(CNN) On Tuesday night, former Tampa Police Chief Jane Castor was elected mayor of Florida's third-largest city. Castor's victory was national news because she's the first lesbian elected mayor in Florida -- and the first in the broader southeast as well.

In search of more info about Castor and the broader political landscape that elected her, I reached out to Tampa Bay Times reporter Kirby Wilson . Our conversation, conducted via email and lightly edited for flow, is below.

Cillizza: How expected/unexpected was Jane Castor's victory (by a margin of 46 points)?

Wilson: Predicting politics in 2019 is a bad idea if you don't have a robust model with good data. Only a few polls were conducted on this race, so we didn't have good data. Having said that, going into Tuesday, Castor's win was all but inevitable. The margin was huge, but it wasn't really surprising.

The biggest reason why was empirical: Castor, 59, nearly ended the mayor's race before it really began. In the March 5 primary, Castor came about 1,000 votes short of a majority in a seven-way race. Had she gotten that majority, there would have been no runoff. That set up a situation where the second-place finisher in the primary, the deep-pocketed David Straz, needed to win basically every non-Castor vote from March to stand a chance in the April 23 runoff. The best way to do that, his team figured, was to go negative.

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