The New Year is upon us, and Lenny Curry’s campaign brochures are starting to surface in San Marco and other places in Jacksonville where likely Republican voters congregate, giving the people of Jacksonville insight into the candidate and the campaign. The cover of the brochure shows Curry’s bridge logo with a sun rising over it – a homage to the Reagan “Morning in America” motif from the 1984 reelection campaign – with a slogan that sets the tone for the…
Last week, the Jacksonville/Northeast Florida Metropolitan Region released an export market assessment, which it characterized as a “critical step in the development of a regional export strategy”, which is part of the region’s participation in the Global Cities Initiative, a collaboration between JPMorgan Chase and the Brookings Institution. Jacksonville is one of eight metro areas in the “new export exchange network”. According to Brad McDearman, Brookings fellow and director of global special projects, “Metro Jax is evaluating its standing in…
The big news last week in the Jax Mayoral Race was Lenny Curry’s hiring of top-level campaign staff fresh off the just concluded Bill Cassidy Louisiana Senatorial campaign, a triumph of Lee Atwater styled power politics. As Phil Ammann wrote on this site last week, “Curry’s campaign manager will be Brian Swensen, a former political director for the Republican Party of Florida who also served as Cassidy’s political director.” Meanwhile, “Curry’s political director will be Jessica Laird, a Cassidy field…
Most people in Jacksonville believe that the 2015 mayoral race is going to come down to incumbent Mayor Alvin Brown and the Republican frontrunner, former GOP Chair Lenny Curry. Yet there is a third candidate currently in the race who may have something to say about that, in the form of former Jacksonville City Council President Bill Bishop, a longtime councilman who has the closest thing approximating a grassroots campaign this time out, assembling a unique coalition of small-government conservatives,…
The 2015 Jacksonville mayoral race has, up until now, been a three-man race. The incumbent, Alvin Brown, who is still polling well, but who has taken heat from many supporters last time around for an overly conservative approach to policy discussions (most notably the squelched Human Rights Ordinance). Former Florida GOP Chairman Lenny Curry, the consummate insider Republican and local kingmaker Peter Rummell’s choice, who has done a great job fundraising and setting himself up as the most logical general…
Jacksonville is a city that has changed drastically in many ways over the last quarter century, with the influx of new corporate capital and the migration patterns that begets making the city more liberal on many issues. Despite this, some things remain the same. One of which is that socially conservative politicians, and the arguments they make about culture, still carry some weight. A recent example of such happened in November, when City Council President Clay Yarborough emailed the mayor’s…
The last two weeks have seen seismic change in the Duval County GOP. In the wake of Duval County Republican Party Secretary Kim Crenier’s explosive tweets on her personal account on the Ferguson verdict and aftermath, with one of them ending up crossposted on the @JaxGOP Twitter account, two Republican Party officers have decided to stand down instead of seek re-election. The first one to stand down, logically, was Crenier herself. Embattled with calls for her resignation from everyone from…