Florida Admits It Just Wants Attention

As Sandy became the first hurricane in a really long time to focus attention somewhere other than the Gulf, Floridians turned Tuesday to another tried-and-true method of capturing the nation’s attention: running ridiculously close presidential races.

With votes trickling in county by county, the candidates constantly switched leads, sometimes coming within as few as five hundred votes of each other. Voters around the country waited on the edge of their seats for the swing state’s hotly contested results. Many feared 2012 would see a repeat of 2000’s infamous recounts. Floridians, meanwhile, seemed positively enthusiastic about being the last state called by CNN. “We haven’t had an absurd political scandal in months, vicious alligator mutilations are way down, and now hurricanes aren’t even hitting us anymore,” said Dave Robinson, fifty-four, of Miami. “Thank goodness we have the election to get us back in the headlines. If it’s close enough, maybe we can even get another Supreme Court case out of it. That could last until 2013.”

The country, however, had other ideas; after spotlighting Florida for hours without drawing any conclusions, CNN finally gave up and called the race based on Ohio’s results. Florida, unable to accept that its votes no longer mattered, continued to hold out long into the night. After Romney’s concession, Florida’s neighbors advised it to give up and go home. Instead, Florida dropped down to a 0.7% victory margin for Obama and continued insisting that nobody cared about Ohio and it was clearly the real battleground state. At press time, Florida was still trying to convince voters that a recount could actually change the outcome of the election and that this election couldn’t be called for another three weeks, at least.