Florida Senate race rife with national implications

Florida has a habit of producing election night nail-biters, and the home of the hanging chad appears set to live up to its reputation for unpredictability in 2010.

It shouldn’t take 35 days to determine the winner of the Nov. 2 race for the Sunshine State’s open Senate seat, as it did when the U.S. Supreme Court picked George W. Bush to prevail in Florida and become president in 2000. But only a kamikaze pundit would try to call the 2010 contest.

The Florida Senate matchup – which pits the state’s current Governor Charlie Crist, who is running as an independent, against Republican Marco Rubio and Democrat Kendrick Meek – is the wild-card race of the year. It may also tell us whether the Tea Party’s 15 minutes is up.

The outcome of Tuesday’s Democratic primary, in which progressive favourite Mr. Meek was chosen as the senatorial candidate over billionaire party outsider Jeff Greene, has not made it any easier to predict the result in November.

It has, however, caused eyebrows to furrow at the White House. Mr. Meek’s primary win is principally seen as hurting Mr. Crist’s chances in November. And if Mr. Crist loses, it will almost certainly be to Mr. Rubio, not Mr. Meek. A Rubio win would put another crucial Senate seat into the Republican column and position the GOP for the 2012 presidential race in the most consequential of swing states.

The role of former Republican governor and first family member Jeb Bush in Mr. Rubio’s campaign only contributes to the intrigue. Mr. Bush’s stamp of approval will put the GOP machine solidly behind Mr. Rubio. And his influence on Mr. Rubio is credited with the latter’s move to soften his Tea Party positions and lure Hispanic voters his way with pro-immigration talk.

“The tea that Marco Rubio is sipping is a lot weaker than it was when Charlie Crist was still a Republican,” University of Florida political science professor Daniel Smith quipped in an interview.

Mr. Rubio is not the only GOP nominee to water down his Tea Party language as primary season winds down and the general election draws closer. Republicans increasingly see little benefit in provoking voters with divisive Tea Party talk. They figure that average Americans’ dismay at Mr. Obama’s handling of the economy may be all the GOP needs to retake control of Congress in November.

There is a risk, of course, in repudiating (or is that refudiating?) the very Tea Partiers who pumped new life into a GOP that had been left for dead after Barack Obama’s 2008 victory. But there may be a bigger long-term risk in embracing them.

Mr. Rubio, a 39-year-old son of Cuban exiles and former Speaker of the state’s House of Representatives, rode the Tea Party wave to upend Mr. Crist’s hopes of coasting to a new career in national politics. There had never been any love lost between the GOP base and Mr. Crist, a quintessential centrist whose fateful 2009 hug of Mr. Obama made him a pariah within his own party. Mr. Rubio’s move to challenge him for the Senate nomination led Mr. Crist to quit the party in April to run as an independent.

Since then, Mr. Crist, 54, has unashamedly courted Democrats by cozying up to the Florida teachers’ union, championing abortion rights and wooing the state’s large (and largely Democratic) Jewish electorate. It’s paid off, in the polls at least.

“My own read on it – and it is very difficult to read – is that it is still Crist’s race to lose,” offered Scott Paine, a professor of communication and government at the University of Tampa. But Mr. Meek’s primary victory complicates Mr. Crist’s task. Though he is considered a weak Senate prospect, Mr. Meek is the son of an influential black leader and currently holds his mother’s former seat in the House of Representatives. As such, he will be able to count on more rank-and-file Democratic support than Mr. Greene ever could and that will draw voters away from Mr. Crist.

Mr. Greene made a fortune betting against the subprime mortgage market – not exactly a popular calling card in a state with one of country’s most devastated residential real-estate markets. He has been dogged by a colourful past and reports of sex- and drug-fuelled partying on his 44-metre yacht with the likes of Mike Tyson.

The enduring story of the Florida Senate race, however, may be the transformation of Mr. Rubio from Tea Party darling into the kind of big-tent Republican the party’s leading thinkers say the GOP increasingly needs to cultivate to grow its base. Mr. Bush, who still appears to harbour political ambitions, has been instrumental in that makeover.

It shows that, though the 2010 race is not over, the 2012 election cycle has clearly begun.