(Via @Aaron_RS) This is gonna be surreal.
Former Florida Gov. Charlie Crist all but announced his intentions to run for Congress in a Tampa Bay-area House seat that will likely be redrawn to include his home, have more Democrats and lack an incumbent.
“If the new congressional map includes my home, I intend on running to serve the people again,” Crist said in a Twitter post on Monday afternoon.
As the story notes: this is not an Alan Grayson kind of situation. A redrawn FL-13 is, on paper, a good fit for the former governor and former Republican and former Senatorial candidate and former Independent… who presumably will be staying a Democrat for this race, because that’s a lot of ‘formers.’ And with incumbent David Jolly deciding to run for Senate, Crist might actually win.
The abridged version for why that is because the core of the district in question was one where the population was trending more and more Democratic while still happily re-electing its Republican Representative (Bill Young), who by the way was Chairman of the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Defense*. Rep. Young passed away in 2013, still in office; the Democrats spent a lot of money to flip the seat in the special, failed, and then managed to thoroughly mess up the general election, to the point where the Democrats didn’t even have a formal candidate at all.
But now it’s going to be 2016, and the district is being rewritten as part of the Democratic party’s successful initiative to break up majority-minority districts in central Florida. The way that it’s likely to be redrawn will mean that pro-Crist voters will be added, and anti-Crist voters will be subtracted; and since the district itself voted for Crist in 2014 (assuming that that Politico article is accurate) that’s good news for Crist. And great news for people like me, if not for the people of FL-13: even if Charlie Crist gets elected, he’ll have no principles whatsoever and a need for attention, which is pretty much the same thing as saying that he’d be great fodder for political writers. Seeing as the aforementioned Alan Grayson is going to be out of federal office entirely in 2017, it’s always a pleasure to hear when somebody equally useful to me is going to be potentially on-call to take his place.
Besides, maybe Crist will flip again. God knows he’s done it enough already.
Moe Lane (crosspost)
*Translation: the ‘by the way’ was highly sarcastic.
… Florida’s gonna be *weird* in 2016..
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Mew
That _is_, after all, par for the course, though.
Gator’s gonna have to hustle…
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Mew
What is happening to Grayson? Why will he be out of federal office? Haven’t heard anything.
It’s Florida: you can’t be on the ballot for two offices at once. That’s why Marco Rubio isn’t running for re-election in the Senate.
I can’t help but view that as an error on Marco’s part… although it does leave him in the wind when he loses the primary.
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Perhaps he’d make a good Ambassador to Cuba?
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Mew
He’s either going to be on the ticket, or a Cabinet official in 2017. If the latter, he’ll be well-placed to run for Florida Governor in 2022.
This is what happens when we give the Florida Supreme Court final say over congressional districts. It is bloody ridiculous that we are still redrawing them three years after the end of the process.