Election Season Ends — A Look At How New Tampa Voted

Florida’s State House District 63, which has typically swung to the Democrats in years a presidential election has been held, didn’t swing this time.

Republican incumbent and Hunter’s Green resident Shawn Harrison edged out Lisa Montelione on Nov. 8 to hang on to his seat in an hotly-contested race.

Harrison captured 50.9 percent of the 73,731 votes cast, picking up 37,547 votes to Montelione’s total of 36,168.

It is the third time Harrison has won the House District 63 seat, which represents parts of New Tampa, Lutz, Carrollwood and the University of South Florida area.

He won it in 2010, lost it to Democrat Mark Danish in 2012, and then regained the seat in 2014, when he took it back from Rep. Danish.

Harrison, who beat Montelione by 1,363 votes, held a big 7,195-4,130 advantage on the ballots cast in Lutz. He also can thank his neighbors in Hunter’s Green, who helped offset New Tampa’s preference for Montelione by voting 1,511 times for Harrison, compared to just 954 for the former councilwoman.

The loss was stinging for Montelione, considering she was running in a Democrat-leaning district, the wide advantage Hillary Clinton held over president-elect Donald Trump in Hillsborough County (58-38 percent), as well as Democrat Patrick Murphy’s local success at the ballot box against Republican incumbent Marco Rubio.

Another Republican, emergency room doctor Jim Davison, also fared well, finishing first in a six-person race to replace Montelione, who resigned her position on the Tampa City Council in District 7 to the run for Harrison’s seat. He did not, however, get more than 50 percent of the vote, leading to a runoff.

Luis Viera, who was second, turned the tables by narrowly defeating Davison 2,588 votes to 2,523 Tuesday in that runoff.

In a battle of Hunter’s Green residents, the 38-year-old lawyer’s 65-vote margin of victory sends him downtown.

New Tampa Picked Hillary

Of the 13 precincts in New Tampa’s 33647 zip code, Clinton, the former Secretary of State and First Lady, ran the table, winning every one, many by surprisingly decisive margins.

In New Tampa’s 13 precincts, Clinton grabbed 58 percent of the 32,843 votes cast for U.S. President, compared with 38 percent for Trump. Early voters and those who mailed in ballots accounted for 14,400 of Clinton’s votes, compared to only 8,989 for Trump. Clinton also held a 700-vote edge amongst Nov. 8 voters.

That wasn’t enough to help Clinton blunt Trump’s surprising win, however. Despite a nearly 1.5-million popular vote advantage nationwide (62,829,832-61,488,190 as of our deadline), the New York real estate developer and former reality-TV star pulled off what was supposed to be an unlikely trifecta by sweeping Florida, Pennsylvania and Ohio to pick up enough electoral college votes for a 290-232 edge, with Michigan still counting votes until after our press time for this issue, but with Trump expected to grab Michigan’s 16 electoral college votes.

Clinton’s 20-point advantage in New Tampa was buoyed by big voting advantages in some of the precincts.

In precincts 362 and 363, where 6,934 presidential ballots were cast at the Cypress Point Community Church on Morris Bridge Rd., she won 60-36 percent. Of the 6,072 voters in Precinct 367 casting their ballots at St. Mark The Evangelist Catholic Church, it was Clinton over Trump, 59-38 percent. And at Lake Forest’s clubhouse, in precincts 583 and 584, Clinton held a 65-30 percent advantage among the 2,295 voters.

The New Tampa Regional Library hosted voting for two precincts that voted very differently. In Precinct 673, which encompasses the area north of Cross Creek Blvd. to the east and west of Kinnan St.,  2,647 votes were cast, with 60 percent going for Clinton and 35 percent for Trump.

Meanwhile, in Precinct 361, which is mostly Hunter’s Green, Clinton was still the choice, but only by a 49-48 edge, or 26 votes (with 2,541 cast). It was the closest vote with the exception of Precinct 355, which votes at the New Tampa Family YMCA in Tampa Palms, which went for Clinton 142 votes-140.

Voter turnout in Hillsborough County was 71.56 percent compared with just 56.8 percent nationwide. However, turnout was down from both the 2012 (73 percent) and 2008 (73.5) presidential elections.

In New Tampa, voter turnout was 73.7 percent, with Precincts 361 and 358 (Compton Park in Tampa Palms) having better than 78 percent participation.

Many voters, according to various media reports, also may have just been plain disgusted by both candidates — or perhaps an election season filled with negative political ads, name-calling and scandals — and didn’t bother to cast a vote for either candidate, despite going through the trouble of finding a polling station, standing in line and filling out a ballot.

In Hillsborough County, there were 1,388 undervotes, or ballots cast where the voter elected not to make a choice for president, more than twice the 616 undervotes in 2012. The number of undervotes in many other places also was more than twice what it was in 2012. In Michigan alone, for example, more than 87,000 undervotes were tabulated.

In the U.S. Senate race between Rubio and Murphy, it was the incumbent winning comfortably overall with 4,822,182 votes, or 52 percent. Murphy received 44.3 percent, or 4,105,251 votes. In New Tampa, though, Murphy was the choice by 54-45 percent.

In other races, Lynn Gray captured the District 7 Hillsborough County School Board seat by defeating Cathy James 50.1-49.8 percent, or a mere 1,233 votes out of almost 475,000 cast.

CDD Results

A number of Community Development District (CDD) supervisor races were held as well, and winners were Paul Meier (Easton Park CDD, Seat 2), Joe Farrell (Grand Hampton CDD, Seat 4), Stephen Stark (Heritage Isles CDD Seat 1), Frank Morales (K-Bar Ranch CDD, Seat 3), Jessica Vaughn (Tampa Palms CDD, Seat 5), Brad van Rooyen (Tampa Palms Open Space & Transportation {OST} CDD, Seat 4) &  Maria Lepage (Tampa Palms OST CDD, Seat 5).