Well, there's been a whole lot of space devoted over the past 24 hours about the whole Kendrick Meek quitting/Charlie Crist caucusing with Democrats/Bill Clinton playing the heavy story being breathlessly covered by state and national media.
The bottom line as we leave you on this Friday afternoon - despite wherever Kendrick Meek's mind was at last week, he's staying in the race for sure, and why not? There's only a handful of days before the election, when he'll permanently be out of the race, if one is to believe his lowly poll ratings.
What about Charlie Crist? According to media reports, he was actually the man who contacted the White House initially to try to ultimately have pressure applied to Kendrick Meek to get him to quit?
Well, though there was talk earlier this week of a Crist "surge" after two polls showed him trailing Marco Rubio by 8% and 7% respectively, his best showing in weeks, that talk was deflated somewhat on Friday when two new polls showed the governor to be losing to Rubio by much bigger margins.
The Mason/Dixon poll has Rubio back up at 45%, Crist at 28%, and Kendrick Meek at 21%. A Sunshine State News poll was even worse news for the governor, showing him trailing Rubio by 20%, 47%-27%, with Meek at 23%, nearly mirroring a statement made by the Rubio camp Thursday night that they said showed in their internal polling that Meek was challenging Crist for second place in the race, well behind their candidate.
Part of the supposed "deal" if Meek were to have quit last week and endorsed Charlie Crist was that the governor would announce that he would caucus with the Democrats if elected, supposedly a necessary measure needed to have everything else go off as planned.
Well, that didn't happen, but a close ally of Crist, Orlando area attorney John Morgan, of the law firm Morgan & Morgan and the ubiquitous commercials ("For the people"), tells the Wall Street Journal that Crist will caucus with the Democrats, anyhow.
“Crist is going to caucus with the Democrats,” Mr. Morgan said. “I don’t think there’s any ifs, ands or buts about it. It would be, in a very tight year, almost like a Democratic pickup in a solid Republican state.”
Mr. Morgan says the question of whether Mr. Crist would side with Democrats had nothing to do with any purported deal under which Mr. Meek would quit the race.
Crist spokesman Danny Kanner has denied that Mr. Crist had agreed to caucus with Senate Democrats as part of any deal with Mr. Clinton or Mr. Meek.
