Sheriff Demings avoids runoff, wins Orange mayor’s race easily
Orange County Sheriff Jerry Demings, who brushed aside a public spat about school safety with term-limited County Mayor Teresa Jacobs in the campaign’s final week, avoided a runoff Tuesday and was elected to succeed her in a landslide.
Demings, the first African-American to be elected county sheriff and the first African-American to serve as Orlando police chief, is now the first African-American to be elected county mayor, the county’s top executive post. He won with 62 percent of the vote.
His wife, U.S. Rep. Val Demings, the first woman to serve as Orlando police chief, also won her primary Tuesday, effectively propelling her to a second term because there is no Republican candidate. She stood at his side on stage.
The sheriff, 59, who celebrated his victory with his family — including his 96-year-old father — easily defeated Orange County Commissioner Pete Clarke, who received 22 percent of the vote, and Winter Park businessman Rob Panepinto, who trailed the field with 16 percent.
“We have won this race! We have won this race!” he said during a victory speech at the Florida Hotel & Conference Center at the Florida Mall. “The son of a maid and a taxicab driver has been elected.”
He said the landslide win “speaks volumes just how far this community has come.”
“I hope that this inspires every boy or girl if you work hard and you play by the rules you can become whoever you dream to be,” Demings said.
In an interview with the Orlando Sentinel, the county’s top lawman since 2008 said the vote also affirmed his view that the disagreement with Jacobs — who won a race Tuesday for School Board chair — over school resource officers “had nothing to do with school safety or security and everything to do with politics. It clearly didn’t resonate with voters. They know me and have trusted me now for years.”
“I look forward to the future,” he said.
Demings is a Democrat, and his victory also ends 20 consecutive years of Republican leadership at the helm of county government, although elections for county mayor and county commission are nonpartisan contests in which voters can cast ballots regardless of their party affiliation.
Though the candidates’ political-party affiliations didn’t appear on the ballot, Demings enjoyed a distinct advantage over his two Republican foes in fundraising, name recognition and political orientation.
Registered Democrats outnumbered their GOP counterparts by 120,000 in Orange County, according to pre-election tabulations by Supervisor of Elections Bill Cowles.
With about $1.5 million spent on TV ads, political mailers, strategy consultants and signs, the race was the priciest ever primary for Orange County mayor.
Clarke, whose public-service career has spanned more than four decades, wished Demings and the soon-to-be-reconfigured board of commissioners well with the challenges they will face.
“Not what I wanted, but so be it,” Clarke said.
Demings has 37 years of public service that also includes leadership roles as Orlando police chief and Orange County’s public safety director.
But he sparred not only with his rival candidates but also with Jacobs over a state mandate to have an armed officer on every public school campus.
Demings and Jacobs jousted about school safety after the Orlando Sentinel revealed that not every elementary school in unincorporated Orange County would have a deputy on campus when classes began Aug. 13.
Under a new state law — approved in the wake of the Feb. 14 mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland that killed 17 — at least one full-time deputy is guaranteed at each of the 117 campuses in Demings’ jurisdiction.
After the squabbling, Demings submitted a memo asking county commissioners to approve a funding request to hire 75 school-resource officers at a cost of $11.2 million to fill the empty posts.
Commissioners unanimously approved the request. But hiring and training could take several months.
A political mailer by Panepinto’s election team criticized the sheriff, declaring “Jerry Demings Fails Our Parents and Schools.”
Demings shrugged off the criticism at the time as ‘”purely politics,” insisting he and the school board had a plan to protect the campuses with officers working overtime.