Charlie Cooke — a.k.a, the good Charlie in Florida — asked whether Charlie Crist, the bad Charlie in Florida, is trying to lose. Stephen Green, somewhat tongue-in-cheek, asks if Charlie Crist has secretly been a GOP deep-cover agent since leaving the party in 2010.
Charlie Crist announced he was running for governor in May 2021. At the time, GOP governor Ron DeSantis had a 60 percent approval rating, but perhaps Crist thought that approval rating would fade. After all, Florida gubernatorial elections, while won by Republicans lately, tend to be extremely close. In 2018, DeSantis won by about a half a percentage point. In 2014, Rick Scott won by about a percentage point over Crist. In 2010, Rick Scott won by about a percentage point over Alex Sink. The last Florida governor to win by a significant margin was… Crist, back in 2006.
Maybe Charlie Crist figured he would be in another jump-ball situation, and as a former governor, he could do what other Democrats like Alex Sink and the now-indicted Andrew Gillum could not.
But that expected collapse in DeSantis’s popularity hasn’t arrived. A poll commissioned by the Democratic Governors Association still shows DeSantis ahead by five percentage points. Florida now has more registered Republicans than Democrats, and the national political environment still favors the GOP. Orlando trial lawyer John Morgan, a longtime Democratic donor and former employer of Crist, sounded glum in an interview with CNN: “I think Charlie has a very, very tough road to hoe. And I’ve pissed money away before.”
And yet, after the primary, Crist didn’t move to the center; he seemed to move further to the left. He denounced DeSantis supporters: “Those who support the governor should stay with him. I don’t want your vote. If you have that hate in your heart, keep it there.” He completely renounced his old positions on abortion. He picked a teachers’ union head as his running mate. He said that Biden was just being honest when he called Republicans “semi-fascists.”
So what’s going on? First, keep in mind DeSantis has $132 million on hand, while Crist had less than $1 million on hand, as of August 19. This is Bambi vs. Godzilla territory.
Florida is an extremely expensive state to run for statewide office, with ten media markets. Crist desperately needs money, and if the big Democratic committees are skeptical or have more pressing priorities, he needs the Democratic grassroots to fall in love with him fast. Thus, he’s sounding more and more like Howard Dean, Alan Grayson, Bernie Sanders, AOC, and other in-your-face progressives. Crist has to make the typical small-dollar Democratic donor more excited to give to him than, say, Beto O’Rourke, or John Fetterman, or Gretchen Whitmer.
Charlie Crist, running to the left but with money for TV ads, has a chance of keeping the outcome reasonably close. Charlie Crist, running to the center but with no money, is going to melt like an ice cream cone in the Florida midsummer heat.
If victory looks unlikely, what’s the next best outcome for the 66-year-old Crist? Something like the Stacey Abrams playbook — if you can’t win, leave Democrats, particularly the Twitter Left, believing that you should have won. And campaigning as an outspoken progressive should open up post-campaign gigs at MSNBC, etc. “Crist the reborn outspoken progressive” is a more interesting than “Crist who ran for office more often than Pat Paulsen.”
To understand what Charlie Crist is doing, follow the money… or the lack of it.