Florida Democratic House District 60 Rep. Lindsay Cross and her Republican challenger, Ed Montanari, on Sept. 23, 2024. (Photo by Mitch Perry/Florida Phoenix)
If the Florida Democratic Party can achieve its incremental goal of escaping its superminority status in both chambers of the Legislature this election year, they can’t lose any of the seats they now hold in the Capitol.
One seat that has been targeted by the Republican Party of Florida for a possible flip is House District 60, comprising much of the city of St. Petersburg and Pinellas Park in Pinellas County. While it’s Democratic incumbent Lindsay Cross’s first attempt to be re-elected, it’s long been a Democratic stronghold.
Both state parties are watching closely, and both have financially invested in the race.
Cross won the seat by eight percentage points in 2022 and Joe Biden won it by 11 in 2020. But the district — like the entire state — has become less blue over the past few years. As of July 22, the state Division of Elections reported that 36% of voters in the district were registered Democrats, 33.5% were registered Republicans, and 30% as nonparty-affiliated voters or with third parties.
Enter Ed Montanari, a Falls Church, Virginia, native who moved to St. Petersburg as a teenager and calls himself a moderate Republican. A former Air Force fighter pilot who flew for American Airlines for more than three decades, he’s closing out a nine-year term on the St. Pete City Council.
His top campaign pledge is that, if elected, he’ll help fix the state’s property insurance crisis — which both candidates say is the number one issue that they hear about from voters in the district. Montanari is attempting to make the case that Cross has failed in her one term in office on that issue and that the voters would be better off electing him.
Republicans hold 84 seats in the 120-member Florida House and 28 seats in the 40-member Florida Senate.
Ineffectual?
A door hanging sign for Montanari in St. Petersburg (Photo by Mitch Perry / Florida Phoenix)
During a recent candidate forum in St. Petersburg’s low-lying Shore Acres area, he criticized Cross, insinuating that she has been ineffectual. He specifically took her on for being unable to advance her proposal to expand the My Safe Florida Home program by $205 million to mitigate flood risks — a major topic for those sitting in the audience.
“My opponent did put a bill forward in front of the Legislature,” Montanari said.
“The problem is, it didn’t go anywhere. You need somebody in Tallahassee to get things done. And that’s what this election is all about. Do you want somebody in Tallahassee to represent the interests of Shore Acres, the city of St Petersburg, and the residents of House District 60 and get things done that has a proven track record, or do you want to have somebody who talks a good game? I’m serious about this. My Safe Florida Homes? That was a layup. That should have gotten done, especially in this neighborhood.”
Edwin Beaton, a political science professor at USF-Tampa, says that although Montanari is smart to take up the insurance issue, blaming it on a one-term Democrat might be considered a reach among those paying attention.
“The Republicans control the Legislature and the governor’s mansion,” he said. “That argument is not going to fly.”
Cross notes that she had a Republican co-sponsoring her bill (Miami-Dade’s Vicki Lopez) as well as a Republican sponsoring it in the Senate (Lee County’s Jonathan Martin).
“That’s just a red herring,” Cross said in a follow-up interview. “It detracts from the fact that I am getting things done and I am pushing back against really extreme policies coming from the supermajority.”
In addition to property insurance, Montanari is touting his support for school choice and cracking down on undocumented immigration.
Environmentalist
A native of the Detroit suburbs and a Colorado State University grad, Cross came to Florida in the early aughts to work as an environmental scientist because “this is a great place to practice that profession and make a difference here.”
Her career has been steeped in environmental causes, such as serving as Tampa Bay Estuary Program’s environmental science and policy manager, executive director of the Florida Wildlife Corridor, and government relations director for Florida Conservation Voters.
In addition to property insurance, she boasts that she has been able to bring home “millions to Pinellas” in state appropriations in her two years in office.
Her campaign is seizing on an internal poll conducted by the Democratic-leaning polling firm Impact Research of 400 likely voters conducted in July suggesting that “Montanari’s extreme abortion stance raises concerns.”
