The big news this week was the much-telegraphed announcement yesterday by Florida Gov. Charlie Crist that he will abandon the Republican senatorial primary (where he was in danger of being trounced by Marco Rubio) and instead re-file as an independent candidate in that race.
Crist’s gambit raises a lot of questions, most immediately about how many of his donors will ask for their money back, and how, exactly, he will negotiate the very difficult shoals of an independent candidacy in a state famous for its partisanship. The instant GOP blowback was intense, as Jonathan Martin of Politico reported:
Immediately after he gave his speech, his campaign manager and two press aides resigned. His mail vendor and media consultant also indicated that they would not remain with him as he pursued a third-party bid.
In Washington, the very GOP senators who had anointed him as the party’s favorite last year castigated him as an untrustworthy opportunist and demanded that he return their contributions and those of other Republicans.
Crist appears determined to run an “outsider” campaign, which will be somewhat difficult for an incumbent governor and former darling of the national GOP establishment. The first post-announcement three-way polls will be very interesting.
While it was completely overshadowed by the Crist drama, the Florida senatorial race was also roiled by reports that billionaire investor Jeff Greene, who bet against the housing bubble and won big, will enter the Democratic primary against U.S. Rep. Kendrick Meek, who had been focused on the general election. Greene is apparently being advised by the eccentric duo of Joe Trippi and Doug Schoen.
The other trend worth watching this week was the sudden dilemma posed to Republican candidates for various offices across the country by Arizona’s new immigration law, which among other things, authorized law enforcement officers to demand proof of citizenship from anyone “reasonably suspected” of being in the country illegally. While virtually all Republicans have defended the Arizona action as an indictment of the failure of the federal government to “protect the borders,” the specific law has struck sparks, particularly among candidates in highly competitive Republican primaries.
In Nevada, for example, the front-runner in the gubernatorial race, Brian Sandoval, who happens to be both a Latino and suspected by hard-core conservatives of being a moderate squish, instantly endorsed the Arizona law. His main opponent, incumbent Jim Gibbons, who has been running as the true conservative candidate, demurred, arguing that Nevada didn’t need that sort of law because it wasn’t a border state. And a third candidate who is trying to outflank Gibbons on the right, Mike Montandon, not only endorsed the Arizona initiative but called profiling by law enforcement officers — the main concern many have had with the Arizona law — absolutely essential.
The furor over the Arizona initiative has not been confined to the West. It may, in fact, have its greatest impact on Republicans in the Deep South, where Hispanic immigration has been visible enough to upset conservatives, but has not yet created a significant voting bloc. Almost immediately after the enactment of the Arizona law, Alabama Republican gubernatorial candidate Tim James, who is struggling to overcome Judge Roy Moore as the Christian conservative candidate in that race, launched an ad attacking his own state’s practice of offering drivers’ tests in languages other than English.
Next door in Georgia, gubernatorial candidate Nathan Deal, who recently resigned from the U.S. House on the heels of an ethics investigation, publicly called for enactment of an Arizona-style immigration system in his own state. And in South Carolina, Lt. Gov. Andre Bauer, who earlier compared subsidized school lunch beneficiaries to “stray animals,” harnessed the Arizona controversy to his own distinctive message in the gubernatorial race by suggesting that immigrants wouldn’t be coming to the Palmetto State if lazy welfare bums were willing to work.
It’s an easy guess that immigration fever will spread in highly competitive southern Republican primaries, and perhaps elsewhere. In general, cultural issues can be expected to pop up where candidates are trying to distinguish themselves in a Republican Party that’s now monolithically — even radically — conservative on economic and fiscal issues.
In polling news, there were two big national surveys released this week, one by the Washington Post/ABC News, and the other by Pew. The WaPo/ABC poll had some good news for Democrats:
The public trusts Democrats more than Republicans to handle the major problems facing the country by a double-digit margin, giving Democrats a bigger lead than they held two months ago, when Congress was engaged in the long endgame over divisive health-care legislation. A majority continues to see Obama as “just about right” ideologically, despite repeated GOP efforts to define the president as outside the mainstream.
Those polled also say they trust Obama over Republicans in Congress to deal with the economy, health care and, by a large margin, financial regulatory reform. And the president continues to get positive marks on his overall job performance, with, for the first time since the fall, a majority of independents approving.
Pew (PDF), on the other hand, found Republicans drawing even with Democrats on five of six major issues (the exception being energy policy). Go figure.
Ed Kilgore’s PPI Political Memo runs every Monday and Friday.
