Photograph by AP

In this frame grab from video, Florida Sen. Marco Rubio takes a sip of water during his Republican response to President Barack Obama’s State of the Union address, on Feb. 12, 2013,

Sen. Marco Rubio was behind a last-minute change on the final day of Florida’s legislative session to move the state’s presidential primaryelection  into compliance with national party rules.

Rubio, a Republican, might well be on that ballot.

But that’s not the reason Rubio’s team says the change was needed. Instead, it was to ensure the state’s vote is fully counted by the party in the primary.

For the past two presidential elections, Florida has lost delegates at the national conventions because the state violated Republican and Democratic rules with an early primary date. Rubio was state House speaker when the state first jumped the line.

Republicans would have only 12 of their 99 delegates counted in 2016 if they kept an early primary, said Todd Reid, Rubio’s state policy director. The change puts Florida’s election on “the first Tuesday that the rules of the major political parties provide for state delegations to be allocated without penalty.”

Reid thought that would be March 1.

The election bill is on its way to Gov. Rick Scott for his consideration after passing the Florida House and Senate today.

“We pointed out that we needed to make a change,” Reid said. “The juice just wasn’t worth the squeeze any more.”

Original post is Rubio Intervenes in Florida Primary Move by Political Capital.

Photograph by Andrew Harrer/Bloomberg

Charles “Charlie” Crist in Washington.

Charlie Crist, the only Florida governor to willingly decline a second term, looks well positioned if he wants his old job back. The second poll in as many days shows the Republican-turned-independent-turned Democrat leading incumbent Republican Gov. Rick Scott trailing by double digits in a potential race.

In the poll out this morning from Quinnipiac University, Crist leads Scott by a margin of 50 percent to 34 percent. A survey yesterday from  Public Policy Polling showed Crist up by 52 percent to 40 percent.

Scott’s approval rating was 36 percent, according to Quinnipiac, the 15th time the Connecticut college’s pollsters asked registered voters about Scott’s approval since he took office in 2011. Among all those polls, Scott’s approval rose as high as 41 percent and dropped as low as 29 percent.

If you’re a Scott fan looking for good news, it might be his 66 percent approval among Republicans. Granted, that’s nowhere near the 87 percent that U.S. Senator Marco Rubio enjoys within their party in the same poll. But Scott’s rating among GOP voters is up 3 percentage points since the last Q poll in December, and comes after he upset many tea party activists by supporting Medicaid expansion envisioned in President Barack Obama’s health care law and proposed a $74.2 billion budget, the largest in state history.

Quinnipiac University surveyed 1,000 registered voters from March 13-18, with a margin of error of 3.1 percentage points. PPP surveyed 500 Florida voters March 15-18, with a margin of error is 4.4 percentage points.

Original post is Crist’s Second Chance: Beating Scott by Political Capital.

Photograph by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

Texas Governor Rick Perry says his first priority as president would be to do away with the new health care law while being interviewed by Google Soapbox at the Iowa State Fair pin this August 15, 2011 file photo in Iowa.

Updated at 3:30 pm EDT

What don’t Rick Perry and Mitt Romney have in common?

Health insurance for their fellow home states’ residents.

It was Perry, the Texas governor who also sought the Republican Party’s presidential nomination last year, who announced last summer that he would reject the health-care exchanges and Medicaid expansion included in President Barack Obama’s Affordable Care Act.

“The bottom line here is that Medicaid is a failed program,” Perry said in an appearance on Fox News. “To expand this program is not unlike adding a thousand people to the Titanic.”

Yet look what else is sinking:

For the fifth year in a row, Texas ranks No. 1 in Americans lacking health insurance, according to a Gallup-Healthways survey.

More than a quarter of adult Texans — 28.8 percent — lacked coverage in 2012, the highest rate for any state since the survey started in January 2008.

Massachusetts, it goes to figure, has the lowest rate, at 4.5 percent — thanks to another former governor, Romney, who once advocated a mandate there that became less appealing to him in the 2012 presidential election contest.

Nationwide, an average of 16.9 percent of all adults lacked coverage.

While Perry holds out against the Medicaid expansion, other Republican governors — including Florida’s Rick Scott — have started reassessing their opposition to the provision of “Obama-care” that offers states expanded funding and coverage for more people. The Florida Legislature, however, appears to want none of it today.

In Florida, 22.8 percent of all adults were uninsured for health care.

Gallup’s Elizabeth Mendes reports: “Uninsured rates in about half the U.S. remained higher in 2012 than in 2008. Just four states, though, show year-over-year increases every year since 2008 — Rhode Island, New Jersey, California, and New York. And Texas — the state with the highest adult uninsured rate in the country for five years in a row — continues to widen the gap between it and the state with the second-highest uninsured rate in the U.S.”

