, he walks around the corner to his Pine Street home and gets his car. He drives to the corner of Riverside Avenue and King Street to wave at the constant flow of traffic going to work.
He gets lucky. Former Mayor Ed Austin and his protege, mayoral candidate Mike Weinstein, are there. They know each other and amiably chat while waving as cars slow, their drivers waving back.
Weinstein leaves, going to a Roosevelt Boulevard corner, hoping — incorrectly, as it turns out — that he can get into a runoff. Hyde and Austin dodge traffic and keep waving.
At 8:45, the cars come less frequently. Austin’s daughter is in town, so he leaves to see her. Hyde goes home and gets wife Kathy. It is time to vote.
The two met while attending Tampa’s Florida College, a small religious school. She came down from Northern Virginia, he just up the road from Gilchrist County. He went on to Gainesville and she stayed in Tampa, but they stayed together. They were married in his final semester of law school.
It is 9 a.m. and the rush is over at the precinct in Avondale Methodist Church. The voting room is down a long hallway and, at this hour, the workers outnumber the voters.
He and Kathy vote, he takes her home and then goes to work.
After graduation from Florida’s law school, he accepted a job with Foley & Lardner’s office here. His specialty is labor and employment law, which has led down some odd paths. He once represented a radio station “and my main job seemed to be to fire the disk jockeys.”
Today, he is going to Amelia Island for a seminar. A client has brought 20 human resource officers in for the week, and Hyde is on the program at noon.
“I thought about getting someone else, but what else can I do?” he said. “I can’t wave signs when no one’s on the road. So, I might as well work. Not a bad place to go, eh? Amelia Island?”
Hyde lives in Council Dist. 14 and originally filed for that seat, which is being vacated by Jim Overton. But a friend, Mike Corrigan, also wanted to run, and the two talked it over.
“I didn’t want to run against Mike and he didn’t want to run against me,” said the 40-year-old Hyde. “I looked at my support, and it came from all over. The at-large seat was going to be vacant — it was Ginger Soud’s seat — so I moved over there.
“I found out one thing. This is a big county. Baldwin to the Beaches. A lot of miles.”
Hyde raised about $157,000 — half his — and that’s his face you see on the big billboards.
“A friend of mine talked me into that,” said Hyde. “Best exposure, he said, and he was right.”
Was it hard raising money?
“I probably have holes in the knees of my pants from groveling so much.”
He leaves his downtown office about 10 and heads to Amelia for the luncheon conference. It turns out to be a good trip.
“Such a pretty day,” he says. “The trip actually relaxed me.”
But it runs long and he doesn’t get back to Foley & Lardner’s Laura Street offices until about 3. His legal secretary, Diane Galloway, has a cake waiting. An early celebration? No, a birthday: Sharon Jacobs, another legal secretary.
He returns some calls. Friends wishing him well. “I thought I could get a little work done . . .” but not on this day.
He’s out at 4 p.m., heading for the firefighters headquarters on Hendricks Avenue for thank-yous. The firefighter support means more than votes and public goodwill — they have the city’s largest sign shop, and many of the campaign signs you see on the roadside are from there.
Then it’s off to the busy corner of San Jose and University boulevards. Another Council candidate, Jay Jabour, meets him there and the two chat while they wave. People honk as they go by.
The traffic flow is still strong but a family gathering awaits, so Hyde packs up and heads home. His family has come up from Gainesville; Kathy’s family is already here. They gather at the Pine Street home for hamburgers and fries. A lot of kids. It becomes a family reunion, and the election is not part of the conversation.
Finally, it is time to go downtown. He has rented a room at the River City Brewing Company and everyone reassembles there. They are told that the returns will come quickly; they don’t.
About 40 are in the room overlooking the river. It is a beautiful night and many stand on the balcony. And wait.
The television set has rabbit ears and the picture is terrible. Finally, Ch. 12 comes in clearly enough to see. But election results do not seem to be news on this evening. There is regular programming, and voting results appear every 15 or 20 minutes.
At 8:09, the returns flash on the screen: Hyde 54, Sanders 24. The other two names don’t appear. A cheer. But how many precincts? The number is too fuzzy to read.
Ch. 12 goes back to programming. The 40 or so go back to the buffet.
8:28. 51-24. Hyde leaves and heads downtown to the election headquarters. Family and friends gather around tables and talk. Down the hall, a soul band plays; City Council incumbent Reggie Fullwood’s party in a nearby room is going strong. He is far ahead, and there are no worries.
9:04. 53-23.
Hyde returns. He wanders around the room, chatting idly to friends.
9:17. 52-23. Why is Ch. 12 showing Carol Burnett — Carol Burnett! — instead of election returns?
9:31. 51-23. A drop, but an explanation is called in from his contact in the elections office. The Northside precincts have come in, and the two ladies in the race are black. Mandarin and Beach precincts are uncounted, so don’t worry.
9:49. 52-23. The trend reverses.
And then . . . thud. Modem troubles in the elections office. Some precincts will have to be manually counted.
“There’s nothing we can do about it,” says Hyde, but he is clearly tense. He senses victory on the first ballot. If Sanders can close enough, it will mean another month of campaigning. So close, so close . . .
Time drags. Some people go home, some drift down to Fullwood’s party.
10:15. Hyde’s cell phone rings.
He ends the call and, for the first time, really smiles.
“I think we’re in,” he says. “52 percent, 94 percent of the vote.”
Not quite, though.
Not quite.
The phone rings again.
It is 10:21, and Kevin Hyde is told that he now has 52.64 percent of the recorded votes, and that only 1.5 percent remain uncounted. Even if Kevin Sanders got them all, it wouldn’t be enough.
There are hugs and handshakes. Hyde stands before the 20 or so who remain and thanks them for their help. Kathy cuts a cake and their daughters pass the plates.
Soon, the room is empty. These are not late-night people and they have had a long evening.
All go home. To bed.
And, it is likely that Kevin Hyde had another night of very sound sleep.
— Staff writer Bailey White contributed to this report.