Mason-Dixon (8/9-11, likely voters for primary and registered voters for general, 8/2-4 for primary trendlines, 5/3-5 for general election trendlines):
Bill McCollum (R): 34 (31)
Rick Scott (R): 30 (37)
(MoE: ±5%)Alex Sink (D): 37 (36)
Bill McCollum (R): 35 (45)
Bud Chiles (I): 13 (NA)Alex Sink (D): 40 (38)
Rick Scott (R): 24 (36)
Bud Chiles (I): 17 (NA)
(MoE: ±4%)
Some sort of dam has broken in Florida in the last week, apparently, and Rick Scott is the one who’s currently getting swamped. There has been a general sense in polling over the last few weeks that Bill McCollum was working his way back into contention in the GOP primary, and all of a sudden, in the latest Mason-Dixon poll, he’s broken back into the lead. What’s wrong with Scott? (Or: What gives, Cueball?)
Mason-Dixon’s Brad Coker offers three pretty good reasons: 1) the Medicare fraud thing is finally starting to gain some traction (you’d think it would have months ago, but I guess you have to hit people over the head repeatedly for stuff like that to sink in, and that’s what the latest round of McCollum ads have been doing), 2) Scott, a la Meg Whitman, shot past the point of diminshing returns on saturation advertising, and 3) Scott sucked at the debates he was in, and has been ducking another one this week.
There’s also some serious spillover for Scott into the general. Mason-Dixon’s general election trendlines go all the way back to May, so they don’t reflect the period where McCollum had been turned radioactive and Scott was polling much better vis-a-vis Alex Sink… but that’s totally turned around in the new poll. Sink narrowly leads McCollum, but now she demolishes Scott (with an assist from indie Bud Chiles, who seems to get a big bump in a Sink/Scott race too). The Sink/McCollum numbers are a definite improvement from their last poll, though, so even if McCollum does somehow pull it out in the primary, it seems like the damage from Scott’s self-aggrandizing kamikaze mission has already been done.
With the way Alex Sink has campaigned (I.E., hasn’t), there’s no reason she should be ahead in the polls. The Republicans are looking so toxic that Sink’s getting a free pass for now.
I guess its time to start rooting for Scott again till he wears down McCollum
Another reason why he’s pulled ahead of Daddy Warbucks.
With the uptick in his spending he can’t have much on hand. On July 12, he only had 800k.
To be ahead without an ad campaign is fantastic for Alex Sink. She should be able to spend way more on the general than mccollum (if he holds the lead that is).
http://www.tampabay.com/news/p…