Charlie Crist, the Republican governor of Florida, will apparently announce today that he’s running for the open Senate seat in 2010. Crist is best described as a moderate Republican who was lukewarm about McCain (perhaps because he didn’t get selected as the VP nominee) and has since supported President Obama’s stimulus plan at the same time every other Republican in the world was screaming no. He’s what Democrats should consider a best-case worse case for Florida, and he’s popular enough that he’ll enter the race as the front-runner. Recent polling shows him at 54 percent, if the GOP primary were held today; his next-closest competitors get eight percent each.
So… Senator Crist? How should Democrats feel about that? Nate Silver has an excellent breakdown of Charlie Crist by the issues, under the headline “Should Democrats Be Rooting for Charlie Crist?” His answer is that Crist would make a Snowe-like Senator. From there it’s self-evident that Democrats should favor a Crist v. Democrat race, because either way that goes, the party gets at least a part-time ally out of the deal.
The interesting question here, just as it is in Pennsylvania, is who should the GOP prefer? The National Republican Senatorial Committee has to make an important choice: Will they support Crist? He’d win more easily, freeing up funds to spend in other battleground states, like Missouri or Kentucky, but he’d also represent a victory for the Colin Powell wing of the party that Leader Emeritus Cheney hates so much. Or will they support conservative Marco Rubio, the former Speaker of the florida House (check him out on YouTube)? Rubio is everything the GOP wants going forward: young, conservative, and a protégé of the Bush clan. Newt Gingrich called Rubio “very attractive and very intelligent… a major contender” when he visited Florida earlier this month, though he stopped short of saying anything negative about Crist.
So what will it be, Florida? A new GOP that looks like — well, like the Bush-Cheney GOP? Or Candidate Crist?
SATURN SMITH 