Florida Attorney General Bill McCollum launched his fourth bid for statewide office in his hometown of Orlando on Monday, announcing he would try to keep the governor’s office in Republican hands in 2010. …
Since Gov. Charlie Crist’s decision last week to run for the U.S. Senate instead of re-election, Republican political leaders hoping to avoid a primary have rushed to throw their support behind McCollum, 64, a 20-year former Central Florida congressman who ran for the Senate twice during this decade.
McCollum is the first major Republican to announce he would try to replace Crist, although Agriculture Commissioner Charlie Bronson of Osceola County has said he will decide this week whether he would also run.
Partisans with long memories will recall that McCollum was one of the House impeachment “managers” who led the infamous witchhunt against Bill Clinton. He also got beaten by Bill Nelson for the open seat Senate race in 2000, and then lost to Mel Martinez in the GOP primary four years later.
A Mason-Dixon poll released last month showed a tie game between McCollum and the likely Dem nominee, CFO Alex Sink, who of course just got into the race last week. SSP currently rates this race a Tossup.
I don’t think B McC has a very good shot at this. He’s probably over-exposed and not well-liked.
FL-Gov will be a superb pickup.
Is that Sink leads among Independendts by six points. I wish we had a poll with fav/unfav scores for both of them.
I tend to agree that Sink is our best candidate for governor (even if that’s primarily because I’m too ignorant to know who else would play well).
Nevertheless, I’m less sanguine than some here. Sink doesn’t come into this with a polling advantage, and I figure that a Democratic woman is going to have problems in North Florida which probably equal the gains she makes down-state for being a good manager.
This one comes down to campaign skills, whether McCollum can turn his viciousness into an asset or Sink can turn it into a liability, the attitude of Crist and the degree to which he wins in a landslide and the general mood of the nation in November 2010. I could still see us losing a 52-48 race.
i mean a democrat (gore, nelson, sink, obama) wins the south. the gop wins the north. and the swing is the I-4 corridor with minor variations.
kudos to mccollum for actually annopuncing in person rather than tweeting.