Switch-Up Strategy: House Incumbent Uses Filing Deadline Trick to Secure Successor

Like a latent virus that roars back to life or an old infection thought to be quelled, the candidate switcheroo has made a dispiriting return.

The body politic came under attack most recently in Florida’s Cape Canaveral area 8th Congressional District. Voters there in 2020 would have backed former President Donald Trump over President Joe Biden 58.3% to 40.6%. So, winning the Aug. 20 Republican primary is tantamount to nabbing the seat in November.

Rep. Bill Posey (R-FL) announced his retirement on the afternoon of April 26, 17 days after he filed for reelection. There’s nothing particularly surprising that Posey would leave Congress around this time. After all, he is 76 and was first elected to the House in 2008, having previously spent 18 years in the state legislature.

But his retirement announcement, reversing his early reelection plans, came just a couple of hours before the filing deadline closed. So, Posey’s favored successor, former state Senate President Mike Haridopolos, filed for the seat, likely ensuring his ticket to Congress. Haridopolos does face a pair of GOP primary rivals, technology executive John Hearton and attorney Joe Babits. But neither has much name recognition in the central Florida Atlantic coast district nor time to build it.

Crucially, Posey’s last-minute retirement blocked other, better-known Republicans from running for the open seat. Any number of state legislators, county commissioners, and other prominent figures from the district likely would have put their names in amid an open filing process.

Moreover, Posey’s clubby congressional retirement statement made it sound like he had effectively set up the process to spare Haridopolos from having to face a tough Republican primary challenge.

“Without going into a lot of personal details, stars aligned during the past week, and Mike decided he was ready for Congress,” Posey said. “I enthusiastically endorse him and will do everything I can to help him get elected.”

Haridopolos is a former legislator turned lobbyist who was state Senate president for two-year term starting in 2010. He’s hardly the first to benefit from a late-in-the-game filing maneuver meant to provide an easy ride to Congress. It’s a tactic that reached a peak in the late 1990s and early 2000s, only to have subsided.

Some states became wise to it and changed election laws so outgoing incumbents couldn’t try to rig the system for candidates they wanted to succeed them. Other states, both red and blue, have had such statutes on the books for decades.

In Nebraska, all incumbents are required to file two weeks before everyone else, even if they’re running for a different office than the one they currently hold. And California automatically extends the candidate filing deadline by five days in races where an incumbent chooses not to run for reelection. While Missouri reopens its filing period in contests where any candidate, incumbent or otherwise, withdraws within two business days of the original deadline.

Florida, though, has no such preventive measures and Posey’s situation included has hosted three of the most conspicuous House race filing switcheroos in recent political memory. Here are those four in the full political infamy.

Joe Crowley, 1998

The New York Democrat, like many former House members, works for a law and lobbying firm in Washington, D.C. He’s most often mentioned, though, in the form of an answer to a political trivia question: Who did hard-left Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) beat in the 2018 Democratic primary to win her seat in the first place.

By that time, Crowley had been in the House for nearly 20 years and was a member of Democratic leadership. AOC slammed him as a member of the “establishment,” which was undeniably true. Going back to how he originally reached Congress.

In July 1998, Rep. Tom Manton, an old-school, anti-abortion Democrat representing a northwestern Queens district, said he would retire from Congress at the end of his term a few months later. Manton, who held a side gig as chairman of the chairman of the Queens County Democratic organization, had already filed for and circulated petitions for reelection.

Manton withdrew on the last day it was legally possible to do so and arranged for Crowley, a state assemblyman and the retiring congressman’s chosen successor, to replace him on the ballot. By announcing his plans so late in the year, Manton virtually ensured that Crowley would face no competition from other Democrats interested in seeking the deep blue seat, which stretched from the Queensboro Bridge to Shea Stadium and included a small part of the Bronx.

Kendrick Meek, 2002

Like GOP Rep. Posey of Florida this cycle, Rep. Carrie Meek, a Sunshine State Democrat, seemed a natural to announce her retirement ahead of the 2002 midterm elections. Age 76 at the time, Meek was one of the first black Floridians elected to Congress since Reconstruction. She had been a House member from South Florida for nearly a decade and a member of the state legislature for 13 years before that.

