Rubio seeks support at town hall

§ September 6th, 2009 § Filed under Election News § 24 Comments

Rubio seeks support at town hall

By Bill Cotterell

Marco Rubio needs 600,000 Republican voters, and he thinks he can find a lot of them at the tea-party tax protests and raucous town-hall meetings on national health care. 

For an under-funded underdog, running for the U.S. Senate against a popular governor with a track record of three easy statewide wins, Rubio’s task is daunting. But experienced political observers see his challenge to Gov. Charlie Crist as the most serious fight either party has had in 40 years — since Gov. Claude Kirk was forced into a runoff and ultimately defeated in 1970.

 

“I’m running to do something, not to be something,” Rubio told about 100 members of Capital Conservatives, a non-partisan Tallahassee group. “There are easier things for me to run for — there are easier things to do in life than run against the sitting governor of your state and your own party.” 

The party wasted no time anointing Crist as its best chance of keeping retiring U.S. Sen. Mel Martinez’s seat in the red column. Florida Republican Party Chairman Jim Greer, whom Crist put in that job, immediately endorsed him, and the Republican National Senate Campaign Committee followed suit minutes after Crist formally announced his candidacy in May.

But Rubio, who announced his candidacy on YouTube and boasts relatively second-tier endorsements like those of South Carolina Sen. Jim DeMint and the son of ex-Gov. Jeb Bush, has travelled the state constantly to meet with grassroots conservatives who are frankly unhappy with Crist’s embrace of President Obama’s fiscal stimulus package and appointment of his former top aide, George LeMieux, to fill Martinez’s seat.

“My campaign strategy is not very complicated. There are 4 million Republicans, about 25-28 percent will vote, so that means if I can find 600,000 people to vote for me in the Republican primary, I’ll be the nominee,” Rubio explained. “That’s the goal — identify and turn out 600,000 voters in the primary.”

‘More of a race’

Modern political history bears him out. Martinez won an eight-candidate primary with 522,000 votes in 2004, but that was a presidential year with higher turnout. And the last man to top 600,000 in an off-year GOP primary was Charlie Crist, in 2006.

But Rubio said Florida’s political winds have shifted in the Obama era.

“This has been a real shock but a great awakening,” he said. “People say, ‘You’re not going to win with just tea-party people and town-hall people, there’s not enough of them.’ I think they’re wrong.”

He scored lopsided victories in straw polls by GOP committees in Pasco, Lee, Highlands, Bay and Duval Counties. The Volusia County Republican committee voted to censure Crist Aug. 3 while a censure vote in Palm Beach County failed in a 65-65 vote — as committee member Steven Ledewitz called Crist “Arlen Specter with a suntan.”

But Crist has some numbers on his side that count more. He raised $4.3 million in less than two months after announcing and polls have consistently shown him trouncing Rubio, who raised only $340,000.

Brad Coker, state director of the Mason Dixon Poll, said that may be a factor of name identification. Among voters who recognized both men’s names, the GOP vote was a virtual tie in Coker’s latest poll.

“In state after state, we’ve seen that the sort of genial candidate with cross-party appeal can raise a lot of money but then get beaten by the more conservative candidate in a Republican primary,” said Coker. “I think Crist is joined at the hip a little too much with Obama, in the minds of too many Republicans.”

Coker said straw ballots and censure votes, along with the outpouring of public anger at health care town-hall meetings and the tea-party protests, are “strong signs of an undercurrent out there, but how strong it is and whether it can sustain itself until next Aug. 24 will determine whether Rubio can make a run of it.”

Republican political consultant Roger Austin of Gainesville said “this thing is definitely do-able for Marco” if he can raise money for TV ads and get Crist into some debates. Rubio has called for 10 meetings with Crist, who has brushed him off.

“This is going to be a lot more of a race than many people think,” said Austin. “The Democrats have definitely tried to marginalize the tea-party people and the town-hall meetings, but I don’t know to what extent the Republican leadership has done so. Appealing to them is a smart move on his (Rubio’s) part.”

‘Real people’

In his standard stump speech, Rubio says he’s running on principle. He doesn’t accuse Crist of compromising or waffling, but it’s impossible not to know whom he’s talking about when he says “Republicans have had too many people run like Ronald Reagan and govern like Jimmy Carter.”

Rubio, 38, is a West Miami attorney who was elected to the House in 2000 and became the first Hispanic speaker 2007-08. His parents fled Castro’s Cuba, and Rubio opens many speeches by stressing that he grew up knowing what it means “when government picks the winners and losers” in an economy.

“I’m willing to lose elections over my principles,” he says. Although casino gambling polls about 68 percent in his district, Rubio said, he is adamantly against it — just as he opposes abortion, “even if 100 percent of my constituents were for it.”

Rubio said his party’s leaders are badly under estimating the tea party protestors and town hall meeting critics. He sees them as his base.

“They don’t think that these are real people,” he said of Greer, Crist and the congressional leadership. “They’re so insulated. Never has our political class been more insulated from the real lives of real people.”