Gimenez squeaked through.
There are 1,221,592 registered voters in Miami-Dade County. Only 199,862 — 16.36% — voted today. Numbers like that make believers in a small-R republican form of government shake their heads.
Gimenez won by 4,375 votes, about 51% of the votes cast. A clear win but no landslide.
Look at it another way, that’s about 0.358 % — about one third of a percent — of the registered voters in the County.
Numbers like that make political activists think their work has meaning.
What it really demonstrates is that most people really don’t care enough about politics to cross the street. The scary thing is that in national elections all the same people who can’t be troubled with politics 99% of the time, vote in an election that is even more important in some ways. Lots of uninformed people heading to the polls once every four years(!) to vote based on a viewpoint that they don’t actually have and based on a decision that they are not really able to make thoughtfully. That’s how someone like Palin might be elected, and how Obama got there (to use but two examples out of many, many, many from both parties).
I’ve often wondered if it might be a better system to disallow voting in national elections if you haven’t voted in the locals… But since ANY attempt to fix our lousey electoral system is deemed racist, it’ll never change no matter WHAT anybody ever thinks might improve things.