Word: floridas
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...Democratic presidential nominee has won Sarasota County, set on one of the most affluent and conservative strips of Florida's Gulf Coast, since Franklin Roosevelt did in 1944. It's home to loyal Republicans like Katherine Harris, who oversaw Florida's controversial 2000 presidential vote recount. But in 2008, women like Joan Smith Geyer may decide Sarasota's outcome. Geyer, 62, is among a growing number of Sarasota Republicans voting for Barack Obama. A big reason, she says, is that John McCain hasn't proved to be the GOP moderate that Floridians thought their moderate GOP governor, Charlie Crist...
...McCain himself admitted as much last week. And as it is, the outlook in the Sunshine State for his campaign is surprisingly dark. The Arizona Senator may have Crist and a Republican-controlled legislature behind him. But Florida's deepening economic crisis, as well as the fact that McCain passed him over for the vice-presidential slot that many Floridians thought he should get, seems to have made Crist a less than ardent McCain campaigner this fall. By most accounts, McCain's national campaign staff has done a dismal job coordinating with the usually potent GOP machine on the ground...
...Lately that pulse has been beating stronger for Obama. In recent weeks McCain has fallen behind his Democratic rival in Florida by as many as 8 points in some polls, though others still show the race a virtual dead heat. The nation's financial crisis is of course a factor: Florida is getting waylaid by home foreclosures at a rate few other states can match, and business owners like Geyer and her husband are having to undertake painful employee layoffs to stay afloat. Though Crist insists he's still enthusiastic about McCain's candidacy, he said last week that...
...beneath the obvious challenges he faces lies a deeper source for McCain's troubles in Florida, the swing state which, he acknowledged at the Miami rally, his struggling campaign "must win." It's not so much that McCain didn't tap Crist for his ticket; rather, it's the widespread feeling that McCain hasn't tapped into the more civil, issues-driven political style that most Floridians have embraced since Crist was elected...
...antidote for a state exhausted by partisan ugliness like the 2000 recount and the Terri Schiavo spectacle of 2005, and it's why half or more of Floridians still give him a thumbs-up in polls this year despite the economic disaster and his own difficulties reining in Florida's exorbitant property taxes and insurance premiums. "That reach-across-the-aisle character was the same thing John McCain was identified with" when Crist supported McCain in the January primary, notes Crist's former chief of staff, George LeMieux...