Thanks to some recent polls, we now know that Republican Attorney General Bill McCollum has a gubernatorial lead on Democrat Chief Financial Officer Alex Sink, and that Gov. Charlie Crist is comfortably ahead of Marco Rubio in the Republican U.S. Senate primary. The elections, lest we forget, are in November 2010.
What the polls have revealed is that those candidates with the most name recognition are ahead. In the case of Sink, it’s likely that there are voters, including females, who don’t even know that “Alex” is derived from Adelaide. That’s why we have campaigns, which are won’t commence for a while.
In the case of Crist, a career politician best known for being ideologically safe and personally pleasant, he also has the GOP establishment behind him. Rubio, the former Florida House Speaker, is attractive to the increasingly marginalized base of the incredibly shrinking Republican Party.
This far out, the polls could only confirm that candidates whom voters are most familiar with would be in the lead. But we already knew that.