Ex-Socialist Candidate for President Polling 200,000 Votes in Florida Primary

Brian P. Moore, the Socialist Party’s candidate for president in 2008, polled more than 200,000 votes in yesterday’s Democratic gubernatorial primary in Florida.

With approximately 92 percent of the statewide precincts reporting, Florida’s Chief Financial Officer Alex Sink was garnering 664,183 votes to 199,623 for Moore, who waged an under-funded and low-key campaign for the state’s highest office.

Moore was polling 23.1 percent of the vote.

According to unofficial returns, Sink — a heavy favorite in the race — carried all of the state’s 67 counties, but defeated Moore by only five votes in rural Holmes County, a sparsely-populated county along the Alabama border in northwest Florida.

Moore, who ran unsuccessfully for the U.S. Senate as an independent antiwar candidate in 2006, carried a scattering of precincts throughout the state, including a handful in populous Miami-Dade County.

Hoping to repeat the phenomenal example of muckraking author and novelist Upton Sinclair — a lifelong Socialist who captured the Democratic nomination for governor of California during the Great Depression in a spectacularly brilliant campaign one biographer described as “the campaign of the century” — the 67-year-old Moore spent less than $8,200 in his improbable bid to win the Florida governorship. Much of that came in the form of a personal loan that he made to his campaign.

Sink, who only recently began airing television commercials and remains largely unknown to a wide swath of Florida voters, raised cash contributions of more than $7.5 million, but saved much of her massive war chest for the autumn election where she will face a deep-pocketed GOP opponent.

In congratulating Sink on her resounding victory, Moore thanked his supporters and promised to continue fighting for the progressive issues, including the establishment of a state-owned bank, that he raised during his short-lived primary campaign.

Moore has not yet indicated whether he plans to support Alex Sink in the autumn campaign.  On the campaign trail, Moore frequently lamented that it was almost impossible to distinguish Sink from Bill McCollum and other Republican members of the Florida Cabinet.

A career banker, Sink is the former president of Bank of America’s Florida operations.

In his congratulatory remarks, the former Socialist candidate for president said that he hoped the Democratic nominee would provide “a more specific and more liberal agenda than she has demonstrated during the primary campaign.”

The major-party nominees will face opposition from Bud Chiles, the son of the late Gov. Lawton Chiles, and Iranian-born economist Farid A. Khavari of Miami, both of whom are running without party affiliation.