Abortion
In a television ad that the Cross campaign began airing last week on places like ESPN, a woman is shown discussing how she needed an abortion to save her life.
A Cross mailing piece emphasizes her stance on property insurance and abortion rights (photo by Mitch Perry / Florida Phoenix)
“So, when politicians like Ed Montanari vote against access to abortion, they’re voting against critical care for women in the worst moments of their lives” she says in the ad, while a graphic cites two votes the City Council made in 2023 on abortion rights.
One of those votes was in February of 2023. As reported by the Tampa Bay Times, only three members of the council’s Health, Energy, Resilience, and Sustainability Committee supported giving $50,000 to the Tampa Bay Abortion Fund to allow for travel expenses for women in St. Petersburg who needed an abortion. Montanari was not a member of that committee and did not vote on the proposal at that time.
When the proposal went before the full council in April of 2023, Montanari did vote against it — as did five other council members, as the measure went down to defeat, 6-2. Two Tampa Bay-area House Republicans (Berny Jacques and Mike Beltran) had warned the council that the abortion fund would run against state law and threatened to withhold state dollars from the city if the council passed it.
Montanari does oppose Amendment 4, the proposed constitutional amendment on the Nov. 5 ballot that would enshrine abortion rights into the Florida’s Constitution, allowing women to get a legal abortion up until the point of viability, at around 24 weeks.
“I think that it’s an extreme bill for the state of Florida,” he has said. “It doesn’t have any sort of restrictions. You can do abortion up until the ninth month.”
But like Donald Trump, Montanari also doesn’t support Florida’s law banning most abortions in the state after six weeks, a bill signed into law last year by Ron DeSantis and that went into effect on May 1. He calls the new law “a bridge too far,” and says he would support a 15-week ban, which the Legislature passed in 2022 but was dissolved once the Florida Supreme Court ruled on its constitutionality earlier this year, allowing the six-week ban to go into effect.
‘Defend Our Dems’
The Florida Democratic Party announced last week that Cross was one of four incumbents in the Legislature and two members of Congress who are part of their “Defend Our Dems” program, which will include organizing and fundraising support ahead of the November election.
“This November, we have a chance to break the Republican supermajority in the Florida Legislature and make Hakeem Jeffries Speaker of the House — but to do that, we first have to protect these seats,” party Chair Nikki Fried said in a written statement.
When asked by an audience member at the Shore Acres forum how he’d distinguish himself and be “not just another number of the supermajority,” Montanari said that while he had meshed well with his (mostly Democratic) colleagues on the City Council, he also would push back when things went too far.
“I’m going to be effective in getting things done, but I’ll stand up if I have to,” he said.
Cross questioned that assertion.
“I’ve seen people who claim to be moderates go up to Tallahassee and will tell people from their district that they don’t believe in ‘that thing,’ but then they go up to Tallahassee and because of the extreme supermajority and top-down system, those people may disagree with it, but they quietly press the ‘yes’ vote every single time,” she said.
Polling
That above-mentioned Impact Research survey conducted by the Cross campaign showed her up by a somewhat surprising 12 percentage points, 50%-38%. The survey said that even after “balanced bios on both candidates” were provided to the voters, Cross remained up by 7 points.
For his part, Montanari doesn’t think much of that survey.
“The race is going very well,” he told radio talk-show host Drew Steele last week. “I would call this a very light blue seat, because it’s trending Republican, just like Pinellas County is.”
But will it trend all the way red on Nov. 5?
“Incumbents have a distinct advantage over challengers, and though the Republicans might be gaining on Democrats in that district, [Cross] is the incumbent,” said USF professor J. Edwin Beaton — noting that incumbents at the local, state, and federal levels are re-elected at a more than 90% clip.
With six weeks left in the race, Cross also has the edge in campaign cash, with approximately $200,000 more cash on hand in her combined accounts than does Montanari.
The first vote-by-mail ballots are due to be sent to Pinellas voters (and voters throughout the state) later this week.