https://www.sun-sentinel.com/news/politics/fl-ne-wasserman-schultz-tim-canova-results-20181107-story.html
Voter support for Wasserman Schultz foe Tim Canova plummets
"To say the least, I do not find the results credible.”
U.S. Rep Debbie Wasserman Schultz, D-Weston, was easily elected to an eighth term in the 2018 midterm elections, receiving 58.4 percent of the vote.
That’s a higher percentage of the vote than she received two years ago.
Joe Kaufman, the perennial Republican candidate, received 36 percent of the vote on Tuesday.
Tim Canova received just 4.9 percent of the vote in his second attempt to oust Wasserman Schultz. That works out to less than one vote for every 11 people who voted for the incumbent.
In 2016, Canova ran as a Democrat and received 21,907 votes in the primary. On Tuesday, he was a no party affiliation general election candidate.
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Vote totals as of Wednesday afternoon show he received 12,920 votes in 2018 — a decrease of 41 percent from the number he received in 2016.
Canova, in an email to supporters Wednesday night, said he doesn’t believe the outcome. “To say the least, I do not find the results credible.”
The result was the same both years — a Wasserman Schultz victory in the Broward/Miami-Dade County 23rd District — but the contest between the incumbent and challenger was far different.
In 2016, Canova was running with the support of Bernie Sanders, the unsuccessful candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination, and was able to harness the passion of Sanders supporters across the country to fuel his campaign.
Wasserman Schultz was chairwoman of the Democratic National Committee at the time, and many Sanders supporters believed she tipped the party scales toward Hillary Clinton, who eventually won the nomination.
Canova had plenty of money for advertising, consultants and staff in 2016. He wasn’t able to repeat the fundraising magic this year.
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Financial reports filed with the Federal Election Commission showed he had just $9,010 cash in his campaign bank account on June 30, 2018. On the same date two years ago, Canova had more than 100 times as much cash on hand: $986,345.
Since losing the 2016 primary, Canova has repeatedly said he doesn’t believe he actually lost that contest because his campaign was going so well, in his view, that summer. Canova has said he had the most impressive field organization of any campaign in the country, and the “internal numbers” collected by his campaign’s canvassers that knocked on voters’ doors “showed a far, far different result than the official outcome.”
In his email to supporters, Canova said this year’s campaign had “exploded with energy,” and that he saw voters breaking our way and openly rejecting Wasserman Schultz.”
His explanation for the 2018 loss was that he didn’t actually lose. “From the beginning, we knew that Wasserman Schultz would try to rig the election. What’s remarkable is how open and blatant the rigging is now,” he wrote. Canova didn’t offer any evidence of rigging.
He asked supporters to send money to help pay debts incurred by his campaign.
The general election two years ago featured a presidential contest, with higher overall turnout than this week’s midterm election. Wasserman Schultz and Kaufman also received fewer votes than 2016, but the declines weren’t as pronounced as Canova’s.
Wasserman Schultz’s 2016 total was 183,225. On Tuesday, she received 154,233 votes.
Kaufman’s 2016 total was 130,818. On Tuesday, he received 95,415 votes.
One other candidate, Don Endriss, ran with no party affiliation in both year’s general elections. He received 5,180 votes in 2016 and 1,536 on Tuesday.