AMPA - The 2000 election may be remembered as the Battle for Florida - and as the time the nation realized that Florida is more than the sum of its sunshine-and-citrus stereotypes. It's the country's future.
Throughout the autumn, Vice President Al Gore and Texas Governor George W. Bush struggled for Florida and its 25 electoral votes. And to compete here, the nominees knew they had to confront the three unavoidable characteristics that shape Florida's politics: an aging population, its rapidly changing ethnic mix, and its new sense of environmental crisis.
That, in short, is the formula for the new American politics of the 21st century.
Right now, for example, seniors represent more than 18 percent of the population of Florida, giving the state the highest rate of people over 65 in the United States, which overall has a senior population of slightly under 13 percent. But Florida's demographic profile in 2000 is roughly about what the country's will look like in 2020.
Florida ranks behind only California and New York in the number of immigrants admitted annually. Its population of Hispanics constitutes a higher percentage of the state than the national average, though the national percentage is arching toward Florida levels. Its fresh sense of peril over environmental questions, symbolized by the rush to save the endangered Everglades, puts the state in the forefront of national sentiment.
That's why, when Gore dropped into Tampa's Lykes Gaslight Park in the last week of the campaign for a late-afternoon rally, he took his cue from the balladeer Jimmy Buffett, who told the downtown audience, ''The environment is a hot-button issue in Florida - you bet your ass it is.'' Gore was slightly less colorful, wagering that he could make his point sufficiently by arguing that ''the environment has been my cause all my public life.''
The new Florida is reinvented every day; besides foreign immigration, the state has a larger net migration from other places in the United States than anywhere else in the country. ''We're a lot like America, because the people here have been born all over America,'' says Stanley K. Smith, the director of the Bureau of Economic and Business Research at the University of Florida. (The largest number of new Floridians is from New York, but there are large enclaves from throughout the Northeast and Midwest, with smaller groups from Georgia and other states in the Southeast.)
This kind of high-octane change, producing growth of 15.3 percent between 1990 and 1998, has created its own brand of political upheaval.
''We're sort of America's politics of the future, in all its glory and all its problems,'' says Susan McManus, a political scientist at the University of South Florida. ''And we are another thing: very divided from a political perspective.''
So divided, in fact, that Florida political professionals are considered the most sophisticated practitioners of the art of highly specialized direct-mail solicitations. In a trend eagerly followed by both Bush and Gore, political candidates here routinely target their mail appeals, targeting voters along racial and generational lines.
The state's strong divisions (and its rapidly altering trends) are reflected in party registration trends. A decade ago the Republicans registered a million new voters and seemed on the verge of dominating this state; President George H.W. Bush beat Arkansas Governor Bill Clinton here in 1992. Then the tide turned, and in 1996, Clinton beat former senator Bob Dole by 300,000 votes. Today, despite the fact that a Republican and a Bush brother, Jeb Bush, occupies the stately governor's mansion in Tallahassee, Democrats outnumber Republicans by about 400,000.
The tides of migration and the relentless waves of change are causing other disruptions. Only New York City and the Los Angeles/Long Beach corridor absorbed more immigrants in 1997 than did Miami, providing the city with language and cultural challenges that are harbingers of America's future. Three decades ago, only one American in 20 was foreign-born. Today the rate is closer to one in 10.
The newly emerging generational resentments fostered by Bush's and Gore's unceasing emphasis on Social Security, Medicare, and the other totems of senior politics came into sharp relief here this fall. Despite the prominence of older people here, by far the largest number of migrants into the state are between the ages of 20 and 30. They're generally more concerned about professional opportunities than prescription drug benefits.
''Florida has the entrepreneurial strains and the optimism that are typically American,'' says J.M. ''Mac'' Stipanovich, chief of staff to Republican former governor Bob Martinez. ''Its openness reflects the America of tomorrow, the willingness to bet on the next thing.''
That's because, if the election of 2000 taught us any one thing, it is that Florida itself is the next thing.
