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Last Updated June 22, 2005
Bill Nelson was elected Florida's junior senator in 2000, after nearly 30 years in politics. He grew up in Melbourne, on what is now the Space Coast, the son of a developer and real estate investor who died when he was 14; Nelson likes to recall that his great-grandfather arrived in Florida from Denmark on boat as a stowaway. From his family home, Rock Point, he could see rockets blast off from what is now the Kennedy Space Center in the 1950s and 1960s. Nelson was active in student government and has always been something of a straight arrow; he doesn't drink, smoke or swear. He went to the University of Florida for two years, then graduated from Yale and the University of Virginia law school. He served two years in the Army, then returned to Melbourne and briefly practiced law and worked on the staff of Governor Reubin Askew. In 1972, at 30, he was elected to the state House of Representatives. In 1978, when Republican Congressmen Louis Frey retired, Nelson ran for Congress, from a seat that then included the Space Coast's Brevard County and most of Orlando's Orange County. His religious faith and traditional values, his indefatigable campaigning and folksy manner helped make him popular in an area that was trending Republican. He won the seat 61%-39% and in five succeeding elections won between 61% and 73% of the vote, in a district that voted 29% for Michael Dukakis in 1988. On the Science Committee, he got his fellow Democrats to vote him rather than the more liberal George Brown chairman of the Space Subcommittee--obviously of prime importance to the district. Nelson not only boosted the space program in every possible way, he also rode the space shuttle Columbia himself, in early January 1986. Less than two weeks later the Challenger exploded. After the Columbia was lost in February 2003, he called for continued manned space flight despite the risks. "Americans are explorers and adventurers by nature," he said. "We never want to give that up." In 1989, with the support of leading Florida Democrats, Nelson set out to run against Republican Governor Bob Martinez, who was not faring well in polls. But in early 1990, some Democrats became antsy about Nelson's prospects and persuaded Lawton Chiles, who had retired from the Senate in 1988 after three terms, to run. Chiles was always far ahead, and won the September primary 69%-31%. Nelson returned to his 77-acre oceanfront home in Melbourne, his political career seemingly over. But in 1994 he found an opening when state Insurance Commissioner Tom Gallagher, a Republican, ran for governor. Nelson was elected in November to an office whose full title was Treasurer, Insurance Commissioner and State Fire Marshal, and proceeded to make a highly publicized activist record. Nelson was obviously setting himself up to run for higher statewide office, and his opening came in March 1999, when Republican Senator Connie Mack said he would not run for reelection in 2000. Mack's retirement left a seat up for grabs in a state that, as election night viewers learned in November 2000, was very closely divided between the parties. And Republicans had a rough primary contest--always a problem in a state with a late September primary and, before the law changed in 2002, an even later October runoff if no candidate gets a majority. The contestants were 20-year, Orlando-based Congressman Bill McCollum, one of the House's impeachment managers, and Tom Gallagher, then Florida education commissioner. Not until June 2000, after a meeting with Governor Jeb Bush and state Republican Chairman Al Cardenas, did Gallagher take himself out of the race, to run for insurance commissioner, the office he had relinquished to Nelson in 1994. A possible problem for Nelson was the independent candidacy of Willie Logan, a veteran African-American legislator whom Democrats had ousted as Speaker-designate in January 1998 on the grounds that he wasn't raising enough money. But Logan, who was getting 5% in many polls, ended up winning just 1.4% in November. Washington observers considered the race a contest over the wisdom of impeachment but mostly it was a battle of competing styles. Nelson, running his fourth statewide race in 10 years, always led in polls. His easygoing, folksy manner contrasted favorably with McCollum's stiff, often aggressive manner. McCollum, with a long conservative record on abortion and gun control, attempted to modulate his positions, but only succeeded in antagonizing his base; his charge that Nelson was a "liberal" and a proponent of "class warfare" proved unconvincing. This was the most expensive Senate race in Florida history, with the two candidates spending over $15 million between them; Nelson won 51%-46%. Nelson won 60%-37% in the Gold Coast, almost exactly the same margin as in the presidential race. In the I-4 corridor, which included McCollum's district and most of the district Nelson had represented in the House, Nelson won 51%-46%; superior name identification was not Nelson's only advantage. In the rest of the state Nelson lost by only 52%-46%, compared to the 55%-42% margin by which Al Gore lost there. Folksiness and Florida roots counted. In the Senate, Nelson voted on the Budget Committee to limit the Bush tax cut, then voted against it on the floor in May 2001. In 2001 and 2002 he tried to amend the terrorism insurance bill