Four of five candidates endorsed by VoteWater in Florida’s primary election won their races Tuesday, with the fifth headed to an automatic recount.

Winners are:

• Amanda Cochran, Lee County Commissioner District 5: Cochran bested incumbent (and Gov. DeSantis-appointee) Trish Petrosky, with 54.7% of the vote in the Republican primary. Growth was a major issue; Cochran advocated for slower and more thoughtful growth in a community where more and more voters see development careening out of control. 
• Christopher “Doc” Collins, Martin County Commissioner District 2: Collins, a sometimes controversial figure during his stint as a Stuart City Commissioner and Mayor, channeled the growing slow/no growth sentiment and won handily in the three-way race with 49% of the vote, beating Susan O’Rourke (40.3%) and Althea Wiley (10.7%).
• Sarah Heard, Martin County Commissioner District 4: Heard, who’s been a commissioner for 24 years, earned another term by taking 47.5% of the vote and beating John Dial (44.9%) and John Kazanjian (7.5%). Heard has long been a voice for conservation on the Board of County Commissioners, sometimes casting the lone “no” vote on controversial proposals.
• Merritt Matheson, Stuart City Commissioner Group III: Matheson, who served a previous term on the city commission including a stint as Mayor, cruised to victory with 58.2% of the vote to Derreck Ogden’s 41.8%. Matheson has been a leader in the fight against damaging discharges from Lake Okeechobee to the St. Lucie estuary and serves as a Rivers Coalition board member and co-chair of the Martin County Forever land preservation program.

A fifth candidate endorsed by VoteWater, Campbell Rich, faces an automatic recount in the Stuart City Commissioner Group I race after unofficial totals show Rich topping challenger Will Laughlin by just 18 votes out of 3,542 cast.

Lastly, Democratic Attorney General Candidate (and VoteWater endorsee) Jose Javier Rodriguez “won” his unopposed race and now prepares to square off against Republican incumbent James Uthmeier, the “mastermind” behind Alligator Alcatraz.

Congrats to the winners — and stay tuned as attention now turns to the Nov. 3 general election.

So what does Tuesday’s primary mean for clean water?

The good news is that even in places like Lee County, where special interests hold such sway, voters are beginning to see through the misleading rhetoric. In Lee County political consultants representing the status quo smeared our endorsement of Cochran, calling us (and her) “liberal.”

It didn’t work; they lost.

And many “insurgent” campaigns heavily dependent on social media did pretty well. Matt “the Welder” Taylor garnered nearly a third of the vote in the Republican Agriculture Commissioner’s race, quite a feat given that incumbent Republican juggernaut Wilton Simpson was sitting on nearly $30 million as the campaign wound down, and Taylor had less than $29,000 remaining in his campaign account.

Social media influences played a significant role in this election and show an increasing ability to rally the clean-water troops.

All this said, clean water does not appear to have been a premiere issue in many races. Affordability was, by a long shot – and we would expect that to continue, though we would remind all candidates that water is always important to Florida’s electorate — and campaigns should treat it as such.