Reply #42: The Tampa-St. Pete area covered by this Newspaper is huge...

[sop]

It's a huge area, millions of people, made up of dozens and dozens of communities....it's just not the City of Tampa or St. Petersburg. This paper circulates all over central Florida, from Orlando to Tampa, and the coastal gulf areas of Florida from Naples all the way up to the Appalachicola Bay beach towns. Most importantly, the entire area is chock full of older, middle-class retirees, mostly from the mid-west....Ohio, Michigan, Indiana, and so on....with lots and lots of ex-military, too. So, it's a good thing these folks are reading this.

Most of the support I'm seeing in west-central Florida for McCain is coming from older folks. Every time I see a McCain bumper sticker on a car I check to see who's driving. Nine times out of ten it's some old fart in a Town Car. Obama stickers outnumber McCain's by at least four to one most everywhere I go in Florida. And the one thing I'm not seeing here in Florida, something that I would see constantly before the 2000 and 2004 elections, are GOP stickers on working-class pick-up trucks and other trade-type vehicles. A few years ago most of these guys would have "W04" stickers on their trucks, this time I'm not seeing McCain stickers on these types of blue-collar vehicles. Maybe they figured out voting for Republicans is not in their best economic interest. I'm seeing a lot of support for Obama in Florida, but it's a pretty Republican-leaning state. It's constantly changing, though.