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Tallahassee, FL – The general election is less than three weeks from now. There are many Florida-based pundits who have been analyzing the various races and giving their take on the various in-state campaigns. But what happens when NPR's "Political Junkie" Ken Rudin brings his vast knowledge to bear on those races? Rudin was in the Capital City this week, and Tom Flanigan sat down with him for an intense chat about Sunshine State campaigns and candidates.
Besides his appearance every Wednesday during NPR's "Talk of the Nation", Rudin is also the network's political editor. He's analyzed every congressional and senatorial contest since 1984. So we asked him first to provide his take on Florida's U.S. Senate race, pitting Democrat Kendrick Meek and Republican Marco Rubio against newly-minted no-party candidate, Charlie Crist. Does Rudin think Crist has a chance to become the first independent in the Senate?
"Well, I don't think he does it. Can he do it? Yes, but I don't think he does. What's fascinating about this is the country keeps saying they don't like polarization, they like people who reach across party lines, but what we've seen in real life is when politicians try to do that, they get unbelievable vitriol. We had Blanche Lincoln, the centrist Democratic senator from Arkansas, who was playing a little footsie with the Republicans on health care and the Left went after her with everything. The S.E.I.U. (Service Employees International Union) spent millions of dollars attacking her. She had to go to a runoff in her primary to win it and she barely won it. Now she's facing opposition from the Republican Right. Same with Lindsey Graham of South Carolina. Every time he suggests something - maybe a compromise about immigration or things like that - the conservatives go crazy. Many county Republican parties in South Carolina have censured Lindsey Graham. This guy's a true conservative, but he's not conservative enough, so any time somebody tries to go across party lines they hear it from the Left or the Right. With Charlie Crist, the most interesting thing is that for awhile it looked like he was on the upswing. It looked like, with the BP oil spill, he was in the headlines all the time, his numbers were improving. But as he was improving, more and more Democrats seemed to be warming up to him, Charlie Whitehead, the former Democratic state chair, (and) Robert Wexler, the former congressman from South Florida, also backed him. And by so doing that, instead of the Rubio/Crist split on the Right, it looks like a Meek/Crist split among the Democrats, and if nothing else, that helps Marco Rubio."
Also helping Rubio and other Republicans may be the many Tea Party supporters who tend to support more conservative, therefore more GOP candidates, right? Rudin says, "Not so fast."
"A lot of the anger we've seen from Tea Party folks has been directed at the Republican establishment and that was definitely true against Charlie Crist. I mean, I saw comments from Jeb Bush throughout that whole primary campaign when Charlie Crist was still a Republican there was clear disdain among many conservative Republicans for Charlie Crist, that he was a chameleon, that he wasn't really a true Republican and just as we saw in Alaska, just as we saw in Delaware and in other states, and with Bill McCollum as well, if you toe the Republican line, if you're party establishment, that's not good enough in this Age of Anger', this age of wanting payback, being in the establishment is not the right way, even though everybody thinks that the Tea Party is a vehicle for the Republican Party."
But Rudin believes all the media focus on the U.S. Senate race may be diverting attention from a contest he thinks may be even more significant.
"Washington and Beltway thinking seems to be focused entirely on senate races. But gubernatorial races are key, especially in 2010 with re-districting coming up and who will decide how to draw the congressional lines for the next census. And so the governorship of Florida, (a state) which will probably pick up at least one if not two congressional seats, they will redraw all the lines, so who controls the governorship and the state legislature is crucial. So everyone's talking about Meek and Rubio and Crist, but really Sink and Scott is the big story in Florida and it affects not only Florida. If you look at the electoral numbers that elected Barrack Obama in 2008, those numbers are probably going to shift. In other words, the electoral votes that elected him will no longer be as strong Democratic because a lot of the rust belt states will be losing population; the south and conservative areas will be gaining population, so the numbers that Obama got and Kerry got and Gore got in the previous elections will probably more favorable to the Republicans. That's why the governorship races are so crucial."
Who will win the Florida governor's race? Rudin won't call it, although he does say Sink's latest campaign strategy, to paint Scott as untrustworthy and a shady character, has boosted her poll numbers. The most surprising thing about this electoral cycle? Rudin says that would be the degree of irrational anger and nastiness that far exceeds anything he's seen in all his years as a "Political Junkie."