Heightening the GOP’s anxiety is the national focus on the race. National GOP turns on Fla. candidate

CLEARWATER, Fla. — Their frustration had been mounting for weeks. But by late January national Republicans had had it with David Jolly, their candidate in Tuesday’s nationally watched Florida congressional special election.

The candidate had just told the state’s top political reporter that he disagreed with an ad the party was airing against his Democratic opponent — a spot paid for with the nearly $500,000 the GOP had already spent on Jolly’s behalf.


“Are you f—-ing kidding me?” a senior National Republican Congressional Committee official told a Jolly staffer over the phone, according to two sources familiar with the conversation. Would the Jolly campaign prefer that the NRCC stop spending money in the race altogether? the official asked.

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Over the past week, a half-dozen Washington Republicans have described Jolly’s campaign against Democrat Alex Sink as a Keystone Cops operation, marked by inept fundraising, top advisers stationed hundreds of miles away from the district in the state capital and the poor optics of a just-divorced, 41-year-old candidate accompanied on the campaign trail by a girlfriend 14 years his junior. The sources would speak only on condition of anonymity.

Publicly, both sides declined to discuss the dispute. In a brief interview here this week, Jolly shrugged off questions about how he’s conducted his campaign. Andrea Bozek, an NRCC spokeswoman said, “We don’t discuss internal conversations we have with campaigns,” but added that “local and national Republicans have been working around the clock to elect David Jolly on Tuesday.”

Heightening the GOP’s anxiety is the national focus on the race — a battle for control of one of the nation’s few true tossup congressional districts, the outcome of which will inevitably be seen as a measure of the political environment heading into the November midterm. Republicans know that if Jolly loses, Democrats will point to the race as evidence that 2014 isn’t the lost cause for them that many have been predicting.

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It is rare for party officials to criticize one of their own candidates, even anonymously, days before an election. One explanation may be so they can point to Jolly — as opposed to the national political mood or the ineffectiveness of attacks against Sink over her support for Obamacare — if he loses.

Standing outside Lenny’s Restaurant, a popular breakfast spot here, Jolly sounded upbeat.

“We’re one team. We’re one team. We share a commitment to winning this seat, because we share the same view of government,” he said. “Look, campaigns always have story lines to them. The important thing we focus on is what our party stands for, what I stand for, and what Alex stands for.”

Aides to Jolly did not respond to several requests for comment on specific criticisms of the campaign.

( Also on POLITICO: Poll: Alex Sink, David Jolly in tight race)

Despite Jolly’s problems, polls show a close race, with Sink narrowly ahead heading into the election. Sink, the state’s former chief financial officer who narrowly lost the 2010 race for Florida governor, has made her own missteps, most recently drawing criticism for poorly phrased remarks about illegal immigrants. She has appeared uneasy with the national exposure during the race: When NBC anchor Chuck Todd asked to moderate one of the forums, for example, her campaign vetoed it, saying it wanted a more local figure to ask the questions.

Jolly, a longtime aide to Young who left Capitol Hill in 2007 to start a lobbying career, wasn’t the Republican establishment’s first choice. In fact, GOP officials sought out three other prospects, eager to find a candidate with a higher and more appealing profile than they believed Jolly possessed.

After longtime GOP Rep. Bill Young died in October, House Speaker John Boehner called Rick Baker, a popular former mayor of St. Petersburg, and pressed him to run for the vacant seat. The Baker courtship didn’t stop there: Former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush also pushed the former mayor to run, according to two sources. (Bush has since gotten behind Jolly, appearing in TV ads calling him “the best candidate to go to Congress.”)

After mulling it over for a few days, Baker turned them down. By that time, Jolly’s name had emerged as a possible candidate. But national Republicans went after two other possibilities — former Clearwater Mayor Frank Hibbard and Pinellas County Sheriff Bob Gualtieri — both of whom also declined. That left Jolly to face off against state Rep. Kathleen Peters and one other candidate in the Republican primary.

As soon as the GOP primary began, problems emerged. State Sen. Jack Latvala, a powerful local powerbroker, bypassed Jolly and threw his support to Peters. And in a bizarre twist, Young’s family was divided: The late congressman’s widow, Beverly, backed Jolly while his son, Billy, was behind Peters.

Jolly won the mid-January primary easily. But his campaign entered the general election nearly broke — and, according to multiple sources, lacking a clear plan to catch up to Sink in the cash race. Jolly hadn’t hired a finance director, and some Republicans grumbled that he was reluctant to make fundraising calls.

Republicans grew worried. According to two sources familiar with the matter, NRCC officials pressed the Jolly campaign on whether it had come up with a blueprint to address the fundraising problems and counter the looming Democratic attacks on his lobbying career.

