Gov. Rick Scott's campaign excoriated Quinnipiac University’s survey showing his opponent, Sen. Bill Nelson, with a 6-point lead. | Joe Raedle/Getty Images Elections Rick Scott battles the pollsters in Florida Senate race ‘So, after the election, will they release an apology or a retraction of some sort?’

MIAMI — Florida governors expect a boost in public opinion surveys after managing a natural disaster, but so far Rick Scott has received no appreciable bump after Hurricane Michael. In three consecutive Senate polls released after the governor earned wall-to-wall media coverage for managing the storm, Scott trails Democratic Sen. Bill Nelson.

Scott’s team isn’t buying it. His campaign excoriated Quinnipiac University’s survey Monday showing Nelson with a large lead of 6 points, and argued instead that the governor is in fact leading by 5 points.


The poll-truthing, however, revealed a deeper concern that’s long gnawed at some Republicans — including GOP donors from Scott’s well-heeled hometown of Naples: Scott should be doing far better given his cash advantage over Nelson.

“A lot of these people are essentially neighbors of Gov. Scott,” said Trey Radel, a former Republican congressman from Naples who’s a political consultant and radio show host. “And the fear they have — and that they keep expressing — is that Gov. Scott, like his first election, has loads of money that he has pumped in and that these donors have given, and yet Rick maintained only a small lead even before these polls came out with Nelson [ahead]. And they believe he should be burying Bill Nelson in the polls.”

The Senate race took a backseat Tuesday after reports surfaced that Democratic gubernatorial nominee and Tallahassee Mayor Andrew Gillum accepted tickets to the Broadway show “Hamilton” from an undercover FBI agent leading a probe into the city’s economic development agency.

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In the run-up to the Aug. 28 primary, Scott’s campaign and Republican backers spent more than $33.8 million on TV compared with less than $12.3 million for Nelson. Scott gained a small marginal lead over Nelson in polling.

But after the primary, Democrats had kept enough powder dry to begin firing back — and they’ve spent almost as much as the Republicans in the Senate race on TV: $17 million compared with the GOP’s $18.4 million. Factoring in ads that have been run and reserved, Democrats now edge Republicans in Senate race TV spending $54 million to $53 million — putting Florida on course to spend $153 million on air and become the most expensive Senate race in the country.

As the Democrats’ message sank in, Nelson started to pull ahead of Scott in many polls.

Then, on Oct. 10, came an event that appeared to be a political boon for Scott — Hurricane Michael. The governor was seemingly everywhere in the Panhandle hurricane zone and on state and national television.

In the days before and during the weeklong aftermath of the storm’s landfall, Scott was either mentioned or interviewed on television 6,417 times, according to media monitoring services TVEyes and Critical Mention. That burst of earned media represented a huge spike in attention compared with Scott’s prestorm media footprint and was about six times greater than that of Nelson, who seemed relatively to disappear.

It was also an opportunity for Scott to showcase some of his best executive skills in managing a disaster, techniques credited with boosting his approval ratings by 8 percentage points in a Mason-Dixon Polling & Research survey after Hurricane Irma in 2017.

Scott announced he might hold no more campaign events in order to focus on hurricane recovery. Meanwhile, his campaign kept churning out ads, some using behind the scenes images of Scott responding to the crisis.

Then, on Sunday, CNN released a poll showing Nelson leading Scott 50-45 among likely voters.

The Democrat’s advantage, within the survey’s margin of error, was easy to write off at the time because pollster SSRS had interviewed what appeared to be too many independents and too few Republicans relative to Democrats for a Florida midterm.

The next day, Quinnipiac’s poll landed, and it again showed Nelson up by 5 points — 52-46 percent. Unlike the SSRS survey, the Quinnipiac poll reflected a fairly typical Florida midterm turnout and interviewed more Republicans than Democrats or independents. The Nelson lead was also within the poll’s margin of error.

Shortly after Quinnipiac’s survey was released Monday, SurveyUSA followed up with its own poll showing Nelson with a 49-41 percent lead over Scott that’s outside the survey’s margin of error. Unlike the Quinnipiac and SSRS polls, SurveyUSA’s sampled voters online.

Scott’s campaign immediately swung into action. It released a memo sent to supporters that said the governor led Nelson by 5 — rather than trailed by 6 in the Quinnipiac poll — and that the governor’s advantage was outside the margin of error. Campaign officials also say Scott was ahead before the hurricane struck.

“Rick Scott is ahead by 5 points. This poll is more than 10 points off. It’s a complete joke,” Scott’s top adviser, Curt Anderson with OnMessage Media, wrote on Twitter to Quinnipiac. “So, after the election, will they release an apology or a retraction of some sort? I will remind them and keep you updated.”

The campaign’s memo also said Democrats “know they are behind, and are throwing everything they can at the Governor, with their trademark disregard for facts or truth. Some things never change of course, but the voters of Florida are not falling for it.”

Chris Hayden, a spokesman for the Nelson-backing Senate Majority PAC, said Scott’s ad campaign was doomed from the start because he’s running as a Washington outsider, despite holding office for two terms and being backed by the GOP establishment.

A fourth poll , released Sunday by the Democratic firm SEA, had positive news for Scott, relatively speaking, and found he had an inside-the-error-margin lead of 2 points over Nelson.

Considering Florida’s history of razor-thin elections margins — the past four top-of-the-ticket races were decided by 1.2 percentage points or less — the SEA poll is the most in line with historical trends.

Radel, the former congressman from Naples, said there’s only so much stock Republicans put in polls. After all, Trump won Florida when most surveys showed he trailed Hillary Clinton by an inside-the-error-margin amount. And Scott also won his races for governor in 2010 and 2014 when many polls indicated he wouldn’t.

Also, Radel said, there’s just the tribal nature of politics at play.

“We believe in the polls that are good for us, just like we believe the boldface lies that my party tells me, just like I don’t believe the boldface lies of the other party,” Radel laughed.