Steve Flowers: Inside The Statehouse: The Tampa coronation

  The Republican Convention is next week in Tampa, Florida. It is not by accident that this central Florida city has been chosen by the GOP for their national convention. They want to do everything under the sun to ingratiate themselves to Floridians.

  Under our Electoral College system only about six, maybe ten states matter in the process. I refer to it as a process rather than an election because our archaic Electoral College system of selecting our president is not really a national election. The states of Florida, Ohio, Colorado, Missouri, North Carolina and Virginia are the battleground states. The most important of these swing states is Florida. It is the grand prize with 29 electoral votes.