LAKELAND, Fla. — Linda Ivell is an ardent supporter of President Bush, leads the state Republican women’s club and has met all of the major GOP presidential candidates. Yet the 53-year-old real estate agent, who lives in this former citrus and phosphate-mining hub in Central Florida, can’t make up her mind about whom to vote for Tuesday in Florida’s presidential primary.
“I honestly don’t know,” said Ivell, who is torn by the candidates’ varying appeals as economic, national-security and social-issues conservatives. “The thing I want most is someone who will speak the truth.”
A hodgepodge of factions
Undecided Republicans like Ivell living near Interstate 4, the corridor that divides the Sunshine State into northern and southern halves, could tip the scales in Tuesday’s primary. And they are being heavily wooed by the leading candidates.
Compared with those in other parts of the state, GOP voters in the Central Florida cities and suburbs along I-4, a 132-mile stretch of highway linking Daytona Beach and Tampa, are more ideologically diverse and less predictable. They are a hodgepodge of the factions — business people, retirees from the Northeast and the Midwest, military veterans and social conservatives — that President Reagan united under the conservative banner in the 1980s.
“What you’ve got in Central Florida are all the elements of the Republican Party, the Republican coalition,” said Lance deHaven-Smith, a political science professor at Florida State University in Tallahassee.
The diversity is fueled by the region’s demographics, which are evolving because of the explosive growth here in recent years. It’s the fastest-growing part of the state and quickly diversifying with an influx of Latinos. The population of Orange County, the home of Orlando, has more than doubled over the past 20 years and is now slightly more than 1 million.
State Sen. Daniel Webster, a Florida chairman for the Mike Huckabee campaign who represents the western part of Orange and neighboring Seminole and Osceola counties, said the messages of each of the candidates resonate with a segment of the area’s Republican voters.
“There is an ability for each one of the candidates to garner significant support here,” he said.
Where the undecideds live
In particular, Sen. John McCain of Arizona, former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney and former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani are concentrating time and resources mining for Republican votes in the remaining days before the Florida vote. McCain, for example, is courting veterans and seniors.
Central Florida accounts for “almost half the primary vote in the whole state, so it’s ordinarily considered the battleground,” McCain strategist Charles Black said. “That’s where all the potential undecided voters are.”
Said Romney spokesman Kevin Madden: “It’s a key area for everyone. There are many counties there that have a growing population and face economic uncertainty and economic challenges, and that is an area where we focus from a strategic standpoint of getting out the vote.”
Romney was greeted warmly at a Wednesday stop at the Moffit Cancer Center in Tampa, where he spoke to a couple hundred people on the edge of the University of South Florida campus. Alluding to the nation’s economic problems, Romney said his business experience and acumen make him the right leader for the times.
It’s a theme that resonates with voters like Cheryl Bartolomeo, a Tampa resident who works in the facilities department at the cancer center and who grew up in Boston.
“I like his business approach to running the country,” said the 35-year-old, who plans to vote for Romney. “He seems to be a straight shooter.”
Impressed but wavering
Colleague Janean Reschlein, who works in security, was wavering between supporting Romney or Giuliani when she walked into the event.
After Romney’s speech, the 56-year-old Tampa resident said she was impressed but remained undecided.
“I like the way he talks about personal responsibility; I think that’s what we need to do as a country and stop looking to government to solve all of our problems,” she said. “But I’m still not sure. It will come down to the voting booth.”
