TALLAHASSEE, Fla. — Christopher Crawford is a 22-year-old from Orlando whose only reported assets are a 1991 Acura Integra worth $2,000 and an IKEA couch. But as of last week, he’s a tea party candidate for a Florida Senate seat centered 400 miles away in the Panhandle.
Stephen Gregory Taylor, 23, is a part-time Tallahassee bank teller who told his father he had filed to run on the tea party ticket for a House District 11 seat 80 miles away in Suwannee County. “I said ‘Do you know what’s involved in these things? What happens if you win?'” recalled his father, Alex Taylor, of Tallahassee. “He doesn’t know anything about Suwannee County.”
Tea party organizers in Orlando
announced Friday they had fielded 20 candidates in state races as a way
to punish incumbent Republicans who had voted in favor of Central Florida’s commuter-rail project in Central Florida or were “big spenders” in the Legislature.
But by Monday, the organizers were complaining of GOP retaliation. And tea party advocate and political consultant Doug Guetzloe was removed from the Orlando radio station where he has bought time for a five-day-a-week talk show.
“A lot of bad things are happening to people who are involved with us,” said political activist Fred O’Neal, an Orlando attorney who with Guetzloe incorporated the Florida Tea Party and has been fighting a lawsuit to keep the rights to the name.
WEUS-AM station co-owner Carl Como said Guetzloe was being replaced by a third hour of conservative commentator Laura Ingraham’s nationally syndicated show. He insisted his decision had nothing to do with Guetzloe’s tea party politics.
“Anybody in this business would know that ratings
are important, and we just weren’t getting them,” Como said. “I guess
he can spin anything he wants.”
Como said he also dismissed a part-time employee, Raul Pantoja of Orlando, because he had qualified as a tea party candidate for a House seat in Fort Myers and then gone on Guetzloe’s show to discuss it.
“The fact is he did go on the air Friday as an
announced candidate and could have violated the Fairness Doctrine,”
Como said, referring to the repealed federal doctrine requiring
political diversity on the airwaves. “That was part of the reason for
letting him go. But I invited him back when the election cycle is over.”
Republicans have accused O’Neal of attempting to
siphon off conservative votes in key swing districts by putting up
non-serious candidates under the tea party name. Their fear: In this
year’s angry, anti-incumbent political atmosphere, the tea partiers
could attract enough votes to swing some races to Democrats.
“None of these people have campaigned. None of them have opened campaign accounts before. It’s very unusual,” said state GOP Chairman John Thrasher.
Many of the candidates are young, don’t appear to
have many assets or full-time jobs and materialized for the first time
in the final hours before the noontime end of qualifying last Friday.
At least seven of the 20 appear to live outside the district they are
running for — sometimes hundreds of miles away.
One, Darin Dunmire, 35, is an airline pilot who works in India three-fourths of the year and owns a home in Kentucky. But he lists his legal residence as the same Orlando address as his mother, Peggy Dunmire, who is running for the U.S. House as a tea party candidate.
Another, Jon Foley, 24, is O’Neal’s son, who said he and Crawford, his friend, had talked about running for office when they enrolled at the University of Central Florida. Foley is listed as Crawford’s campaign treasurer.
But they don’t appear to have plans to contact voters. “Contact voters? I don’t even know what that means,” Foley said Monday.
And another is Victoria Torres, 44, of Orlando, who qualified to run for a Pinellas House seat and whose company, Public Opoinion Strategies Inc., received $11,000 this year from firebrand liberal U.S. Rep. Alan Grayson for polling and survey expenses.
“There should be little doubt left: Alan Grayson is pulling the strings of the so-called Florida Tea Party,” railed Andy Sere of the National Republican Congressional Committee.
Republicans said they suspected O’Neal’s group was
paying them to run. O’Neal said that though his group did pay for the
candidates’ $1,781.82 qualifying fees and promised to cover expenses, it was not paying them to run.
“This is no big plot. We’re just thorns. We just get
it in our mind to do stuff and are troublemakers,” O’Neal said. He said
Taylor, the Tallahassee bank teller, had been “forced” to withdraw and another candidate was told by Republicans to “withdraw or else.”
Nor were all the Tea Party candidates recruited by O’Neal’s group.
Ira Chester, a 75-year-old retired state employee in Tallahassee, qualified to run for state agriculture commissioner as a tea party candidate against Democrat Scott Maddox and Republican Adam Putnam.
Chester, previously a registered Democrat, has been
a frequent campaign contributor to Maddox since 2001 — a fact that
Putnam’s campaign said suggested they were working together.
Chester denied it.
“I know Scott Maddox; he’s a fine young man,” Chester said. “But I have 40 years more experience than both of these guys put together.”
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