VOTERS in Florida, America's fourth largest state, go to the polls today in what should have been a major test of the Republican party's presidential candidates. In the end, that is not quite the way things worked out.
With 98 delegates at stake Florida was due to be one of the main battlegrounds of the primary season. Of the six states scheduled to vote today only Texas, with 123 delegates, outweighs Florida.
A candidate must capture 996 delegates to win the Republican nomination, and the right to challenge President Bill Clinton in November, at the party's convention in San Diego, California, in August. But Senator Robert Dole's sweep of 10 states since the beginning of the month has removed much of the drama from today's voting.
Florida has seen nothing like the advertising barrage directed at states such as New Hampshire, Iowa and South Carolina. Here, as in much of the country, Mr Dole is presumed to be ahead and has the backing of a lot of the state's Republican Party establishment.
There have, however, been few opinion polls in the run up to today's voting, and there are some indications that the political commentator, Mr Pat Buchanan, may make an unusually strong showing if he can mobilise Florida's large number of conservative Christian voters.
Winning in Florida involves appealing to the main electoral constituencies: Miami based Cuban exiles, retirees from northern states and staunchly right wing Southerners. Each group is generally conservative, but issues that animate one often alienate the others.
Mr Dole, for example, emphasises a proposal to make English, the country's official language when speaking in the north of the state, but does not mention it when campaigning in Spanish areas around Miami.
At the weekend the publisher and Republican presidential candidate, Mr Steve Forbes, called for US action to prevent the completion of what he describes as a "Chernobyl like" nuclear reactor in Cuba, an issue designed to appeal to Miami's anti Castro, exile community.
Outside the Cuban community, Mr Forbes has stuck to his proposal for simplifying income tax. That idea carried him to victory in Arizona last month. Arizona, like Florida, has a large retiree community. His flat tax plan appeals to the elderly because it would exempt savings and investment income, off which many retirees live, from taxes.