Demanding to make the Florida political establishment take his third-party candidacy seriously, Libertarian Party of Florida gubernatorial candidate Adrian Wyllie has named Pasco County insurance agent Greg Roe as his nominee for Lt. Governor and running mate.
"We're going to be dealing with dramatic issues with health insurance, flood insurance , property insurance and so on and so forth, so I really wanted someone who's an expert in that field on my team," Wyllie told CL this morning before attending a lunchtime campaign forum at Maggiano's in Westshore Mall. "He brings a lot of knowledge and experience to the campaign. We've been friends for some time. He's the chairman of the Libertarian Pasco County Party. He was the best choice."
Wyllie is in the middle of his "30 campaign events in 30 days" craft-brewery tour of the Sunshine State, and his voice has already given out not even halfway through August. He deflects the issue by self-deprecatingly saying that "If I sound like an elephant seal on helium, please forgive me."
The 41-year-old Pinellas County resident continues to do relatively well in the polls for a third-party candidate, though that's sometimes hard to assess since his name isn't always listed in such surveys by pollsters.
"They do seem to misspell my name as 'other,'" he jokes, referring to a Survey USA poll released last week that showed Rick Scott holding a slim 45-43 percentage lead over Crist, with eight percent of the vote listed under the category of "other." That comes after his best showing of the year in a major poll, the nine percentage points he garnered in the most recent Quinnipiac survey, and his confidence is growing.
"We think with our recent media exposure, the craft brewery tour, we wouldn't be surprised if the next major poll to come out puts us in the mid-teens."
The most recent ads produced by the Scott and Crist campaigns are drenched with negative information about their opponents, prompting Wyllie to quip that "they're all true," adding that he believes the only time either of the two men are speaking the truth is when they're attacking each other.
"These guys can't run on their records," he says. "They both have horrendous records as governors of the state of Florida, that's why they don't want to talk about issues; they're going to sling mud and that's their modus operandi, and they're not going to be able to deal with a third person in this three-way race that's actually out there talking about the issues, actually offering up real solutions, not just the same old recycled garbage."
This article appears in Aug 7-13, 2014.