If you hear a rubbing sound it’s the sound of Democrats rubbing their hands in gleeful anticipation in Florida:
Shrugging off critics who derided her campaign as spectacularly inept, U.S. Rep. Katherine Harris easily won the GOP nomination for a shot at unseating incumbent Sen. Bill Nelson .
“Tonight I say to Bill Nelson: Come home, Bill. Enough is enough,” Harris said Tuesday.
However, apparently “enough is enough” was also the conclusion drawn by many Harris staffers who seemed to set a campaign turnover record when they quit. Unless they were fired. MORE:
As secretary of state in 2000, Harris oversaw the recount that gave George W. Bush the White House. She became a rising star in the Republican Party, parlaying name recognition into two terms in Congress.
But state GOP leaders tried to talk Harris out of running for the Senate, citing fears she would lose to Nelson — a Democrat who had no primary challenger — and spur a large turnout by Democrats in November that would hurt the entire Republican ticket.
Harris’ campaign was widely ridiculed, even by her own party. Fundraising lagged, her appearance was mocked, staff members kept quitting and she was linked to a corrupt defense contractor.
Still, she won comfortably, thanks to weak opposition and a strong base. Some 2 1/2 hours after the polls closed, the 49-year-old congresswoman arrived at her Tampa campaign headquarters to chants of “We want Katherine.”
“It’s a great victory because it shows each of us we can overcome adversity to achieve extraordinary victories,” Harris said.
And she’ll now need an extraordinary image makeover, luck or a guardian angel descending from the heavens, according to the latest Rasmussen poll, taken before the primary:
Democratic Senator Bill Nelson, now leading 57% to 34% (see crosstabs), also remains the prohibitive favorite to win reelection in November. His lead has been as high as twenty-eight percentage points, so Harris can perhaps claim that she is narrowing the gap a bit.
But not really. Early in the year, the Rasmussen Reports three-poll rolling average of showed Nelson with an eighteen-point advantage, which widened to twenty and then twenty-six points. Harris’s recent flurry of ads depicting herself as a fighter and Nelson as a do-nothing liberal may have persuaded some voters that she is not as tenuously-hinged as depicted in many campaign stories. But she has yet to make any real dent in Nelson’s prospects or win more than 35% support herself.
Indeed, Harris wins only 60% of even GOP voters in the current match-up with Nelson; Nelson lures 35%.
This margin might not be as big if the GOP had been able to field a better candidate who didn’t so much baggage that TSA could be tempted to send a whole team out to inspect it. And the GOP is a big enough party so that it didn’t have to necessariy be a Harris/Nelson match-up.
But unless there’s some huge development, everything in this race is over except for the counting of the votes (which sometimes is a bit more complicated in Florida..)
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.