It was no secret that a son, state Sen. Kendrick Meek, sought to succeed her in Congress. And the pair ensured that came to pass, without other potential Democrats in the blue-dominated district able to jump in.

She announced her retirement just two weeks before the deadline for candidates to qualify to run, which involved gathering a substantial number of signatures from district residents. The move was choreographed to hand the seat to her state legislator son. Nor was the congresswoman coy or shy about treating the House seat as a family birthright.

“I know there will be other candidates,” she said at her Miami retirement announcement that summer. “But there’s just one Meek.”

There were no other candidates. Faced with little time to gear up a campaign and the daunting prospect of taking on the Meek family political machine, no one stepped by the filing deadline.

Kendrick Meek, 35, at the time, spent eight years in the House but lost a three-way 2010 Senate race as the Democratic nominee in a Republican wave year.

Dan Lipinski, 2004

Armed with a Ph.D. in political science from Duke University, Dan Lipinski knew full well how representative democracy is supposed to work. Election rules are set in advance, and candidates pitch themselves to voters in the hope their ideas and public policy proposals prevail.

But Lipinski in 2004 also benefited from another part of his pedigree, as son of Rep. William Lipinski, an Illinois Democrat who, for nearly 22 years, had represented a district taking in most of southwestern Chicago. The elder Lipinski was conservative by national Democratic standards. He strongly opposed abortion and described himself as a staunch conservative on foreign policy.

He also was a Chicago inside political player. And he used his influence to ensure the district’s next representative was his son, who was a relative latecomer to the family business. Dan Lipinski earned a B.S. in mechanical engineering from Northwestern University, followed by an M.S. in engineering-economic systems from Stanford University and, nine years later, his doctorate from Duke in political science.

During the 2004 election cycle, William Lipinsky easily won the primary election, which practically assured him of another two-year House term. Yet he withdrew his name from the Nov. 2 general ballot. The congressman then persuaded state Democratic Party leaders to name his son in his place. The plan worked — even though Dan Lipinski was living out of state as a professor at the University of Tennessee, he still won the congressional race. William Lipinski at the time dismissed questions of nepotism or carpetbagging, saying his son was well qualified for the job and grew up in the district.

A social conservative like his father, Dan Lipinski opposed legalized abortion and embryonic stem cell research. He was among 39 House Democrats to oppose the Affordable Care Act. Over the years, Lipinski’s district turned more liberal, and in 2020, he lost renomination to left-wing challenger Marie Newman.

Ginny Brown-Waite, 2010

The Florida state elections loophole allowing for late candidate substitutions was before this year, last used in the 2010 election cycle by retiring Republican Rep. Ginny Brown-Waite. For nearly eight years, she represented a Big Bend district stretching along several counties in western and central Florida, including territory in the northern metropolitan area of Tampa Bay.

In 2010, Brown-Waite announced on the final day of candidate filing that she was abandoning her reelection campaign for health reasons. She said Hernando County Sheriff Rich Nugent would run in her place. Nugent qualified by paying the $10,440 filing fee just before the noon deadline rather than going through the arduous signature-gathering process.

Brown-Waite at the time sought to defend the move.

“My constituents have always been my first priority in Congress, and they were my first priority in this decision-making process,” Brown-Waite said in emailed responses to questions from the St. Petersburg Times. “They deserve a representative that can give them 110 percent. Sheriff Nugent has always given 110 percent for his community, and he will do the same as the representative of this great district.”

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Critics said that cheated voters by denying other viable candidates a chance to enter the race. But the switch worked.

Nugent went on to be a House member for six years. Though in retiring ahead of the 2016 campaign, he gave plenty of time for candidates to jump into the key GOP primary in the strongly Republican seat. Rep. Daniel Webster (R-FL) succeeded Nugent after Florida House districts were redrawn in the 2016 cycle. The 11th District moved inland from the Gulf of Mexico, encompassing the western Orlando suburbs and The Villages.