Results are based on telephone interviews conducted as part of the Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index survey throughout 2012, with a random sample of 353,564 adults and a possible margin of error of 1 percentage point.

Original post is Perry’s Titanic Texas: Health Insurance by Political Capital.

Jeb Bush, former Florida governor. Photography by William Thomas Cain / Getty Images

Former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, visiting the Texas legislature, said that sharing his thoughts on Medicaid expansion might raise some hackles back home.

It also might cause him trouble at Tenet Healthcare Corp., whose Chief Executive Officer Trevor Fetter told Bloomberg News yesterday that all Republican governors would eventually expand their programs under President Barack Obama’s 2010 Affordable Care Act.

Bush is a director at Tenet, which is based in Dallas.

Asked to discuss his opposition to expanding Medicaid at a press conference in Austin, Bush said: “No. I just don’t want to get in trouble back home.” Earlier he testified on education reform at a Texas Senate committee hearing.

Florida Gov. Rick Scott, a Republican, last week said he would approve the Medicaid expansion, joining 24 other states participating in the health program for the poor. Fourteen other Republican governors remain opposed, including Rick Perry of Texas, according to a tally by Advisory Board Co., a technology consulting company based in Washington.

Asked about his interest in running for president in 2016, Bush said it’s too early for him to consider the matter.

Original post is Jeb Bush on Medicaid: ‘Trouble Back Home’ by Political Capital.

Photograph by Andrew Harrer/Bloomberg

Charles “Charlie” Crist, governor of Florida, waits for President Barack Obama to speak in Washington.

Updated at 3:45 pm EST

Florida’s Republican Gov. Rick Scott, a former chief executive officer at HCA Holdings, could lose his 2014 re-election bid to several hypothetical opponents, including former Gov. Charlie Crist, Democratic National Committee Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman-Schultz and Tea Party supporter Allen West, according to poll results today from Public Policy Polling.

The survey showed Crist leading Scott by the largest margin: 53 percent to 39 percent.

Crist hasn’t denied rumors that he’s interested in winning back the seat he gave up in 2010, when he ran for U.S. Senate and became the first Florida governor to decline a chance for a second term. Crist, who ran for Senate as an independent after polling predicted him losing a Republican primary to now-Senator Marco Rubio, signed paperwork at a White House Christmas party last month to register as a Democrat.  He spoke at the Democratic National Convention that nominated President Barack Obama for re-election. (Obama carried Florida last year, as he did in 2008.) Crist had  served as governor, attorney general, education commissioner and a state legislator as a Republican.

The poll also showed Crist leading a primary field of potential Democratic candidates. He drew 52 percent support among Democratic voters. The next closest contender was the party’s 2010 nominee, former state Chief Financial Officer Alex Sink, with 18 percent support.

Wasserman-Schultz, a five-term congresswoman from South Florida, wasn’t included in a hypothetical primary. Her spokesman, Jonathan Beeton, has said she has no intention of running for governor.

Sink hasn’t announced her plans for next year.

West, a Republican who lost his re-election to the U.S. House in November, led Scott by 38 to 37 percent among primary voters in the survey. West announced yesterday that he’ll host a co-host a new Web show called Next Generation.

Today, West said he has no plans to challenge Scott.

“That’s one of the most asinine things I’ve ever heard,” West said.

Scott, who has acknowledged that the yellow Labrador he adopted during his 2010 race was returned to the rescue shelter after the campaign, has a 33 percent approval rating, according to the poll. He’s struggled with low approval ratings since taking office.

Still, the poll suggests Scott would win re-election against two potential Democrats: state Senator Nan Rich, who has announced a campaign for the seat, and Orlando Mayor Buddy Dyer, who hasn’t said he’ll run.

PPP conducted automated telephone interviews with 501 Florida voters, including an over-sample of 401 usual Democratic primary voters and 436 Republican primary voters, from Jan. 11-13. The margin of error for the overall sample is 4.4 percent, 4.9 percent for the Democratic portion and 4.7 for the Republican portion.

Original post is Florida’s Scott Hears Footsteps — Loudest Coming from Charlie Crist by Political Capital.

Photograph by Joe Raedle/Getty Images

Four gay and lesbian Miami-Dade couples accompanied their lawyers to the clerk's office at the U.S. courthouse to file the first federal lawsuit challenging federal and state laws prohibiting same-sex marriages as a violation of the Constitution in this file photo.

