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Gov. Rick Scott thinks that Florida voters will be fooled by $80 million in television advertising into electing him for a second term as the state’s governor.

According to the National Review, Scott thinks he can win another term because he is going to spend big, “The other question, of course, is: Can he win? The incumbent, Governor Rick Scott, says he can’t. When I ask him why he’s so confident, Scott, who is on message with metronomic reliability, says, “I will have $25 million in the bank by the end of the year and will use it in early 2014 to define my opponent.”

The problem for Scott is that is looking more and more likely that he will be running against Charlie Crist. While the conventional wisdom is that the state’s Republicans will turn out in droves to vote against Scott, but Crist still got 13% of Republican support in the latest Quinnipiac poll. The problem for Scott is that he has the support of 75% of Republicans, but Crist has the support of 83% of Democrats and leads with Independents by 12 points.



The Tampa Bay Times’ unscientific insider poll of Florida’s political elite found that Republicans are gaining optimism. The reason for this optimism is both dubious and familiar, “When it comes to Rick Scott being re-elected, never underestimate the power of a strengthening economy and $80 million on TV. Scott will pound into the frontal lobes of every Floridian that he promised jobs and delivered on his promise. He wins on this critical question: Did you do better under four years of Charlie Crist or four years of Rick Scott?”

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This thought process should sound familiar to anyone who followed the Mitt Romney campaign last year. Republicans are trying to take an unpopular candidate, wrap him around the economy, and carpet bomb voters with advertising. This is the same strategy that led to Mitt Romney’s collisional failure as a candidate in 2012, but the GOP brain trust is sure that it will work in 2014.

The problem with the message of Rick Scott job creator is that most Florida voters don’t agree. According to the same Quinnipiac poll 33% of voters think that the economy has gotten better, 18% believe that it has gotten worse, and 47% think that it has stayed the same.

Like Mitt Romney, Rick Scott is a fatally flawed and unlikable incumbent with a terrible record whose hopes for reelection hinge on the hope that Florida voters forget everything that Scott has done to them during his first term in office.

I suspect that will take a lot more that saturating the state with TV ads for Rick Scott to defeat Charlie Crist.