Should Republicans Be Rooting For Charlie Crist?

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?

Ridge Out, Gerlach In — More PA Primary Fun

Yesterday’s news was that Tom Ridge had said clearly and officially that he won’t be running for the Senate in Pennsylvania in 2010, as earlier rumored.  The stories I’ve read about this since then have sounded mostly the same notes: this means Pat Toomey’s the candidate.

That misses the most interesting part of the early Ridge rumors — that Ridge was recruited by more moderate Republicans and urged to run.  Pat Toomey, the Club for Growth sweetheart whose conservative politics scared Arlen Specter out of the primary, isn’t the ideal GOP candidate in Pennsylvania (though strangely, he seems like exactly the guy they’d want to have in office now).  Polls from this week showed Ridge defeating Toomey statewide by nearly 40 percent in a Republican primary.  Even taking into account Ridge’s past popularity and higher name recognition, that seems to show there actually is a hunger among Pennsylvania Republicans for someone who’s closer to the center than Toomey.  They just don’t want that guy to be Arlen Specter.

The question we should be asking now isn’t whether Specter can beat Toomey in a general election, because he can.  Nearly any Democrat can.  The question we should be asking is whether the Republicans will let that race– a race with Pat Toomey as the Big R candidate — happen.  Orrin Hatch, co-chair of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, has said he doesn’t there is anybody in the world who believes he can get elected senator there.”  He’s also said the NRSC probably won’t support Toomey, though he backed off that statement a little bit later.

^{Image by: America2050/Flickr}

In fact, the NRSC seems to be looking pretty seriously at Jim Gerlach, the 6th-district Republican House member who’s been making some noises about entering the race.  Jon Cornyn, Hatch’s co-chair, apparently spoke with Gerlach this week about getting into the race.  Gerlach isn’t Ridge: he’s won his races only narrowly the last three times and doesn’t enjoy the statewide fondness that Ridge does (even if Ridge is now a resident of Maryland).  On the issues… it’s hard to say whether he’s a conservative masquerading as moderate or the other way around.  Gerlach voted against the president’s budget and the stimulus (but so did every other House Republican), but for SCHIP expansion, against the federal act defining marriage as one man/one woman and for prohibiting job discrimination based on sexual orientation, for embyonic stem cell research but against nearly everything else NARAL supports, and with a mixed record on environmental and energy issues.  His fundraising is run-of-the-mill Republican (with a few fun exceptions: he got $1,021 in 2008 from the Poker Players Alliance): $890,000 from business PAC sources in his 2008 campaign; $83,000 from labor PACs, most of whom had an interest in his seat on the Transportation and Infastructure Committee.

Is he a viable statewide candidate?  Not today.  But if the NRSC throws some money at him, in six months he could be — and since the primary is still a year away, that should have Pat Toomey worried.  Gerlach is Specter-esque — a waffling maybe-conservative — without the high-profile defection of the Stimulus to make him distasteful to the party.  Those Republicans that want to see the party shift away from moderate views should be worried.