ABSTRACT
Most people are reacting to the profession of politics and the behavior of individual incumbents, candidates, bureaucrats, lobbyists, and others who engage regularly in it—i.e., they are expressing feelings of mistrust aimed more at the players than at the nature of the game itself. Technical competence aside, citizens in Alachua County and nationwide continue to worry about such things. Alachua County lies in the north central portion of the state, little more than an hour’s drive from either coast. About half the county’s nearly 200,000 residents live in the city of Gainesville, the county seat, with several thousand more living just outside city limits; the rest live in rural areas or in small towns with populations below 5,000. The partisan makeup of Alachua County continues to be mainly Democratic, though Republicans have been increasingly competitive. In certain respects there was a sense in the Alachua County sample that the government might not be powerful enough to do its job effectively.