to put limits on insurance rate increases and to guarantee continued coverage; in June 2002 he was defeated 70-24. He lamented that his experience as an insurance regulator was unappreciated. "Nobody understands anything about insurance here at the federal level, so there's a big education effort that has got to be made." In March 2004 he agreed with John Kerry's call for a delay in military base closings and an increase of 40,000 troops. After exposure of the Abu Ghraib abuses, he said he thought that orders for them came from higher up, but was not sure how high. On the Foreign Relations and Armed Services committees, Nelson kept pushing with Pat Roberts to get Iraq to provide information about Scott Speicher, the Navy pilot shot down in 1991 who was classified as Missing In Action; Speicher's family lives in Orange Park, near Jacksonville. In February 2004 he recommended a multilateral peacekeeping force for Haiti, and in April 2004 became the first member of Congress to meet with heads of its provisional government since the resignation in February of Jean-Bertrand Aristide. In June 2004 he called on the OAS and the Carter Center to review the purchase of an untested voting system by the Hugo Chavez government in Venezuela; in January 2005, with two Senate colleagues, he met with Chavez, who told him he would cooperate in keeping Colombian FARC guerrillas from reaching sanctuary in Venezuela. Nelson voted for the Iraq war resolution in October 2002, but in May 2004 said he regretted the vote. "I received incorrect intelligence information." Nelson serves on the Commerce subcommittee with jurisdiction over the space program, where he has strongly supported the space shuttle. After the loss of Columbia, he called for accelerated development of a reusable space vehicle to ferry astronauts to the Space Station. When George W. Bush proposed sending spacecraft to the Moon by 2020 and Mars by 2030, Nelson praised the idea but said funding was insufficient. When the committee was considering reauthorization of the space program in September 2004, Nelson passed an amendment calling on NASA to report to Congress on the costs of extending the space shuttle past 2010, but did not get approval of another amendment requiring NASA to find laid-off shuttle workers similar jobs in the agency. Facing the prospect of cuts in shuttle spending and safety concerns in November 2004, he said, "I'm not feeling comfortable at all. I am very distressed when they start whacking jobs--which is exactly what I said they were going to do, start whacking jobs at the Kennedy Space Center." After weeks of study, he voted against the Medicare/prescription drug bill in November 2003 and said in August 2004, "When seniors see how miniscule the coverage is and the costs escalate, there will be a lot of moaning and groaning. People will demand change." He voted against the constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage on the grounds it "could limit civil rights--including inheritance and hospital visitation--for a whole class of people." He has promoted physical fitness programs, and in 2001 urged Major League Baseball to pay pensions to 29 former Negro League players; in 2004 MLB agreed. In July 2004 he called for an independent audit of Florida's new touch-screen voting machines. After hurricanes hit Florida in August and September 2004, he pushed successfully to get $1 billion of agricultural assistance in the homeland security appropriation; he questioned the inclusion of Miami-Dade County as a disaster area after Frances because it had suffered little damage. In November he blasted FEMA for not providing enough housing for victims of Charley in Charlotte, DeSoto and Hardee Counties. In 2004 he was mentioned several times as a possible running mate for John Kerry, but tended to defer to his senior colleague Bob Graham. In January 2005 he made it clear that he wanted to run for reelection and not for governor in 2006. Elected with 51% of the vote, and as one of only four Democratic senators representing the 11 Confederate states, he is an obvious Republican target. In January 2005 he opposed George W. Bush's Social Security plan. "By linking benefits to a volatile stock market, privatization shifts the risk to seniors and weakens Social Security's guaranteed safety net. In the wake of recent cases of corporate laundering, we all know too well the dangers of relying on stocks for retirement." After the Pentagon limited access to military bases for the Boy Scouts, apparently in response to criticism of their policy of excluding gays and requiring belief in God, Nelson introduced a resolution supporting the Scouts and embarked on a tour of Florida in their support. "There is no way, shape or form that the U.S. military should be separated from the Boy Scouts. They're not going to stop the Boy Scouts from using military facilities." In June 2005, Congresswoman Katherine Harris, who decided not to run for the Senate in 2004 after consultations with White House strategist Karl Rove, announced she would run against Nelson in 2006. Governor Jeb Bush, probably the strongest possible Republican candidate, has indicated time and again that he is not interested in running. This is likely to be a high-spending race--Nelson has said he needs to raise $18 million--and could be one of the most fiercely contested in the 2006 cycle.
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