A 26-year-old real estate investor and entrepreneur seeks to deny the former chair of the Florida Democratic Party a third term in the Florida House and capture one of the last two Florida House seats held by Democrats between Jacksonville and Pensacola.
Republican Spencer Brass’ challenge to House District 9 incumbent Allison Tant, D-Tallahassee, comes in an election when Democrats hope to flip five seats to break the GOP supermajority in the House. (A supermajority enables the GOP to set the House agenda with virtually no input from Democrats.)
Brass is backed by the incoming House leadership and has engaged Tant in an expensive battle to divert Democratic resources away from districts that lean Democratic and are held by Republicans.
Republicans have long coveted the Tallahassee-based seat. In past elections, they recruited former Florida State University football star Peter Boulware and other well-known business leaders to flip the seat.
Elections data analyst Matt Isbell, who consults for Democrats and concedes bias because of a friendship with Tant, calls HD 9 the GOP’s “fool’s gold.” The party repeatedly makes a run for a Tallahassee-based seat, where voters have routinely supported Democratic candidates by more than double digits.
But a quirk in this year’s race is that it is Tant’s first real test after the 2022 redistricting. She was reelected two years ago when a Republican candidate was disqualified.
Once wholly contained in Democratic-dominated Leon, redistricting moved the district east. It retained northeast Tallahassee precincts where voters twice voted for former President Donald Trump by double digits and merged them with rural counties Trump won easily.
Tant and Brass are competing to represent roughly 180,000 residents who live in a three-county region that posts higher unemployment and poverty rates than the state average and lower household median incomes – Madison County’s median income is 64% of the state median of $67,000, according to U.S. Census Bureau data; Jefferson is 76% and Leon 91%.
Brass’ list of the top three issues he will address if elected are mental health and homelessness, crime and economic development. Tant said constituents tell her property insurance costs, education spending and environmental protection are their top concerns.
The campaign being played out on social media, television commercials and mailers, however, are about other things.
In a million-dollar campaign financed by the Florida House Republican Campaign Committee, television commercials, mailers and text messages introduce Tant to voters as “Radical Allison Tant” and “the ultimate party insider … Hillary Clinton’s party chair.”
An eerily dark 30-second video was the talk of the town in Tallahassee political circles when first released. It features an iceberg ominously moving towards the viewer and tells voters that if they think Tant is a typical politician then they’ve only seen “the tip of the iceberg.”
Ad wars heat up in race for Tallahassee-based House seat
The commercial and accompanying flyers allege Tant voted “to allow sex change surgeries for children,” when she voted against a bill to prohibit the use of state funds for sex reassignment prescriptions or procedures for patients younger than 18.
A Tant spokesman declined to address the allegations — as both candidates in interviews, phone calls, and text messages bemoan a lack of civility in local politics. Brass said the commercials and mailers are sourced to Tant’s voting and public records.
“If somebody doesn’t stand by what they voted for, I don’t know what to tell you,” Brass said.
Kenneth Miller, a UNLV political scientist and expert on political advertising, said such ads have little impact on the average voter but do carry risks for the targeted candidate, especially if there is no counterattack.
Research indicates an attack ad brings partisans home, reminds them why they are a Republican or Democrat, or what it is about the other side they don’t like. Left unanswered, Miller said, they tend to mobilize one base and possibly depress turnout for the other.
“There’s a little bit of a game of chicken here with campaign spending. It is not, ‘if I spend 10% more than you, that I’m going to win,’ but if you are being outspent five to one, that’s a bit of an edge.”
Last week, the Brass campaign sent a text message accusing Tant of hypocrisy for hiring a south Florida consultant. Tant responded in a Facebook post, which appears to have since been deleted, and thanked the Brass campaign for using a better photo of her than it did in previous ads. She promised to use it as the image on a cake for her election night party.
An incident in September involved a truck outfitted with a monitor displaying the iceberg commercial trolling a Tant fundraiser in a suburban Tallahassee neighborhood.
Tant supporters were outraged by the stunt. Brass denies any knowledge of it and suggests the incident was a false flag staged by Tant supporters to generate publicity.
Brass’ commercials and mailers so far have been part of a “three-pack” campaign buy that the FHRCC made with Mentzer Media of Maryland, the company behind the infamous John Kerry “windsurfing” and “swift boat” ads.
By lumping together three candidates, Florida law allows political parties to skirt campaign finance limits for an individual candidate; the money spent does not count as a contribution to any of the candidates.
Brass is in a three-pack with incoming House Speaker-designate Daniel Perez, R-Miami, and Pensacola Republican Alex Andrade.
State campaign finance reports show FHRCC this election cycle has spent at least $1.3 million with Mentzer Media.
The incoming House leadership’s support for Brass has Tant’s attention.
Big money, big stakes as Brass seeks to unseat Tant
By the end of September, Tant’s campaign and affiliated political committee had spent at least $624,000 to defend a seat many consider a safe Democratic seat.
At a Labor Day event in Tallahassee, she told a group of union leaders she was running hard and was looking for people to make phone calls, talk to neighbors and write postcards on her behalf.
“The Republican House campaign is spending $1.1 million against me so I have a no joke rule in effect: I’ve got to fight back hard. I’m relentlessly fundraising because I’m trying to stay as competitive as possible … but I need your help,” Tant said.
Republicans say a lot has changed in the four years since Tant was first elected with 57% of the vote. In the three counties that make up HD 9:
- The GOP has increased its share of the vote from 29% in 2016 to 36% in 2022.
- Republican voter registration has overtaken Democrats in both Jefferson and Madison counties.
- Democratic voter registration in Leon County has dropped below 50%.
- In 2022, Democratic candidates received 42,000 fewer votes in HD 9 counties than they did in 2016 while Republican candidates increased their vote total by 15,000.
Brass notes redistricting also dropped what consultants once considered to be a 10-point advantage for Democrats to +4. “And that’s within the margin of error,” he added. The margin of error for most political polls is usually around 3.2%.
A Impact Research poll taken in August, before the FHRCC commercials began running on Tallahassee television stations, showed Tant with a 19-point lead.
University of Central Florida political scientist Aubrey Jewett’s reviewed the numbers associated with the HD 9 campaign — campaign spending, voter registration, voter turnout and past election results — and said they could be a recipe for an upset.
“If Democratic turnout in Florida lags anywhere close to 2022 then he certainly has a shot at knocking her off,” Jewett said of Brass.
Democrat turnout collapsed two years ago, resulting in Gov. Ron DeSantis winning reelection by 19 points and the GOP establishing supermajorities in both the Florida House and Senate.
Jewett, coauthor of “Politics in Florida,” an account of more than a century of Florida politics and government, said 90% of incumbents typically win reelection bids, but most politicians live in fear of being among the fewer than 10% who lose.
In Florida, it usually takes a scandal to lose.
“If Democratic turnout matches that of a normal presidential election and is high, then Brass’ task becomes much more difficult,” Jewett said.
Both sides are sitting with plenty of cash on hand to turn out the vote in the final month of the campaign.
According to state campaign finance reports, there’s $447,000 in cash-on-hand in both Tant’s campaign account and her affiliated political committee.
Brass reports only about $122,000 in his campaign and PC accounts combined. But he can count on support from the FHRCC — and the $7.3 million it has amassed.
James Call is a member of the USA TODAY NETWORK-Florida Capital Bureau. He can be reached at jcall@tallahassee.com and is on X as @CallTallahassee.
