The next Senator from Florida is almost certainly going to be Marco Rubio. Kendrick Meek and Charlie Crist split the center-left of the electorate and spent most of their time in the campaign beating each other up, while Rubio, unchallenged, coasted into the lead. The race has gotten so far out of hand now that I don’t think that the claim Crist would caucus with Democrats matters anymore.

Spotted this in the New York Times’ piece about Marco Rubio trying to run a slightly less Teabaggy campaign.

Thanks to a brutal Republican primary battle between Attorney General Bill McCollum and billionaire Rick Scott, Democrat Alex Sink has been able to take the lead for the first time in Quinnipac’s newest poll.

There has been much hope — or dread, depending on which party you support — that the embrace of arch-conservative and Tea Party-backed candidates in contest primaries could seriously cost the Republican Party several Senate seats this November. The economy may be the key to Republican outcomes.

The great state of Florida happens to have not one but two self-financed billionaire political novices running in primaries for top offices this year. Both are challenging veteran politicians with long histories in the state, and according to a new Quinnipiac poll, both have a double-digit lead over their opponents.

The competitive three-way race for the open Florida Senate seat has some interesting new developments. Republican Marco Rubio is boasting impressive fund-raising numbers, pulling in more than $4.5 million in the second quarter, and Florida Gov. Charlie Crist is pushing to place an offshore-drilling ban on the ballot.

Marco Rubio (BP-FL) went on Faux News the other day and belched up this weird tirade against labor.

Florida Gov. Charlie Crist, running for Senate as an independent, holds a narrow lead in a three-way race. How he’ll fare depends partly on which Democrat will be his opponent. An Aug, 24 primary will decide that.

We’ll have to see how it develops, but the muck is flying in Florida.

The unfolding disaster has dramatically reduced support for offshore drilling among Democrats and independents. It dropped by 13 percent since February. Yet, over the same time period, Republican support for drilling has remained strong (76 percent in May, compared with 74 percent in February). Overall, 54 percent of Americans still support more offshore drilling, but that’s significantly less than the 63 percent that approved of it in February. There is now a large and growing divergence between Republicans and other Americans.