Public Policy Polling: Marco Rubio's a little overrated.

[seafan]

Gee, ya think?


Thanks, PPP, but many Floridians knew this little fact years ago. But the Jeb Bush Machine rolled on.


Tom Jensen at Public Policy Polling:

Marco Rubio is probably the most hyped of the 2011 freshman Senate class, to the extent that there's already discussion about him as a possible 2012 Presidential candidate. Our latest Florida poll though suggests that it might be time for everyone to slow down a little bit on that front. Rubio is the most hyped new Senator...and he might be the most overrated too. Here's what we found:

-Rubio is not unusually popular with Florida voters- they're pretty evenly divided in their feelings about him with 43% rating him favorably and 42% unfavorably. He does have an unusual amount of appeal to Democrats, with 25% viewing him positively. But his 28/52 favorability with independents isn't a whole lot better than the 25/56 we found for new Governor Rick Scott, who's pretty universally thought to be highly unpopular.

-When it comes to the 2012 Presidential contest in the state Rubio trails Barack Obama by 8 points, a worse performance than Mitt Romney, Mike Huckabee, and Newt Gingrich posted in the poll and better only than Sarah Palin. In fairness to Rubio he's not the one pushing himself as a 2012 candidate but it does seem safe to say that if he couldn't pull his own home swing state his chances of winning the other major swing states wouldn't be too good either.

One thing frequently lost because Rubio's margin of victory in the Senate race was so impressive is that he still got less than half of the vote in an electorate that skewed heavily toward the GOP. With the Democratic vote splitting nearly evenly between Charlie Crist and Kendrick Meek, Rubio was going to win big pretty much no matter what he did and that didn't require him to be an unusually appealing candidate. Given where the race started it's still somewhat amazing and impressive that Rubio's going into the Senate but folks might want him to serve at least half a Senate term before the White House bid.

.....

Alan Farago:

.....

Republican Marco Rubio, the Senator-elect from Florida, is being touted by conservatives as a likely 2012 candidate for the Republican presidential ticket though he has done nothing but look good, sound reasonable, and act as the next Jeb Bush proxy in the battle to control the GOP. The media scarcely touched the point, during the Senate campaign, that Big Sugar interests – the Fanjul billionaires —strongly supported Rubio against his opponent, outgoing Governor Charlie Crist.

Crist is a sunny politician who did something no Florida elected official in modern history had ever done: he defied the Fanjul billionaire sugar barons and initiated a deal to take more than 150,000 acres from sugar production in order to help restore the Everglades. The deal with US Sugar was set up without consulting the Fanjul billionaires. For this, they waged political war on behalf of their candidate, Rubio. Although Crist has been quoted in the mainstream press as pointing to the Everglades deal as the signature accomplishment of his term, he scarcely mentioned it during the campaign nor did the mainstream media pick up the thread of its importance.

.....

“The republic works and isn’t designed to elect a bunch of experts.” --- Marco Rubio, September, 2010


With Rubio, this concept will certainly endure.





Meet Jeb Bush's young apprentice.




By God, we deserve infinitely better than this.

[DrDan]

1. rubio and scott - could things be any bleaker for us in Florida

[Zax2me]

2. Ya think?! n/a

[SoCalDem]

3. Looks like the bulb burned out..on his light saber

:)

[seafan]

4. Like Rick Scott, Rubio garnered less than 50% of the vote. But that won't stop the frenetic hype.

One thing frequently lost because Rubio's margin of victory in the Senate race was so impressive is that he still got less than half of the vote in an electorate that skewed heavily toward the GOP. With the Democratic vote splitting nearly evenly between Charlie Crist and Kendrick Meek, Rubio was going to win big pretty much no matter what he did and that didn't require him to be an unusually appealing candidate. -----LINK

But, he was Jeb's groomed candidate. And, apparently, that's all that mattered.

Rubio is not unusually popular with Florida voters- they're pretty evenly divided in their feelings about him with 43% rating him favorably and 42% unfavorably.

.....

But his 28/52 favorability with independents isn't a whole lot better than the 25/56 we found for new Governor Rick Scott, who's pretty universally thought to be highly unpopular.

-----LINK

(Rick) Scott, who became only the second governor in the state's history to be elected with less than 50 percent of the vote, has seen his numbers improve, but voters remain skeptical. His net approval rating is -10 percent, with 33 percent of voters approving and 43 percent disapproving.

..... -----LINK

But, hey, we're not supposed to notice the similarities in unpopularity between Rubio and Scott.


Rubio is presidential material, you see. Why, there's already a movement ramping up to dazzle us.





Let's also take a look at Governor Crist's latest numbers.

Floridians have a soft spot for outgoing Gov. Charlie Crist, but remain unsure about Gov.-elect Rick Scott, according to new data released Wednesday by Public Policy Polling, a traditionally Democratic polling firm.

Crist is viewed favorably by 50 percent of the state's voters, his highest approval rating this year. With 39 percent viewing him unfavorably, the self-styled "People's Governor" leaves office with a net approval rating of 11 percent. Among Independents, the governor is a superstar, garnering a 70 percent approval rating.

Among the 30 states where PPP issued year-end polling for governors, Crist ranked 10th, more popular than Gov. Rick Perry, the Texas Republican who won re-election, but less popular than Gov. Joe Manchin, the West Virginia Democrat who resigned to run for the U.S. Senate.