Back in May, just after President Barack Obama decided to finally come off the fence and endorse same-sex marriage, Florida Republican Gov. Rick Scott saw the move as a political mistake in his highly competitive state.

“It will hurt the president here in Florida, his position,” Scott said on CNBC, noting that just four years ago, more than 60 percent of the state’s voters approved a constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage.

Obama, of course, ended up carrying Florida as part of his re-election win. And a poll released today shows that over the eight months since Scott’s tea-leaf reading of his state, opposition to same-sex marriage among his constituents has dropped from a 10-percentage-point margin to a 2-point  difference — yet another sign of rapidly changing attitudes toward such unions.

Forty-five percent of registered voters in Florida were against same-sex marriage while 43 percent favored it, according to the survey by Connecticut-based Quinnipiac University. A Quinnipiac poll released May 23 showed 50 percent of Floridians opposing wedding bells for gay couples, while 40 percent were in support.

Here’s an even more dramatic contrast: A 2004 poll by the Maimi Herald and St. Petersburg Times found 65 percent opposing same-sex marriage in the state, compared with 27 percent who back it.

The new poll — taken Dec. 11-17 and with an error margin of plus or minus 2.3 percentage points — follows the November election in which voters in Maine, Maryland and Washington state approved referenda legalizing same-sex marriage, marking the first time such measures have passed. Previously, same-sex marriage became legal in states including Massachusetts and New York as a result of legislation or court rulings.

A national Quinnipiac poll released earlier this month showed a slight plurality of U.S. voters supporting same-sex marriage, 48 percent to 46 percent. In a comparable 2008 survey, 55 percent opposed the unions while 36 percent backed them.

Original post is Florida Poll Underscores Shifting Views on Same-Sex Unions by Political Capital.

Florida Gov. Rick Scott expressed his disappointment about the Supreme Court's decision upholding the core of the president's health care bill. Photograph by Steve Cannon/AP Photo

President Barack Obama has been Florida Gov. Rick Scott’s biggest political foil.

Scott launched his political career from Tea Party rallies in 2009 opposing the president’s 2010 health care law. On the campaign trail in 2010, many of his TV ads tied his Democratic opponent to Obama. Once in office, Scott used terms like “Obamacrats,” “Obamamath” and “Obama rail” to ridicule the the president’s agenda.

Now, Scott is rethinking his opposition to “Obama-care” after Florida voters last week supported Obama’s re-election and struck down a proposed constitutional amendment that would have made it tougher to implement the health insurance law.

Read more here.

Original post is After Obama-Vote, Scott Drops Opposition to ‘Obama-care’ by Political Capital.

Photograph by Joe Burbank/Orlando Sentinel/MCT/Getty Images

Florida Governor Rick Scott greets Mitt Romney during a rally at Flagler College, in St. Augustine, Florida, on August 13, 2012.

Florida Gov. Rick Scott, who won election despite a business record including a company engaged in Medicare fraud, is not the most popular politician.

The super-PAC backing President Barack Obama is counting on both that and the Medicare voucher plan that Mitt Romney’s running mate included in a Republican House-passed budget to work against Romney in the closing days of the campaign.

In one ad, Priorities USA Action has wrapped Scott’s history, Rep. Paul Ryan’s Medicare plan and Romney’s already reported involvement in a company that defrauded Medicare into  a “connect the dots” message for senior voters in the Sunshine State.

“Mitt Romney and Rick Scott. Connect the dots,” the narrator of the super-PAC’s ad says. “Scott ran a company that paid a record fine for committing Medicare fraud.  Then, as governor, Scott cut millions from healthcare. Romney was director of a company that stole millions from Medicare.  Now, Romney’s plan would end Medicare as we know it.  We’ve seen this picture before. Just connect the dots.”

“If Romney wins,” the ad concludes, “the middle class loses.”

In his private equity career at Bain Capital, Romney served on the board of Damon Corp., which defrauded $25 million From Medicare for unnecessary blood tests. He made $473,000 when Corning Inc. purchased Damon in 1993, the Boston Globe has reported.  Damon Corp. pleaded guilty in 1996 to a federal conspiracy charge of defrauding the government of $25 million between 1988 and 1993. It paid $119 million fine and penalty.

Romney claimed that he helped uncover the fraud, Politifact has reported, but prosecutors gave the credit to Corning for stopping the fraud. In the book, “The Real Romney,” authors Michael Kranish and Scott Helman wrote: “On the one hand, he said he hadn’t known what was going on at Damon; on the other, he said he’d helped to put a stop to practices later found to be fraudulent. One thing that looked good at Damon was the bottom line for Bain. In the end, it was a profitable deal for both the firm and Romney, however tainted by legal troubles and layoffs it may have been.””

