Airing new views in America's cul-de-sacs

WESLEY CHAPEL, FLA. — Cheap mortgages and cheap gas built this sprawling landscape of tan and gray stucco homes, iron gates and golf course communities. And the people who flocked here over the last decade -- upwardly mobile young families in pursuit of lower taxes and wholesome neighborhoods -- emerged as a Republican voting bloc crucial to President Bush's 2004 reelection.

But listen to Anna Rodriguez and her neighbors who gather nightly on lawn chairs to unwind, and a change comes into focus that could shift the national political landscape in 2008 and beyond.

The boom that turned swamps and pastures into a suburban mecca has stopped dead. Now the talk is about plummeting home values, rising food costs, and gas prices that make the once-painless half-hour commute to Tampa a financial strain. It's enough to give some here the sense that maybe, this time around, the Republicans do not deserve their votes.

"This is the first election I ever actually looked at someone else other than the Republican candidate," said Rodriguez, 33, who is studying to be a teacher and is a fixture at the lawn chair hobnob here on Greely Court, a quiet cul-de-sac in a Pasco County subdivision called Wrencrest.

"I've had enough with the Republican economics," she added, as her husband, Danny, who had just driven from his banking job in Tampa, piped in: "No more Bush."

The Rodriguezes were sitting in a neighbor's driveway with several other regulars as the kids played in the street. From their chairs, the parents could see evidence of changing times: home-for-sale signs in both directions, with overgrown lawns marking the foreclosures.

Dori Merkle, 50, who works as a special education instructor in the local schools, said her collapsing home value was pushing her to consider voting Democratic for the first time in her life. Another neighbor, Cheryl Bernales, a 29-year-old economics teacher who voted for Bush in 2000 and 2004, said that she could face a pay cut "because the economy's so bad," and that she believes Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama "isn't so entrenched in the system."

In this massive housing complex on the fringes of the Tampa Bay area, one of dozens in Pasco County that popped up over the last 10 years, the sour economy appears to be turning many GOP-friendly voters into undecideds or even potential switchers.

These voters represent a jump ball -- a potentially decisive constituency in several states that could be snared by either candidate.