Charlie Crist: Not so beloved, but still beating Marco Rubio
Where has the love gone? Well ... not to Marco Rubio.
Charlie Crist isn’t as popular as he used to be. That probably was inevitable, given the wrecked economy left over by the former Florida governor’s big brother, and given Crist’s failure to launch on some key campaign promises: like lowering property insurance and tax rates for struggling Florida homeowners. A new poll, conducted for the Miami Herald, St. Petersburg Times and Bay News 9 surveys the damage:
– [O]nly 42 percent of likely Florida voters think Charlie Crist is doing a good or excellent job as governor, by far the worst approval rating of Crist’s 34 months in office.
– Two-thirds of Republican voters said they disagreed with Crist’s decision to appear with Obama and support the stimulus package and nearly half said they strongly opposed it. Overall, 48 percent of voters said they supported Crist’s appearance and 42 percent opposed it.
– “After nearly three uneventful years in the people’s mansion in which unemployment has reached double-digits across the state and the real estate boom turned into a foreclosure nightmare, Charlie Crist has finally made something drop like a rock — his approval ratings,” said pollster Tom Eldon.
It all sounds pretty awful, and to hear the jihadis tell it, Crist is finished (George Will predicted firmly on “This Week” today that Crist would be beaten by Marco Rubio in the GOP primary.” And the jihadis claim that polls show Rubio is more electable than Crist versus Kendrick Meek, though curiously, the poll they cite looks suspiciously like a statistically insignificant difference in performance between two Republicans versus a virtually unknown Democrat… Meanwhile, the same poll that shows Crist’s popularity sagging also shows him beating Marco Rubio, but good:
In the Senate race, the poll found 50 percent of Republicans backing Crist, 28 percent Rubio, and 22 percent undecided. Even little known and 22 points behind, however, Rubio poses a real threat to the self-described “people’s governor” no longer appreciated so much by people who overwhelmingly see Florida headed in the wrong direction.
That’s a 22-point spread, in case you’re counting, and it’s a lead that’s grown versus previous polls that had showed Rubio closing to within 15. There’s more:
In the Herald/Times/Bay News 9 poll, Crist beat Rubio among every demographic group including Hispanics, where 40 percent backed Crist, 30 percent the Cuban-American Rubio and 30 percent were undecided. The Miami Republican was strongest in central Florida, where he trailed by 10 percentage points, and weakest in Crist’s home territory of Tampa Bay, where he trailed by 29 points.
In other words: Miss Charlie may not be able to win a straw poll of right wing party activists, but when you get outside the intensity of the teabagger crowd, name ID still wins. And while the small but intense Internet movement for Rubio makes great fodder for the Sunday shows, it doesn’t help Marco Rubio become better known to people who don’t spend most of their time waiting for the black helicopters.
The one thing that could blow this race up isn’t a thing at all, and his ego notwithstanding, it isn’t Erick Von Erickson and his band of Jacobins. (And despite the power the mainstream media continues to insist she wields via Facebook, it isn’t Sarah Palin either.) What could change the equation in the Florida Senate race is a blast from the past called Jeb Bush. From the St. Pete Times:
A new St. Petersburg Times/Miami Herald/Bay News 9 poll underscores how much Bush’s shadow still looms over Florida almost three years after he left office: Forty-six percent said they would rather have Bush leading Florida today, while 41 percent said Crist.
More striking, 71 percent of Republicans would pick Bush as governor today, while only 22 percent of Republicans said they would pick Crist over Bush.
“Is there a path to victory for Marco Rubio? Yes, but it involves the support of Jeb Bush,” said pollster Tom Eldon. “Crist may have appointed the last senator, but Bush has it in his hands to appoint the next one.”
And if you haven’t heard already, Miss Charlie and Jebbie are not friends. In fact, the only two things they share are the governor’s mansion, and what most people believe is a burning ambition to get themselves an even bigger house in Washington:
“This is absolutely a proxy war between two Republican clans,” MSNBC host Joe Scarborough, the former Republican congressman from Pensacola, told the St. Petersburg Times. “And it’s not just about Florida, but about what Florida politician gets to the front of the line to run for president. It’s a zero sum game. Any advantage Charlie Crist gets hurts Jeb Bush, and any advantage Jeb Bush gets hurts Charlie Crist.”
Republican consultant Adam Goodman of Tampa said the divide between Bush and Crist factions is more about the state of the GOP.
“It has less to do with Jeb and Charlie and their personalities than about the national fight to discover or rediscover the soul of the Republican party,” Goodman said.
As a caveat, Jebbie probably knows that barring a complete catastrophe for the Obama administration, Americans aren’t about to elect a third Bush to the White House. The first two go-rounds weren’t exactly a success. But the battered Republican Party would nominate him in a heartbeat, last name notwithstanding. And conservatives see him as more ideologically pure than his older brother, and certainly than Crist, who is at this point, more loved by Democrats than by Republicans:
Crist’s emphasis on bipartisanship appears to be paying off only with Democrats, who said they would pick Crist over Bush as governor, 58 percent to 24 percent. The poll found that 44 percent of independents said they would pick Bush as governor today and 38 percent said Crist.
Hispanic voters picked Bush over Crist, 63 percent to 24 percent, while African-Americans picked Crist over Bush, 70 percent to 16 percent. Even in Crist’s home base of Tampa Bay, 47 percent said they would prefer Bush as governor today, compared with 37 percent for Crist, who beat Bush by 10 percentage points in South Florida.
Of course, Jeb does have the advantage of having governed, first during the Clinton boom, and then during four years in which his brother was in a position to pass the lard…
Meanwhile, the same poll shows that nobody knows who any of the Democratic candidates are (still) — Kendrick Meek only scores 26 percent after all these months of campaigning, versus 6 percent for Maurice Ferre, who gets that amount without having done any campaigning, with two-thirds of voters undecided — and Alex Sink is in a statistical tie with the painfully dull Bill McCollum, 38 to 37 percent.
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