The DraftKings and FanDuel-backed Florida Education Champions (FEC) initiative has spent $35 million trying to get its question on the ballot but is running short of time.
As of a Tuesday, the FEC petition had reached just over 427,000 verified signatures. It needs 891,589 to not just be submitted but verified by the end of this month to qualify for the 2022 ballot.
This shortfall comes despite the best efforts of many of the gaming industry’s biggest names, including part-time Florida resident Dave Portnoy, the Barstool Sports founder who has attempted to sway Floridians in favor of the petition with one of his “Emergency Press Conference.”
DraftKings, meanwhile, is offering 100 “DK dollars” to its Floridian customers should the effort succeed in getting the question on the ballot.
But neither the bluster of Portnoy nor the mild bribery of DraftKings – or the millions in spending – looks like it will be enough.
A doomed campaign
According to Matt Para, a Florida-based gambling consultant who has worked with the Seminoles’ Hard Rock operation in the past, the effort is doomed regardless of whether it manages to gain the necessary petition numbers.
“Even if they get this across the line, the Seminoles are still going to have a lot more political capital (than those behind the petition),” Para told Wagers.com.
Para said the Seminoles would look to tie the ballot question up in the courts. Even if the backers managed to surmount that challenge, the ballot question would face the opposition of the Seminoles in November through what could be a multimillion-dollar campaign ad spending blitz.
That makes Florida’s 60 percent approval threshold for any constitutional amendment ballot measure that much more difficult to cross.
“The Seminoles have already been running commercials, featuring normal people, talking about how the out-of-state interests want to take money out of the state of Florida,” Para said.
Back to the ballot
If defeated – either via a miss on the petition, a court judgment, or in November – it would leave the way open for the Seminoles to put up a ballot measure of their own to the voters.
While the Seminole Tribe fights its own legal battles in federal court over its (since invalidated) compact that gave it an online sports betting monopoly for a few weeks last year, defeating the commercial operators’ measure opens another route to legal betting, Para said. Even if the federal appeals court upholds the lower court decision blocking both the compact and online sports betting, a 2024 Seminole-backed ballot measure could amend the Florida constitution, circumvent the court system and create an alternative route to an online gaming monopoly.
Meanwhile, the tribe has millions of members in its exiting casino data base gained from its six brick-and-mortar Florida properties, a strong asset for a potential ballot drive.
“I think they will get (the FEC measure) defeated by next month, then they would launch their own question,” Para said.
