For Sale: Florida Gov, Senate Seats

Democratic candidate Jeff Greene. Courtesy of JeffGreene.com.

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.


Weeks ago, political aspirants Rick Scott and Jeff Greene were long shots, outsiders, no-names. Scott is a Florida Republican running for governor, Greene a Florida Democrat running for US Senate. But Scott and Greene have something in common, a shared trait that’s propelling both men toward success in the Sunshine State: They’re stinking rich, and spending freely to boost their candidacies.

Their strategy looks to be working. A new Quinnipiac University poll shows both Scott and Greene leapfrogging their opponents in public support. After entering the race two months ago with meager public support and little name recognition, Scott now boasts 44 percent of support among Republican voters. That’s a 13-point lead over his challenger, Florida Attorney General Bill McCollum. (24 percent of Republican voters are undecided, the poll shows.) McCollum has the backing of the GOP establishment, and was considered the frontrunner until today’s poll. How, you ask, has the underdog surged so fast? So far, Scott, a former hospital CEO, has spent more than $12.5 million on his campaign, including a wave of ads plugging his support for an Arizona-like immigration law in Florida. McCollum has spent just $805,000.

Then there’s Jeff Greene, a billionaire real estate investor vying for the Democratic Party’s US Senate nomination. Here are a few details on Greene: Like the investors immortalized in Michael Lewis’ The Big Short, Greene cashed in betting against the subprime mortgage market. Boxer Mike Tyson was the best man at Greene’s 2008 wedding. Heidi Fleiss, the infamous madam to the stars, once shacked up in Greene’s guesthouse. He collects erotic art. Now, billionaire Greene, a relative unknown in Florida Democratic politics, is in a statistical dead heat with Rep. Kendrick Meek (D-Fla.), with Meek claiming 29 percent and Greene 27 percent. So far, Greene has spent millions on campaign ads.

Although Scott and Greene’s millions have boosted their polling numbers, paradoxically, their familiarity with voters remains low. Forty-six percent of Florida Republicans say they don’t know enough about Scott to form an opinion of him, while 64 percent of Democrats say the same about Greene. (By comparison, most Florida Democrats—59 percent—don’t know enough to form an opinion about Meek.)

Here’s the Washington Post‘s Chris Cilizza on the Scott-Green surge:

The rise of Greene and Scott speak to two realities: one new and one old.

First, the old. In large states with lots of media market where communicating is difficult, television is king. You can only meet so many Florida voters—even in a primary—and so the way you make an impact is through ads. And, when one candidate can write a check (or multiple checks) for millions of dollars while the his opponent has to scrape up donations in $2,000 or chunks, it is a major advantage.

The new(er) reality is that voters are really, really, really—we can’t emphasize that enough—sick of politicians who they believe have repeatedly failed them. In an anti-incumbent cycle like this one, people like Greene and Scott who have no voting record or even a set of past issue positions to defend have a far greater chance of succeeding.

The pervasive anti-incumbent sentiment I understand. But if it’s the deep-pocketed, well connected, corporate-linked establishment voters dislike, then they’re not getting much of a change in Scott or Greene, despite the barrage of ads and messaging these two candidates have unleashed to the contrary.

Typically, Scott has denied that his formidable campaign war chest has anything to do with it. “No one can buy an election,” Scott said recently. “When you walk into the voting booth, what you’re going to say is, ‘Which candidate is best for my family?’…They want somebody that’s run a business before.” Keep in mind, the hospital Scott ran was nabbed for alleged Medicare fraud, and forked over $1.7 billion to the feds resulting from the charges.

While Scott and Greene’s rapid success is startling, they’ve still got months to go before Florida’s August 24 primary. Time will tell whether they can keep up the spending barrage, or if the two cash-flush candidates peaked too early.

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate