Although it's rainy in the Tampa Bay area and much of Florida, South Florida this morning isn't expected to see rain until a little later in the day.
The weather can always be a factor on election day, and since Rick Scott's camp believes the more turnout the better, well, we'll see how motivated his voters are if in fact the elements get a little more extreme as the day progresses.
If you haven't already heard, there has been a record turnout of early voting over the past two weeks in the Sunshine State,with 361,615 voters casting their ballots before the polls opened across the state at 7 a.m. (That's up 44% from early primary voting in 2008, and 40% from 2006).
It absolutely does not mean we'll see any type of record voting tonight, just that those supremely interested in the election have already taken advantage of that convenience (the trend will continue in the future to diminish election day as being the ultimate day of voters deciding, as absentee, early voting and perhaps Internet voting will only increase).
Now the Rick Scott camp is hoping – really hoping – for major turnout today, as they see that as the path to victory, as Scott campaign adviser Tony Fabrizio wrote in a memo, courtesy of the St. Pete Times:
“Given that as of Saturday, August 21st nearly 520,000 Florida Republicans have already voted by absentee or early vote, we expect overall turnout of at least 1.7 million in the Florida Republican gubernatorial primary,” Fabrizio said. “This would represent roughly 41% of registered Republicans, a 70% increase over the 2006 gubernatorial primary. This is consistent with the increased turnout we have seen in Republican primaries across the country, where outsiders have shocked the establishment candidates.”
Meanwhile, not only is the entire GOP establishment in Tallahassee firmly behind Scott's opponent, Attorney General Bill McCollum, but national Republicans are as well. Haley Barbour, the chairman of the Republican Governors Association, will be hanging with McCollum headquarters tonight near Orlando, and will headline a Republican Party "Victory Committee fund-raising dinner tomorrow night in Orlando – if McCollum wins tonight.
But what if he doesn't? It's not beyond the realm of possibilities. Though I have been with the conventional wisdom over the past two weeks in assessing the races as the new rich guys having their fun but ultimately losing out to the establishment candidates, the two latest polls in this race have me questioning that premise.
This article appears in Aug 19-25, 2010.