Looking back with Buddy MacKay, Florida’s last Democratic governor

OCKLAWAHA — Buddy MacKay badly wanted to be governor of Florida, but not in the way he got the job.

On Dec. 12, 1998, Lawton Chiles, the last elected Democratic governor, died less than a month before leaving office. As lieutenant governor, MacKay succeeded his friend and partner as governor for three sad weeks before the inauguration of Jeb Bush, who had soundly defeated MacKay that November.

That 1998 race was a turning point in the modern evolution of the state, as Bush’s resounding victory gave Republicans total control of state government. In the years since, the GOP has tightened its grip on the Legislature, Cabinet and courts as Florida has become an increasingly reactionary one-party state. The Democratic Party’s downhill spiral in state politics hit a new low that year.

MacKay, 88, and his wife Anne live near Ocala in an unpretentious old Florida-style house surrounded by flowers, a place he calls “downtown Ocklawaha,” named for a nearby river. They sat on their back porch for a long talk — a simple chat that’s incomprehensible with the current governor — and took in the view of nearby Lake Weir as Remy, the family dog, retrieved a tennis ball. The MacKays’ live deep in MAGA land: Trump took Marion by nearly a 2-to-1 margin last fall.

MacKay spent 26 productive years in the state House and Senate, Congress and for eight years as Chiles’ engaged lieutenant governor, but he never won statewide office on his own, losing three times — for governor and twice for U.S. Senate.

He led the opposition to the Cross-Florida Barge Canal when that stand was not popular, and he stood up to racists who taunted his UF law school classmate, W. George Allen, who had a prominent legal career in Fort Lauderdale before his death in 2019.

He was a policy wonk with persistence and had a stand-offish style — “charismatically challenged,” as he once said. He had the spine to change from no to yes on the Equal Rights Amendment. He was a deficit hawk in Congress and a believer in moderate and activist government, a good and decent man with strongly held views on abortion rights, the environment and civil rights.

“He was honest — you’ll make me cry — and thoughtful,” Anne MacKay said, choking up. “About 10 years ahead of his time and that got him into a lot of trouble.”

One word defines MacKay’s career, but it’s for the wrong reasons, because it was used to smear him, mostly in the 1988 Senate race he narrowly lost to Republican Connie Mack.

“I was known as a liberal — L-I-B-RU-L,” MacKay said with a smile, spelling it with a drawl as some constituents said it, like an epithet. “That liberal from Gainesville.”

Those university-town voters kept electing him, offsetting votes against him from nearby counties where sheriffs were openly hostile. A rare exception was Dixie County, at the mouth of the Suwannee River on the Gulf Coast, where MacKay called a friend the night he first won a state Senate seat in 1974.

“‘Hey, fellas, he’s won. Can’t we let him carry Dixie County?’ ” MacKay recalls the friend saying. “That said it all, man.”

A portrait of MacKay, with his familiar tight-lipped half-smile, hangs on the wall in the Capitol in Tallahassee next to those of other governors. Its presence is a reminder of his uncommonly bad timing, like so much in MacKay’s career. He deserved better.

Against Mack in ’88, he ran on a ticket led by the disliked Michael Dukakis. Mack reduced a statewide election to five words, with 10-second TV ads that said “Hey Buddy, you’re a liberal,” and won after a mass of absentee ballots were counted late. The contest was marked by drop-offs in votes cast in several large Democratic counties, as voters appeared to skip the Senate race as a result of its placement at the bottom of a page.

Against a well-organized and lavishly financed Bush in ’98, MacKay had too little money and Democrats in the Legislature were divided over race. Times were changing. Bush was selling T-shirts online to voters with new dial-up modems. As Anne MacKay recalled it, their youngest son Andy said: “Y’all ought to have a website.”

Still a proud Democrat, MacKay wants to be upbeat about Florida’s future, but he’s appalled by Tallahassee’s transactional right-wing politics and its preening gasbags. He sees a rootless, what’s-in-it-for-me place that “lacks a center … we’re a lightweight operation.”

MacKay despised the corruption of the word liberal, but never apologized for his views. Say what you will, but he was real. “You sort of live with who you are,” he said. “I didn’t feel I could change who I was in order to get elected.”

It’s way past the time that Buddy MacKay would ever run for anything, and that’s just as well. As he said only half in jest, “I’d probably have to move from downtown Ocklawaha.”