Clinton camp says turnout makes Florida count

Senior advisers to Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton’s (D-N.Y.) presidential campaign said Tuesday that the potentially record-breaking turnout in Florida means that the Sunshine State’s voters have shown that their primary should count even though it does not award any delegates.

Clinton is widely expected to win the state handily when the results come in Tuesday night. While no delegates will be awarded for the victory, the senator is planning to hold a rally in the state after the polls close, and her advisers held a conference call in the afternoon explaining “Why Florida Matters.”

{mosads}After the Democratic National Committee (DNC) stripped the state of its delegates for violating party rules regarding the timing of primaries, the consensus emerged that most Democratic voters would not be motivated to go to the polls, especially after the candidates pledged not to campaign there.

Clinton’s campaign said, however, that Florida voters have shown that this is not the case, as more than 1 million voters participated in early voting. Campaign officials said the early participation is indicative of what is predicted to be a record turnout in Florida’s primary.

Mark Penn, Clinton’s pollster and senior strategist, said on a conference call Tuesday afternoon that the massive turnout is the “crucial factor that changed” the dynamic of the state’s primary.

“Something unexpected happened here,” Penn said. He added: “It’s quite different from what the DNC maybe expected.”

The campaign sought to spin the expected results in Clinton’s favor after a landslide loss in South Carolina last Saturday and ahead of Super Tuesday. At the same time, the Clinton camp also argued that chief rival Sen. Barack Obama (Ill.) had violated the no-campaigning pledge by running national ads that played in the Sunshine State.

“People in Florida saw the ads, so it did give the Obama campaign some advantages in terms of voting,” Clinton spokesman Howard Wolfson said. “Nobody forced them to make a national cable buy that people in Florida saw.”

The campaign also sought to reinforce its argument that delegates from both Florida and Michigan — another state that was stripped of its delegates by the DNC, and a state that Clinton won — should be seated at the Democratic convention this summer.

Trying to get credit for the wins, Wolfson and Penn noted that national media coverage of the early primaries has saturated the country, and voters in Florida were likely not ignorant of who is running and what has transpired.

“I doubt there’s a household in Florida that doesn’t know about Sen. [Edward] Kennedy’s [D-Mass.] endorsement of Sen. Obama, for example,” Penn said.

The Obama campaign on Tuesday reminded reporters that the nomination battle is a race for delegates and Florida gets none. Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.), who supports the Illinois senator, said voters around the country would see Clinton’s Florida move as spin.