Florida Senate Update

We have a pair of polls to look at updating us on the Florida Senate race, a general election carpet bomb from Rasmussen, and a peek at the race between the Democrats in the primary from PPP.

Unfortunately, what we don’t have is any clarity.

For the Democrats, PPP tells us what we already knew: it’s still a close race between Kendrick Meek and Jeff Greene. Meek leads Greene 28-25, with two other candidates near the Margin of Error of 5.3. It’s essentially a two way race, and Meek only pulls a 61% lead probability according to my math.

What Rasmussen tells us though is that it might not matter which Democrat runs. In looking at how both Democrats match up against newly left-leaning independent Charlie Crist and against Republican Marco Rubio, the differences look to me like random noise.

Against Meek, the result is Rubio 35 – Crist 33 – Meek 20 (MoE 4.5). Against Greene, it flips to Crist 36 – Rubio 34 – Greene 19. But Rubio only moves one point, as does the Democrat, and Crist moves only three. All of these changes are reasonably explained as noise caused by the randomness of the sample.

I will be interested to see if any of this changes once the Democrats and Republicans have official nominees, when Rubio and either Greene or Meek win their primaries making the choices becomes clear for left and right of center Floridians.