Thursday, July 22, 2010

Scott, Meek lead Florida primaries

Rick Scott is looking like the frontrunner to be the Republican nominee for Governor of Florida, although both he and Bill McCollum have been badly bruised by their primary fight. Scott leads McCollum 43-29.

Scott has certainly succeeded in destroying McCollum's popularity with GOP primary voters. Only 26% have a favorable opinion of the Attorney General while 40% see him unfavorably. He hasn't done much though to make Republicans take a charitable view of him. 35% see him positively while 32% have a negative opinion of him, not usually the kind of favorability numbers you want to see with your party's base.

Scott has tried in particular to court the party's large conservative voting bloc and his favorability with them is a positive 38/27 spread. But that's come at a cost to his standing with moderate Republicans, who see him negatively 28/43. That doesn't bode well for the general election and goes a long way toward explaining why Alex Sink fared so well in the numbers we released yesterday.

With 28% of voters still undecided McCollum is certainly not out of it but Scott has to be seen as the strong favorite at this point.

Indecision reigns in the Democratic Senate primary. Kendrick Meek leads Jeff Greene by a 28-25 margin that's pretty inconsequential given the survey's margin of error. The bigger story is that 37% of voters remain undecided, and that both candidates continue to be relatively unknown even to the party base.

Meek's small advantage is built on strong support from African Americans and liberals. The race is even with whites, but Meek is up 44-19 with black voters. Meek has a 3 point lead with moderates that's balanced out by Greene's 19 point edge with conservatives, but the tie is broken by a 39-26 margin for Meek with liberal voters.

45% of primary voters don't know enough about Greene to have formed an opinion and 47% have not yet formulated one of Meek. Democratic voters haven't been very impressed with what they've seen from Greene so far- 33% have an unfavorable opinion of him while just 22% see him positively. Charlie Crist should definitely be rooting for Greene given those numbers because it would significantly increase his odds of holding onto the Democratic support that's fueling his current lead in the race. Meek's favorability numbers are better at 33/20.

With polls right now showing both Democratic candidates under 20% in the general election you almost wonder if it even matters who the nominee is, but this race is looking a lot different than it did four months ago and it could shift a lot more yet in these final 3.5 months leading up to November.

Full results here

9 comments:

  1. Conservative voting block.. LOL..McCulum is the liberal in this race. Scott has got the Conservative vote.

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  2. CONSERVATIVE BASE.. Scott has all the Conservative voters.. Bill has the Liberal Rino GOP base.. McCulum tried to not upset anyone in this race. If he had come out on Supporting AZ Immigration law in Floirda. From the start..then he had a good chance of winning this race.. Now no one believes him..

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  3. McCollum is a lesser version of Charlie "The King Rino" Crist...

    attack attack attack because he has no clear stance on issues himself...

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  4. Will the GOP 2012 poll numbers be released today or tomorrow?

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  5. Florida will not elect a Democrat for Governor right now...so really the candidates should just save their $$$.

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  6. I just left a Rick Scott rally in Naples and that man is on fire! He is NO flip-fopper and provided common sense ideas for a state and country in trouble by ignorance, greed, and people that only want to create problems and not focus on the real issues. Rick Scott will bring accountability back to Tallahassee!

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  7. McCollum had his chance and did nothing for the 76% of Floridians who supported teh 6 anti illegal immigration bills in 2008 that McCULLUM, RUBIO, RIVERA and Zapata killed the bills.

    I will trust a crooked buisnessman over a crooked lawyer lobbyist in the pocket politician any day, and so will the people.

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  8. Are you folks NUTS?

    Rick Scott is a scumbag! Read the facts about how his company defrauded Medicare! Is that what you want -- to reward a guy like that by electing him to the Governor's office?

    My Lord, do any of you folks read the news?

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  9. In my 50+ years of Republican activism I have never seen a more dispicable campaign as McCollum is running for governor. One ad makes it looks like Scott just committed an abortion on a poor girl who is writhing in an alley. It says Scott made big bucks on it. Actually Scott is pro-life and strongly so. McCollum says he's a crook for defrauding Medicare. Hmmm, at the time congressman McCollum defended Scott calling the Clinton Justice Dept attack on the hospital companies a "witch hunt" --that is what professional pols do. Anything to get elected to something, somewhere. I could go on but suffice to say that I will take a successful exec over a career pol anytime. After all, the governor's job is an executive position.

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