Vote-Hunters' Elusive Prey

Step outside the focus group lab to spend a couple of hours with a local specimen. Bruce Pronovost is the mayor of working-class Casselberry, a town of 24,000 northeast of Orlando, and the only Democratic mayor in Seminole County.

Pronovost describes himself as "liberal on some things and conservative on others." He budgets stingily, which used to be called conservative. He is the main voice trying to move the adult entertainment clubs off the main highways, which also could be conservative, but he calls it liberal because in this case the clubs are "special interests" and he's defending everyday people.

What he loves most about Casselberry are the flags flying on every other house.

His obsession at the moment is creating a town center, nothing so fancy as Celebration or nearby Winter Park village with its swank shops and Tiffany museum. Just an indoor space to hold the annual jazz festival, in a converted greenhouse near the police station, a place where "people can do a little shopping, see some art, drop by a little cafe, be it a Starbucks or whatever."

That also could be conservative, or at least traditional, but really it's just the usual nostalgia infecting suburbs that expanded too quickly, lost their center and are now looking back.

If you ask his neighbors if their lives are going in the wrong direction they don't mention health care and jobs, as those in the focus groups do. They talk about the dismal record of the Orlando Magic basketball team or traffic on I-4. They might also mention their vague sense that after 9/11, Disney is not quite the tourist magnet it once was.

Pronovost knows that Casselberry is the bottom rung for most working folks, a place to start. They come for a few years and then move one suburb over, to Altamonte Springs, or to Winter Park if they really get lucky. "But me, I'm biased," he says. "I love it here."

It's late afternoon, and the tour's winding down. He considers getting on I-4 to go to Orlando, finish a consulting job for a nonprofit, but thinks better of it.

"Too congested," he says, and then declares his loyalty to -- what? Family values? Cocooning? Late afternoon fatigue? "I'm going home," he says.