Middling turnout would have turned the election

Broward County, of all places.

Broward suffered more laggard, no-account, couldn’t-be-bothered, sorry-but-I-had-to-stayhome-and-play-GrandTheft-Auto, no-vote voters than any other joint in Florida. Except for the state’s other mighty bastion of progressive politics, Miami-Dade County.

Some 42.6 percent of Broward voters were no shows. In what progressives billed as the most important mid-term election in memory, an opportunity to repudiate the mendacity and bigotry and sexism and reactionary politics of the Trump regime,

503,000 voters from the most progressive county in Florida couldn’t be bothered.

Only Miami-Dade managed a more dismal showing. In a county where 53.8 percent of the population is foreign born, after a campaign season turned rancid by the denigration of immigrants, 618,000 MiamiDade registered voters still decided they had more pressing issues than attending to their civic obligations.

The election turnout in Miami-Dade was depressing. In Broward, it was downright disgraceful.

Election day was exactly 100 days shy of the one-year anniversary of the Parkland slaughter. It was the gun violence horror right here in Broward County, we were assured, that would finally motivate the youth vote. This election would bring a day of reckoning, when a mighty army of young voters showed Florida politicians what happens when they kowtow to the NRA. Apparently, they win elections. Election Day came just 11 days after an unhinged Trump supporter, Cesar Sayoc, apparently in the throes of the hatefulness afoot this political season, was arrested right here in Broward County, outside an auto parts store in Plantation, and charged with mailing bombs to CNN and prominent Democrats across the country. You’d think discovering that the would-be bomber was a local boy might have awakened our indolent voters from their collective lethargy. But no.

Just a day later, 11 Jews were massacred at a Pittsburgh synagogue, the deadliest act of anti-Semitic violence in American history. The killer was apparently motivated by the myth that a caravan composed of terrorists,

MS-13 gangbangers and walking disease vectors, all on the payroll of a Jewish billionaire, was marching out of Central America, bent on invading the U.S. (You remember the caravan, don’t you? Such a big, scary issue, right up until Tuesday evening). You’d think that the county with the largest Jewish population in Florida would storm the polls and vote down politicians who affiliate themselves with the fomenter of such hateful, dangerous, inciteful, lying rhetoric,

Apparently not.

Broward and Miami-Dade and Palm Beach counties all reported turnouts that lagged behind the statewide turnout of 62.1 percent. Juxtapose the teeny-tiny winning statewide margins (unless a recount reverses the outcomes) of Rick Scott and Ron DeSantis against the 60 percent-plus margins in favor of Bill Nelson and Andrew Gillum in South Florida. (Gillum led by 68 percent in Broward.) Just a turnout hereabouts equal to the middling state average would have turned this election.

Didn’t happen. But I’ll tell you who did show up. Almost 78 percent of Sumter County voters, led by The Villages retirement community, 125,000 folks with plenty of leisure time to hop into their tricked-out golf carts, cruise down to their polling places and renew their allegiance to the party of Donald Trump. The President received about 70 percent of the Villages’ vote in 2016. Rick Scott and Ron DeSantis did about as well this time out. In other states, the Republican Party may have evolved into the party of working class white men, but Florida’s version is a gaggle of prosperous white retirees in cabana wear.

It’s the political paradox of our time. The elderly get their creaky bones up and moving and go vote. The young – despite rather more urgent reasons to elect leaders who’ll protect their future from environmental degradation, climate change, lousy schools, unaffordable health care, gun violence, rotting infrastructure -- vote at about half the rate of folks who won’t be around to endure the long-range consequences of their political choices.

The Tampa Bay Times reported that two-thirds of Florida’s no-show voters in this election were younger than 45. Gillum, for example, received over 60 percent of vote from the 45 and younger set, while DeSantis received 54 percent of over-45 voters. But the older category accounted for

75 percent of the electorate.

The statewide Democratic candidate who came closest to winning was Nikki Fried, a Fort Lauderdale lawyer running for agricultural commissioner. She trailed Republican State Rep. Matt Caldwell by just 12,521 votes -- 16 percent of the statewide total, a margin so close it triggered an automatic recount.

Fried, by the way, is a lobbyist for the marijuana industry. Maybe that tells us something about how to fire up those elusive young voters.

Fred Grimm (@grimm_fred or leogrimm@gmail.com), a longtime resident of Fort Lauderdale, has worked as a reporter and columnist in South Florida since 1976.