..... LINK

To review:

Among Florida voters:

Rick Scott (Governor-elect): 33% approval
Marco Rubio (Senator-elect): 43% approval
Charlie Crist (outgoing Gov): 50% approval


Among Independent voters:

Rick Scott: 25% approval
Marco Rubio: 28% approval
Charlie Crist: 70% approval


Among Democratic voters:

Charlie Crist: 59% approval right before election; 54% approval now


Among Republican voters:

Charlie Crist: 23% approval late October; 36% approval now




Do these comparisons of polling numbers for these three men lend a palpable discomfort as to the outcome of Florida's election? They certainly do for me.


But, the frenetic Marco Rubio hype is ginning up to drown all of that out.



Never mind the corruption; the new narrative is that Rubio is the next coming of Christ.

[starroute]

5. Ah yes -- the Fanjuls

They've been supporting GOP candidates for a long time -- though they've dabbled in donating to Democrats as well. Hillary Clinton's PAC got $23,000 from them in 2004-06. And then there's this:

http://motherjones.com/politics/1998/11/sweet-rewards

November/December 1998 Issue

On Presidents' Day in 1996, Bill Clinton told Monica Lewinsky in the Oval Office that he "no longer felt right about their intimate relationship, and he had to put a stop to it." According to the Starr report, Clinton "hugged her but would not kiss her." Lewinsky remembered that at this point the president got a phone call from somebody named "Fanuli." According to White House records, the caller was Florida sugar magnate Alfonso Fanjul Jr. The call came through at 12:24 p.m., and Clinton returned it less than 20 minutes later. He and Fanjul then spoke for 22 minutes, from 12:42 to 1:04 p.m. -- an eternity in presidential time.

Why call the Oval Office on a federal holiday? Had the media bothered to follow up, reporters quickly would have discovered that, a few hours earlier, Al Gore had announced in Everglades National Park a plan to levy a penny-a-pound tax on Florida sugar growers. The money raised would go toward a $1.5 billion effort to clean up the Everglades, polluted primarily by years of sugarcane runoff. Florida was set to be a key battleground in the upcoming presidential race, and according to one poll, most Floridians wanted to make sugar growers pay for their own mess -- hence the Clinton-Gore plan. This wasn't the sugar industry's only worry. The House was debating a measure, inserted into the 1996 farm bill, to phase out the industry's federal price support program -- a subsidy worth an annual $1.4 billion. Gore's proposal apparently sent a message to sugar barons: Don't take White House support for granted. Or: Make it really worth our while to support you.

As Mother Jones reported in our last list of the top 400 contributors, the Fanjul family pumped a total of $900,000 (including $128,080 from company executives) into the political system in the 1995-96 election cycle. For example, in April and October of 1995, Fanjul attended two White House kaffeeklatsches. Shortly after each, the Democratic National Committee received $40,000 in soft money, sent in $5,000 and $10,000 chunks on the same day by several different Fanjul companies. This precaution to evade disclosure also sent a clear message to Clinton: Fanjul was a player who could deliver.

And this:

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9F0DE3D61630F932A15753C1A960958260&sec=&spon=&pagewanted=all

October 21, 1996

Bob Dole, who has been attacking President Clinton for accepting campaign money from foreign contributors, has also accepted major donations from noncitizens. And the vice chairman of his primary-election finance committee was Alfonso Fanjul, a Cuban-born sugar magnate who is an immigrant living legally in the United States. . . .

Mr. Fanjul has long been a strong supporter of the Republican Party. He fled Castro's Cuba and now runs a $500 million sugar cane empire, along with his brother, Jose. In this campaign, Mr. Fanjul's company, the Flo-Sun Sugar Company, has given $234,000 to the Republican National Committee, and his family has given an additional $44,000 directly to a number of Republican candidates. The family also has the Flo-Sun Inc. political action committee, which has given $107,000 to Republican and Democratic candidates.

In addition, Mr. Fanjul, a fixture in Florida society, lent his 26-room Palm Beach house for a Dole fund-raiser in April that netted more than $100,000. Mr. Fanjul carries a Spanish passport, and that allows him to avoid United States estate taxes on foreign assets so long as he contends that his intention is to leave the United States. A spokesman for Mr. Fanjul, however, has said that Mr. Fanjul is now applying for United States citizenship.

[seafan]

6. Ex-CNN/ABC News journalist busily singing the new Rubio narrative.

Mixed blessing here.... gone from our teevees but still selling out in other ways.

President Barack Obama may be an excellent communicator but he faces a serious challenge in that department from incoming U.S. Sen. Marco Rubio, argued a prominent communications expert on Wednesday.

Maintaining that the best communicator has prevailed in every presidential election since 1980, Brad Phillips released a study Wednesday looking at the communication skills of Obama and 18 possible Republican opponents, including Rubio and former Gov. Jeb Bush. Phillips, a former journalist with CNN and ABC News, is the founder of Phillips Media Relations, a firm specializing in communications training, and is a prominent blogger.

..... ----LINK

LINK



'The best communicators have prevailed....', so says ex-CNN/ABC "news" journalist.


Just makes ya effing proud, doesn't it...