As for the Mayor’s race, it seems as though Tampa has lost outright with the two worst choices being our options in the runoff election.
Do you want a reason NOT to vote for Jane Castor? Here are some.
She oversaw “Biking While Black” which profiled and persecuted people of color while being an ineffective, racist police policy, proven by the DOJ. It was not fully investigated... interesting how as I stood before City Council asking that the investigation be reopened to look at Jane’s emails and who was responsible for oversight, I sat down and checked Facebook (after delivering my remarks) to find that she had just announced her run for Mayor.
Jane first stood by the policy, & later changed to Democrat right before running for Mayor, and finally “apologized,” also right before running for Mayor. Her apologists are quick to gloss over and dismiss “Biking While Black” an issue — which is astounding to me. Jane said, of a friend, who was harassed at a “black” park, that he shouldn’t have been there, asking something like “why was he there?” Questionable words.
She is in Buckhorn’s circle and should not be trusted to be any better than his disaster of a mayoralty. How about her oodles of financial backing from GOP firms and so on? I hope that people are aware of this stuff.
I cannot fathom how any true progressive would consider her campaign, voting for her knowing the facts, or make the call that she ought to be Mayor. It is astounding to me. And horrible, considering how my friends and family will live in Tampa for years to come, and some folk would go so far as to use identity politics to justify such an awful candidate. It’s disgusting, identity politics gone wrong, and should not be okay with true progressives. That being said, there is another option.
Straz is too much of a wild card. Straz is a billionaire who voted for Trump, and certainly has a litany of past actions hidden from the general public—I presume many (not all, per say) people in his wealth margin are similar, especially those who dip into politics as Straz and others have done. How can we trust Straz to be anything, at all, more than the lesser of two evils in this situation?
I know he has taken some progressive policy positions, including the minimum wage being raised. How can we hold him to that; what has he done to politically indicate that he would be good and leftist for Tampa, aside from dumping two million dollars into a local election while essentially forging a nice looking platform? Voting for Trump wasn’t a progressive political move; and while it isn’t an immediate disqualification for me, it’s a serious question of character and political allegiance.
I hope that we will have the write in option. I wrote in my own name rather than vote for Buckhorn in the 2015 mayoral election. This time I will be more creative should the WI option be present. If there is not a WI option, this mayoral runoff could end up being the FIRST election I do not vote for at all, and I have voted each and every opportunity since the 2012 general election, my first time eligible to vote at age 18. That says something about the state of Tampa politics and the quality of choices our municipal voters have made—the few of them that voted at all. I wish Harry Cohen had received more votes.
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