released on Thursday that includes all three of the major U.S. Senate candidates mixed into one survey shows Charlie Crist leading with 38%, Marco Rubio at 32%, and Kendrick Meek at 19%.
However, pollster Brad Coker says that much of that support for Crist comes from Democrats and African-Americans, which he believes will change once voters get to know Meek better as his campaign unfolds (Meek agrees, telling CL in an interview last week, that Crist won't get the 18% of the black vote he got against Jim Davis against him in November).
Coker told the Miami Herald that Meek inevitably will be better known later this year than he is now, and that's not hard to believe. As we wrote in our feature article this week, in a Quinnipiac poll from last month, 71% of voters surveyed said they didn't know enough about Meek, which was almost identical to the same survey six months before.
This article appears in May 5-11, 2010.