The 132-mile stretch from Daytona Beach to Tampa Bay is again seen as a major route to the White House.
But this is not the same Interstate Highway 4 corridor that handed President Bush a 4,400-vote buffer in his bitterly fought presidential contest with Democrat Al Gore in 2000.
Since then, the rolls of registered voters in the seven counties connected by I-4, which links the east and west coasts of Florida, have swelled by 156,000 people, to 2.4 million. The Democratic ranks have grown twice as fast as those of the Republicans, but the dramatic surge has come in the number of people registering as independents.
It is the power of those independent-minded voters along the I-4 corridor that is drawing Bush back to Orange County on Saturday for the first big rally of his re-election campaign.
His Democratic rival Sen. John Kerry also is keenly aware that the I-4 swing vote is critical to success in November. He staged rallies in Orlando and Tampa immediately after clinching the presidential nomination this month and plans more Florida trips in April.
As much as Bush and Kerry play to partisan bases, it is the independents–including Puerto Ricans and new citizens from Central America and the Caribbean willing to split their vote–that present the ultimate challenge for either candidate.
“Where the race is usually won or lost is Central Florida–that I-4 corridor … the core of the majority of the swing voters is that growing number of people without party affiliation,” says Aubrey Jewett, political scientist at the University of Central Florida.
Supervisors of elections attribute the growing independence to the “motor-voter” drive that enrolls people when they apply for driver licenses, but often capturing those who lack political passion and may not vote on Election Day.
Party polarization
Yet pollsters say increasing polarization between the two major parties, pitting conservative and liberal extremes against one another, has prompted more voters to make political choices candidate by candidate.
“It somewhat reflects the fact that both parties have moved to their outer edges, their extremes,” says Brad Coker, a Florida-based pollster. “And it expresses somewhat a dissatisfaction that neither party speaks to the middle of the road. It’s safe to register as an independent and then just pick by the candidate.”
The teeming corridor of central Florida that will become center stage for this year’s presidential election not only swings from party to party but also serves as a bellwether for the state: Tampa’s Hillsborough County has voted the way that Florida has in every presidential race since the 1960s, backing President Bill Clinton in 1996 and Bush in 2000.
Area’s diversity
“It’s the diversity in the corridor” that makes it so volatile, says Coker, managing director of Mason-Dixon Opinion and Research. “North Florida for the most part kind of blows one way. Southeast Florida kind of blows one way, and the I-4 corridor has more of a mixture of people in philosophies and where they come from.”
Bush, backed by the non-stop campaigning of brother Gov. Jeb Bush, holds an advantage in the region. Yet, in 2000, for the first time since the President Franklin D. Roosevelt era, Orange County backed the Democrat running for president, by a margin of 5,703.
And Democrats have grown stronger. They claimed a narrow edge over Republicans in the county just before the 2000 vote and have continued outpacing the GOP in registration.
“In September of 2000, when it flipped, I thought it was a fluke, but it wasn’t,” says Bill Cowles, Orange County’s supervisor of elections.
Hispanics account for about 18 percent of Orange County’s million-plus population; blacks make up 17 percent. Across the seven counties of the I-4 corridor, blacks and Hispanics each account for about 12.5 percent of the 4.5 million population.
Orange County’s Democratic registration has grown from 165,024 before the last presidential election to 183,492 before the March presidential primary. Republican rolls have grown from 161,451 to 169,140. But outpacing them both are voters registering without party affiliation–up from 69,430 to 89,129.