The Jolly camp response was dismissive: We’ve got it under control, staffers told them.

Unconvinced, the NRCC in late January dispatched a finance staffer to Florida to help the candidate fill his coffers. Soon after that, the committee sent three additional aides to the state to help Jolly’s team in a variety of ways.

With Jolly’s campaign basically insolvent, Democrats began pounding him on the airwaves. In the three weeks following the GOP primary, Sink and her Democratic allies outspent the Republican side nearly two-to-one on advertising. Many of the Democratic spots would echo an attack line that the party would use throughout the race: Don’t elect a D.C. lobbyist as your next congressman.

One ad from the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee portrayed a suit-clad Jolly imitator walking from a K Street office to the Capitol. “So little gets done for us, while the special interests have lobbyists like David Jolly. He’s what’s wrong with Washington,” the narrator said.

To date, Jolly has raised $1 million to Sink’s $2.5 million. National Republicans say it’s hard to fathom how a candidate with deep connections to the D.C. influence world — and one who’s running in such a high-profile race — has struggled to draw donations.

Jolly’s lack of cash has left him dependent on outside conservative groups over which he lacked control — including the NRCC and Karl Rove-founded American Crossroads — to do much of his bidding. The NRCC spot that Jolly distanced himself from, to the consternation of GOP officials, criticized Sink for using a state plane for personal travel. Washington Republicans believed it was an effective attack; Jolly suggested it wasn’t fair game, saying there was more “nuance” to Sink’s conduct than the ad claimed.

Some of the ads that Jolly’s campaign produced were done on the cheap: One showed him standing in front of an obviously fake backdrop of the Florida coastline.

Mike Fasano, a popular former GOP state representative from nearby Pasco County, said it’s surprising, given the Republican candidate’s problems, that Jolly might still win.

“It’s not been run as I’ve seen other campaigns been run,” Fasano said. “I think he was probably getting bad advice from whoever he was getting advice from — his consultant, his campaign manager, whoever.”

Addressing a small group of reporters Wednesday, Jolly admitted his campaign lacked the money to defend himself adequately on the airwaves.

“Look, I’m a first-time candidate. I don’t come from personal wealth. I don’t come from family wealth,” he said. Sink “brought to her campaign statewide name recognition and a national party that clearly promised they’d put all the fundraising resources behind it.”

Fundraising hasn’t been Jolly’s only trouble. He’s also overseen a campaign that veteran GOP operatives describe as disjointed. Two of the campaign’s top staffers, adviser Marc Reichelderfer and communications director Sarah Bascom, have worked out of Tallahassee, a four-hour drive from St. Petersburg. Bascom, the president of a public affairs firm and a former top aide in the Florida state Senate, is a cousin of Jolly’s.

It is unusual for a communications staffer to work so far away from where a race is taking place, and Bascom’s distance from the 13th District has been a persistent source of complaints among Republicans. With her absent, Jolly often relied on a team of young aides to monitor his interviews with the parade of reporters who’ve descended on the district to write about the race.

Neither Reichelderfer nor Bascom responded to requests for comment.

The resulting media coverage has been overwhelmingly negative. On Wednesday, the Tampa Bay Times reported that Jolly’s Florida condo development is typically used by part-time residents, fueling questions about his ties to the district. In January, it was a story that he had once lobbied for companies that sought stimulus funds. A few weeks before that, the Times reported that Jolly was dating a 27-year-old former employee of his.

Behind the scenes, his campaign has caused grief for Republican leaders in Washington. The NRCC has spent nearly $2 million in the race, precious resources that could be used to help other candidates this year. But on at least two occasions, Jolly declined to say he would back Boehner as speaker. After the second response, Jolly sent out a tweet clarifying that, indeed, he would back Boehner.

That wasn’t enough for the speaker’s allies.

“After all that was done to help Jolly, his noncommittal statements on if he supports the speaker made Boehner advisers furious,” said one Republican official close to Boehner’s operation.

If Jolly has a strength as a candidate, it’s his accessibility. While Sink’s public events are tightly controlled, Jolly takes any questions thrown his way. At the diner and at a later stop at his campaign office to visit volunteers, some people wanted to talk to him about the race or about his views on a particular issue.

But other times, the conversation was more personal. At campaign headquarters, Jolly asked one of his volunteers how her preparation for the bar exam was going.

“It’s far more intimidating than it is difficult,” Jolly, an attorney by training, told her encouragingly.

Addressing a few reporters Wednesday, Jolly said he always knew the race would draw a national audience and plenty of dollars. But he seemed to acknowledge the possibility that he hadn’t done enough to stop the Democratic offensive.

“I think there’s a lot of noise out there,” he said. “And the unfortunate thing is I’m not sure voters know exactly where we stand on the issues.”