Florida Democrats appeared to be riding high in 1986. But they weren’t.
The popular Bob Graham was in his final year as governor before going to the U.S. Senate. All six Cabinet members were Democrats. The party held both houses of the Legislature and most seats in the state congressional delegation.
Mike Stocker/Sun Sentinel
Steve Bousquet, South Florida Sun Sentinel columnist.
Statewide, registered Democrats still outnumbered Republicans by about 1.2 million — similar to the lopsided advantage the GOP holds today.
Few saw the deep trouble ahead.
Florida was still solidly Democratic then, but it was not liberal, then or ever.
In 1986, Democrats forgot all that. They abandoned their winning tradition of nominating moderate centrists and instead chose a liberal, Steve Pajcic, for governor.
It was the election that put Republicans on track to long-term success in Florida.
A Jacksonville lawyer, Pajcic (rhymes with magic) had served for a decade in the state House. Smart, policy-driven and diligent, he compiled a liberal voting record that would be used against him with devastating results.
Pajcic won the party nomination over moderates Harry Johnston and Jim Smith, but the lingering acrimony from that primary fight left the party divided.
Republicans had a messy primary, too, but they rallied around Bob Martinez, a former Tampa mayor who would be only the second Republican Florida governor since Reconstruction.
A former Democrat who had once led a striking teachers’ union, the dour-looking Martinez seemed unlikely as a conservative champion, but he beat Pajcic easily.
“I was too liberal, really,” Pajcic recalled.
Catching up after four decades, I visited the 79-year-old Pajcic at his spacious gated home on Amelia Island, where he can see the Intracoastal Waterway from his kitchen.
After that 1986 loss, he left politics and never looked back.
He was so successful as a personal injury lawyer at the firm of Pajcic & Pajcic (with his late brother Gary) that he and his wife Anne became leading philanthropists, and for decades supported Democratic candidates and causes.
Anne Pajcic died in 2021.
With his flowing gray hair, Pajcic could pass for an aging rock-and-roller. He describes himself in those days as naive and politically shortsighted.
Raised in Jacksonville, he was high school class valedictorian and an all-state basketball player who graduated with honors from Princeton and Harvard Law School.
Those should be glittering political assets. But Martinez’s TV ads skewered Pajcic’s image, showing him in bow ties and horn-rimmed glasses, the picture of geeky, Ivy League liberalism.
“People were probably voting on image,” he said, “and the image they got was that I was this too-liberal young guy” — which of course he was.
Analyzing Pajcic’s votes, Republicans found an opponent who favored decriminalizing marijuana, same-sex marriage and allowing gay couples to adopt, issues that were way before their time in Florida.
Pajcic also opposed the death penalty. He supported allowing convenience stores to sell adult magazines if they were covered behind the register.
A mastermind of the Martinez triumph was Mac Stipanovich, a swaggering GOP operative who watched as Jim Smith ripped Pajcic as too liberal, and finished off the job in November.
Pajcic “tried to reinvent himself as not being that liberal,” Stipanovich recalled.
The Democrat had long since switched from glasses to contacts, “but I put them back on him just to needle his a–,” he said.
It worked to perfection. After the election, Pajcic said, his wife bought him a new red Jeep, and one day a man recognized him outside a store.
“That your Jeep?” Pajcic recalled the man saying. “Man, if I’d known that, I would have voted for you!”
The L-word — liberal — had become a toxic, supremely effective tool in statewide campaigns. Even left-leaning newspapers abandoned Pajcic for Martinez. (The Fort Lauderdale News/Sun-Sentinel and Miami Herald both endorsed the Republican.)
In later years, Pajcic considers his greatest political accomplishment to be his support of his friend, Nat Glover, who was elected Duval County sheriff in the 1990s — the first Black sheriff elected since Reconstruction in Florida.
Pajcic would have been a good governor. Taxes likely would have gone up a bit, but Florida surely would have been better off in the long run. It wasn’t to be.
Martinez didn’t fare so well, either, and after four rocky years, he lost to Democrat Lawton Chiles.
Pajcic has mostly fond memories of his nearly 12 years as a state legislator, during which he championed environmental protection and public education and once proposed a small tax increase to protect rivers and wetlands.
“Almost everybody was committed to trying to do the right thing, which is different from nowadays,” he said.
Steve Bousquet is Opinion Editor of the South Florida Sun Sentinel and a columnist in Tallahassee and Fort Lauderdale.