TALLAHASSEE – The hotly contested Senate and Gubernatorial races here are once again establishing Florida as a key, battleground state as organized labor and progressives seek to defeat the ultra-right combination of the “Tea Party” movement and the Republican Party.
The Senate race, in particularly, is being closely watched. Florida Governor Charlie Crist was heavily favored by many political pundits to win the Senate seat, but faced a serious challenge from ultra-right backed Marco Rubio, compelling Crist to leave the Republican Party and run his campaign as an independent. Crist had high “favorable” numbers among Floridians, but never courted the combination of neoconservatives and paleoconservatives which are the GOP’s base, leaving that field open to Rubio who received support from those forces on a nationwide scale.
Current polls show Crist trailing Rubio by two percentage points. The Democratic candidate for Senate, Kendrick Meek, once regarded by the mainstream media as an also-ran, has seen a surprising surge in his numbers which once were in the mid-teens. The current poll by CNN and Time magazine shows a jump in his support, with 24 percent of voters polled now favoring him.
While these numbers are still 10 to 12 percentage points less than the poll numbers for Crist and Rubio, they attest to the efforts of organized labor and progressives both inside and outside of the Florida Democratic Party. As governor, Crist was supportive of many of the economic perspectives of his predecessor, Jeb Bush, while abandoning conservatism in favor of a kind of homespun populism. But Crist is finding running as an independent has some distinct disadvantages, and has not fared well recently.
And while Marco Rubio may be the darling of the ultra-right, the Florida Republican Party was rocked earlier this year by a lawsuit alleging secret contracts, lavish spending, and the departure of Florida GOP Chairman Jim Greer. While this scandal had a major role in derailing Florida Attorney General Bill McCollum’s effort to win the Republican nomination for Governor, it remains to be seen whether it will prove equally detrimental to Rubio’s campaign.
Florida’s other US Senator, Bill Nelson, a Democrat, is not up for reelection this year.
The Gubernatorial race is pitting Democratic (Ms.) Alex Sink against multi-millionaire Rick Scott, the former Chief Executive Officer for the Columbia/HCA hospital chain. Scott spent millions of his own money to squeak by GOP favorite McCollum by only 3 percentage points in the primary.
But Scott’s virtually unlimited campaign coffers may be the only thing he has going for him. GOP regulars regard him as an “outsider,” and it has been reported that the during his tenure as CEO of Columbia/HCA, the hospital chain paid $1.7 billion in fines for Medicare and Medicaid fraud.
Recent CNN/Time polls show Sink with a 13 point lead among independent voters, and a 49 to 42 percent lead over Florida’s registered voters. Ron Littlepage, writing in the Jacksonville-based Florida Times-Union on September 12, reports that “In one of her campaign ads, Alex Sink correctly points out that her opponent, Rick Scott, is talking more about President Barack Obama than about what he would do as governor of Florida.”
“That’s not a surprise,” Littlepage continues, “[i]t was the same tactic he used in his primary battle against Bill McCollum when it appeared he was running for Arizona’s State House, not the Sunshine State’s.”
“There’s a reason he’s running on red-meat national issues like health care reform, the federal stimulus package and a proposed Mosque in New York city,” note Littlepage. “That’s because his platform for governing Florida, what there is of it, is worn out and a proven failure.” (Sink has a Big Edge over Scott on the Real Issues,” Florida Times-Union, 9/12/10).
William Harris, a retired Teamster now living in the Jacksonville area, says the stakes for him in Florida’s mid-term election are clear. “I don’t know whether I would call myself ‘progressive,’” he says. “I’ll tell you that I am a working man, just like my Dad and my Granddaddy. Well, I am retired now, but I’ll always be a working man and I vote like one. These people, like Rubio and Scott….they’re not for people like me. Never have been, never will be, no sir. But I know how important this election is and that’s why I’ll make sure that me and a bunch of other seniors will be giving people rides to the polls.”
Then, using language that was famously described in Nixon’s phony “White House Transcripts” as an expletive deleted to describe how he felt about the ultra-right, Harris got back into his car, a car that still sported an Obama/Biden bumper sticker.
Photo by Erik (HASH) Hersman, courtesy Flickr, cc by 2.0
