Florida Governor Rick Scott Catches Ex-Gov Charlie Crist, In Spite Of Heavily Pro-Obama Electorate

Photo courtesy of the AP/Steve Cannon.

It's amazing what a year can do in politics. Last year about this time, still reeling from the aftermath of a devastating presidential election loss, Republicans looked awful on the generic congressional ballot. President Obama was still in the midst of his post-victory honeymoon with voters, at least as far as his job approval ratings were concerned. And up and down the 2014 Governor/Senate race roster, things just weren't looking as bleak for Democrats as they could.

Flash forward and Democrats and Republicans are virtually tied on the generic ballot (while Democrats haven't led in a single poll besides Rasmussen or YouGov for nearly two months). The President has recently gone through a spate of the worst job approval ratings of his presidency, and is still suffering on that front. And most importantly, more than a few 2014 races are looking better for Republicans than they did one year ago - namely, the Florida Governor's race.

Per Democratic pollster, Public Policy Polling, over the course of the last year, former Republican Governor and current Democratic gubernatorial nominee Charlie Crist has gone from an impressive 53% of the vote in a match-up with Republican incumbent Rick Scott (against his 39%), to 43% of the vote (with Scott up to 41%). In other words, Crist's lead has dropped from a substantial 14 points, to a statistically insignificant 2 points - a net drop of 12 points.

What's worse, there's been a fairly miraculous turnaround in Florida voters' personal views towards the man who tried but failed to leap from the Governor's office to the US Senate in 2010. Consider the table below:

One year ago, half of Florida voters had a favorable view of Charlie Crist. Today, that number has dropped to barely over one-third (36%). Meanwhile, unfavorable views of the former of Governor have risen from 38% to 46%. Overall, Crist's net favorability score has dropped 21 points since last January.

Governor Rick Scott's suddenly competitive reelection bid is less due to any improvement among voters on his end, and more thanks to Charlie Crist's precipitous drop. While the governor's job approval rating has improved from -24 to -17 points, he's still at a measly 34% approval, with 51% disapproving.

President Obama's approval rating is down, but only slightly from just after the 2012 election (a notable difference from most recent state findings by other pollsters).

In sum, things just got a lot worse for Charlie Crist in Florida. And if you buy one particular crosstab provided by the Democrats most prolific pollster, things may be even worse for Crist than they appear on the surface. Peering through the PPP tabs, consider question #20, which asks Florida poll respondents to identify who they voted for in the 2012 presidential race:

Obama's State Job Approval Collapse, And What It Could Mean For 2014

Photo found here.

November 2013 is likely to be remembered as the worst month of Barack Obama's presidency, that is, if he's lucky enough to stop the bleeding over the course of the next few weeks. Republicans, fresh off of what was perceived at the time as a historic misstep in shutting down the federal government to defund the Affordable Care Act, were handed a life-line with the disastrous healthcare.gov rollout, followed by nationwide cancellations of millions of people's health insurance.

What came next was predictable. The President's numbers remained steadily negative up until late last month, when they turned steeply southward.

The last non-daily tracking poll to find the President in single-digit negative territory was a GWU/Battleground poll from one month ago. No less than 6 separate surveys taken this month have shown his approval rating in the 30% range. And a recent CBS/NYT poll gave Obama the worst job approval rating of his presidency, in *any* poll.

Making things more difficult for the White House, a flurry of state polls indicate negative impressions of the President's job performance have filtered down to the states.

Consider the chart below of every state-based survey to test Obama's job rating since November 1, 2013 (approximately the period at which Obama's *national* ratings began to drop):

With relatively few exceptions, the President's numbers are quite poor, especially when compared to his performance against Mitt Romney in last year's general election. And when considering JUST the numbers taken over about the last two weeks, the picture gets even more grim, especially with respect to five swing-states with high profile Senate or Gubernatorial races in 2014: Colorado, Iowa, North Carolina, Florida, and Ohio.

What does a term-limited President's job approval rating have to do with Democrat's chances in 2014? Sean Trend of Real Clear Politics recently concluded that, at least from an aggregate, national perspective, it matters a lot. But what kind of correlation, if any, is there between a President's state-based job approval rating, and that particular state's Senate or Gubernatorial midterm result? On the more micro level, the relationship between presidential approval and his or her party's midterm result gets murkier.

Embracing Charlie Crist With Open Arms, Florida Democrats Look Poised To Bury Gov. Rick Scott In 2014

In some political parties, the desire to win trumps old disagreements, which must be the case for Charlie Crist's success with Florida Democrats in recent polls. But expect Rick Scott's team to play-up past associations like the ones above (a campaign appearance with Palin in 2008, then Obama four years later) to highlight Crist as a political chameleon.

The current state of Florida politics would be entirely unrecognizable to a to a time-traveling political observer from the year 2006. Then, a popular politician named Charlie Crist looked like a rising Republican star who drew barbs from Democrats rather than adoration. In fact, he performed down-right poorly among traditional Democratic voting blocks in his successful gubernatorial run, winning just 14% of self-identified Democrats, 21% of liberals, and 18% of African Americans.

My, how things change.

Flash forward through a bitter 2010 Senate primary campaign against Marco Rubio (which, rather than lose embarrassingly, Crist withdrew from), a failed Independent bid for US Senate, and a speaking slot at the 2012 DNC, to the man who will again seek the seat he abandoned for Washington D.C., this time as a Democrat.

And Democrats seem entirely willing to welcome him into the fold. In a recent survey, Crist attracts 85% of the Democratic vote against incumbent Republican Governor Rick Scott. He garners over 80% of liberals, and over three-quarters of African Americans - literally, the polar opposite of the coalition he built to defeat Democrat Jim Davis in 2006.

And lest you think Democrats are simply flocking to Crist as the lesser of two evils between he and Gov. Scott, he's killing it in a match-up with his only announced competitor among likely Democratic Primary voters, 59-16%. 62% of Democrats view him favorably, as compared to 43% of ALL likely Florida voters.

The sitting Governor's political evolution may not be nearly as complicated as Charlie Crist's, but his current political standing is in much more dire straits.

Unlike Crist in 2006, Scott was never elected with a real mandate from Floridians - he defeated his Democratic opponent Alex Sink just 48.9 - 47.7% in what was otherwise a wave-Republican election year. He's suffered from uniquely poor job approval ratings his entire term in office, and currently sits  at 33/55% per PPP, leading their President, Dean Debnam, to label Scott "one of the most unpopular Governors in the country. . . "

Based on his head-to-head numbers against Charlie Crist, he's also one of the most at risk of losing his seat, trailing 50-38% in the most recent poll. And the bad news runs deeper than the top line.

Pull back the curtains of the PPP survey, and you'll see that women and men, young and old, black, white, and Latino - virtually every demographic & political group surveyed prefers Crist over Scott. And despite what the information in the chart below might suggest, no, it isn't because PPP finds a much more racially diverse electorate than the one that turned out in 2010 (and in some ways, 2012).