Redstate

By Charles Fenwick Posted in User Blogs — Comments (2) / Email this page » / Leave a comment »

Most newspapers in Florida carried slight variants of the Associated Press story that was linked in Red Hot yesterday: House Speaker Bense considering a run for U.S. Senate

The article also mentions Senate President Tom Lee pondering a candidacy.

Hitherto, neither candidate has expressed much thought of running for higher office, except for the cabinent post of Chief Financial Officer.

Past polls by Quinnipac University and Strategic Vision give differing views of the margin of Harris' lead over other prospective Republican candidates.  The April Qunnipac poll showed Harris with an eight point lead over (later gubernatorial candidate) Charlie Crist and a twelve point lead over (also later gubernatorial candidate) Tom Gallagher.  The April Strategic Vision poll showed Harris with leads of fifteen and seventeen points over Crist and Gallagher, respectively.

The June 15 Strategic Vision poll shows Harris with a dominant edge over prospective challengers, pulling 53% in a pool of possible challengers with then rumored possibile candidate Tommy Franks second at 13%.  Bense and King were not offered as possibilities.

The reasons for a desire for a challenger to Harris can be seen in the Strategic Vision polls, which have shown her trailing Nelson by seven points.  The same polls have Crist and Gallagher beating Nelson, albeit by a small margin.  Similarly, the Quinnipac polls show a generic Republican opponent as being tied with him.

One is reminded of the 2000 race in which polls showed Gallagher tied with Nelson before dropping out, leaving Bill McCollum, who trailed Nelson by ten points and ended up losing by five points.

Similarly in 2004, Mel Martinez entered the race for the nomination well behind Bill McCollum.  However, with polls showing him as the only candidate tied with or beating Betty Castor, he won the nomination and went on to a 1% victory over her.

The glaring problem of a Bense or King candidacy is that neither has been in a state-wide race of any kind.  Looking through online election records that date back to 1978, I cannot find an example of a general election in which a Senate or gubernatorial candidate that did not have state-wide race experience beating a candidate that did.  

Katherine Harris, of course, won Secretary of State in 1998, by a margin only slightly smaller than Jeb Bush's.  

Despite two failed gubernatorial (nomination) runs, Gallagher was easily sucessful in his run for Treasurer in 2000.  In that same year, Crist was elected  Education Commissioner.

But as mentioned earlier, both have thrown their hat into the Governor's race.

Once you rule those two out, there is only one prominent Republican with state-wide experience who is not named Jeb Bush.

In 1994 he became the youngest Commissioner of Education in Florida history.  With 53.4% of the vote he was the top performing Republican candidate that year.

He was Jeb Bush's running mate in 1998, but declined to run again in 2002, opting instead to become the President of his Alma Mater, Florida Atlantic University.

Calling Frank Brogan....