Good for South Florida!

Looks like Attorney General Bill McCollum and Congressman Allen Boyd have both decided against running for the Senate. That leaves all three major candidates for the Democratic nomination from South Florida, and also knocks off a Republican non-south Floridian. Though there some indications that there could be a Democratic woman from central Florida considering a run.

This could also mean that the Republican field is being cleared for Charlie Crist. Although I think this to be unlikely, the logic goes something like: get out of Florida with still high numbers (the looming budget mess could act like an albatross on the Governor's high approval ratings), position himself for a 2016 White House run (staying as governor runs his term until 2014, leaving him paying his own dime for trips to Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina, and Nevada), and DC might be a more attractive town for a newly married man than Tallahassee.

Senate Candidate Ideology Estimates

Political scientists and interest groups often use scaling mechanisms to describe legislators and other political actors. While we know that the (nominal) measures of partisan identification give us some information about ideology (knowing that an individual is a Republican versus a Democrat), we are also used to more ordinal measures of ideology. Thus we have "Blue-Dog Democrats" or "Northeastern Republicans," which convey a sense of ideology in a comparative sense; Blue-dog Democrats are more conservative than a standard Democrat and Northeastern Republicans are more liberal than a standard Republican. But we can also attempt to come up with interval measures of ideology which not only gives the relative position of candidate ideology (e.g., "he is more than conservative than she") but also a sense of the distance between candidates. While we know from Howard Dean's famous talking point that he declared himself part of the "Democratic-Wing of the Democratic Party," we can't really tell from this statement how much more liberal he was than John Kerry. Is a conservative Democrat more conservative than a liberal Republican?

Polls and Money, Money and Polls

Early polls are not particularly predictive of eventual winners. So early polls that show Kendrick Meek topping the Democratic field of Senate candidates at a ridiculously low 13% and Attorney General Bill McCollum at just 22% should be taken with a grain of salt. Yet these polls can certainly assist candidates with strategy (positioning or name ID?), and fundraising. Fundraising and likelihood of winning are effectively a "positive feedback loop" without a direct causal mechanism. That is to say that the more one raises money, the easier it is to get elected. The more likely one is to win an election, the easier it is to raise funds. Who wants to give money to a losing candidate? Yet there are some interesting phenomena at work. When incumbents raise a lot of money, it can often be a sign of trouble.

Mack on Hold?

Connie Mack IV (R), a member of the U.S. House of Representatives, appears to be hedging on his Senate run - at least outwardly proclaiming that he would defer to a Charlie Crist run for the Senate. Mack is an attractive candidate for the Senate for many reasons: solid conservative credentials with a few well-known moderate stances, political experience, high name ID (largely owed to his family), and decent fundraising ability. He is dutifully waiting on the leader of the party in the State, and did the same for Jeb. While this many not strike the general public as the strongest qualities of a leader - this kind of deference goes a long way toward appeasing the party faithful (generally a prerequisite for a primary run).

Gelber inching closer

Florida Senator and Former House Minority Leader Dan Gelber is getting closer to an official announcement of his candidacy for running for the U.S. Senate. It's interesting to compare Gelber and Ron Klein who share a natural South Florida Jewish Democratic constituency, but fairly limited name recognition through-out the state. Klein has proven to be a better fund-raiser and is less caustic than Gelber, and is a bit more conservative. But Gelber can have his cake and eat it too; Florida has a "Resign to Run" law that effectively bars one from holding office and running for another office. The Florida legislature, however, created an exception that would exempt one who holds state office and runs for federal office (largely thought to have been for Governor Crist, opening a pathway to the Vice Presidency). For all of the other Democratic contenders, including Klein, they will have to give up their current federal seats when running for the Senate; Gelber can have a nice-fall back job should he fail to win the U.S. Senate seat.

Rumors, rumors, rumors

On the Democratic side of things, Meek is in, Sink is out. Gelber, Klein, and Boyd are likely entries. For the Republicans, Bush is out, McCollum, Rubio, Mack, and Buchanan are likely contenders; prodigious fundraiser Florida House Majority Leader Adam Hasner is also a possibility.

Full disclosure - my wife has donated money to Representative Hasner for a state house race.

Governor to Senator?

Despite pleas from Senator Cornyn (R-TX), head of the National Republican Senatorial Committee Chairman (basically the Senator in charge of all of the 2010 races) for Charlie Crist to enter the fray, money should not be put on this guy to run. He avoids the trappings of term-limits, but the transition from Executive to Legislator is not always so easy. In fact, the Republicans may be losing two Senators this cycle who will return home to run for Governor (Brownback-KS and Hutchison-TX). These jobs call for very different skill sets and desire for the klieg lights. Governor Crist's response to how much interest he has in the seat? "Not much."

First in the water

While names have been dropping off the radar screen (Jeb Bush, Alex Sink, Joe Scarborough), the first serious candidate (one with significant electoral experience) has entered the race. House Member Kendrick Meek (D) has announced his candidacy in the Democratic primary run for the Martinez seat. Meek represents Florida's 17th District in Congress, a district that stretches from North Miami to Hollywood, just inland off the coast. Meek, despite some low name ID statewide could be a formidable candidate. He hails from a well connected political family (Meek's mother Carrie had been the previous office-holder from the same district), he spent eight years in the Florida legislature (both House and Senate), and serves on the Ways and Means Committee in the U.S. House (one of the so-called "prestige" committees). Meek could also bring together the Democratic Party in Florida. He was an early backer of Senator Clinton in the Presidential primary (certainly made notable largely because Meek is African-American and hails from a predominantly black district), but has now hired Steve Hildebrand - Obama's deputy campaign manager. And massive money raiser (and spender) Chris Korge appears to be an early backer as well.

Welcome

Welcome to what may be the definitive space for information related to the 2010 U.S. Senate race in Florida, mixing a bit of attention to the news with a dash of political science. It is required reading for my students at Florida Atlantic University, and recommended to all. With Senator Mel Martinez (R) announcing that he will not run for re-election, the race became wide-open. There are two cross-cutting phenomena at work here. First, typically when an incumbent announces that he or she will not run for re-election, this is a sign of expected electoral trouble for the incumbent party (here the Republicans). Second, midterm elections usually break against the party in power in the White House (here the Democrats). So here we now have a Senate race with no clear front-runner (incumbents generally win Senate about three out of every four races entered), the typical indicators of which party may win are at odds with one another, and the state is evenly split between Democrats and Republicans in terms of partisan registration and voting behavior. Welcome to the race; it should be quite the ride.