Scott was co-founder and CEO of a company that committed the largest Medicare fraud in U.S. history, ending with the hospital-operating company Columbia/HCA paying a record $1.7 billion in fines, penalties and damages.

Scott invested tens of millions of his own money into his 2010 election campaign.

His public approval ratings have run low since narrowly winning the governor’s office.

Florida is the biggest of the swing states, the share of elderly voters there greater than in any other state.

Original post is Medicare Fraud: Obama-Backing Super-PAC Ties Scott, Romney by Political Capital.

“Tampa-St.Pete.-Clearwater and Miami area experienced largest unemployment rate declines in country,” the Republican governor tweeted @FlGovScott.

He linked to the Bureau of Labor Statistics report in that Friday message: “Unemployment rates were lower in August than a year earlier in 325 of the 372 metropolitan areas, higher in 40 areas, and unchanged in 7 areas.”

“Twenty-seven of the metropolitan divisions recorded over-the-year jobless rate decreases in August, while seven registered increases. Miami-Miami Beach-Kendall, Fla., posted the largest rate decline from a year earlier (-2.0 percentage points),” the BLS reported Oct. 5.

Josh Earnest, the principal deputy White House press secretary, who made note of Scott’s Twitter report today, told the press pool that the president would be talking about this today (at a University of Miami campus campaign rally in the biggest of all swing states):

“You’ll hear from the president a little bit more today about what he believes that we should do to build on that progress and to build on what we can do to help our economy in south Florida and communities all across the country recover from the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression,” Earnest said.

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Original post is Florida’s First Tweeter Noted Aboard Air Force One: Miami Looking Up by Political Capital.

Photograph by Joe Raedle/Getty Images

Putting up a security fence around the Tampa Bay Times Forum on August 23, 2012 as they wait for Tropical Storm Isaac.

It’s worth taking note of Isaac’s veering course.

Yet it’s worth remembering what Isaac and Gustav have in common:

Ominous beads on the northern Gulf of Mexico coast at the opening of a Republican National Convention.

The opening of the party’s convention in St. Paul, Minnesota, in 2008 was delayed for the better part of a day in respect for the people of the Gulf Coast (remember, this is the party of then-President George W. Bush, famous for making a lonely Air Force One flyover of New Orleans in his first pass over the Hurricane Katrina-ravaged city.)

The party’s presidential nominee, Senator John McCain, warned then that it “just wouldn’t be appropriate” to have a party amid a natural disaster. (Gulf-Coast Republican governors, Charlie Crist of Florida and Bobby Jindal of Louisiana, also had business to attend to at home.)

The party is convening another convention Monday in Tampa, and cable news has breathlessly focused on the path of an Atlantic storm several days away, Isaac. This is likely to keep another Florida governor, Rick Scott, at work in Tallahassee when his party convenes in Tampa.

As five-day predictions for the path of Tropical Storm Isaac today push it westward into the Gulf, Scott declared that to be a “positive” move.  (Tell that to New Orleans.)

Convention organizers “make their own decisions” about delays or cancellations, Scott said at a news conference today in Tallahassee.  Republican officials in Tampa are moving “forward with our planning” for the convention’s start while keeping “in regular contact with the National Weather Service,” William Harris, convention president and CEO, said in a statement today. Scott and local officials “have assured us that they have the resources in place to respond to this storm should it make landfall, as our primary concern is with those in the potential path of the storm,.”

More than 50,000 people are expected to visit the Tampa Bay area as Republicans hold a four-day convention to nominate Mitt Romney as their presidential candidate, according to James Davis, a convention spokesman.  The Tampa Bay Times Forum, site of the gathering, is in an evacuation zone once the storm reaches 96 miles per hour, a category 2 on the five-step Saffir-Simpson scale, according to the Hillsborough County Hurricane Guide.

Isaac  is a mere tropical storm at this stage, with maximum sustained winds of 40 mph (it takes 74 to make a hurricane). And the National Hurricane Center has posted hurricane warnings for Haiti and the Dominican Republican, suggesting that Isaac could become a Category One storm by landfall there (74-95 mph).

Category One is not a lot to worry about (see the Saffir-Simpson Scale and its predictions of damage here). Should the storm continue veering west into the Gulf, the effect of its outer bands on Tampa should be lesser — we’re suggesting rain slickers for delegates here. Should it veer eastward again, well, we’ll have to see.

However, the Northern Gulf Coast could be in for some trouble mid-week  if Isaac finds strength in the warm Gulf waters.

Gustav made landfall near Cocodrie, Louisiana, at 9:30 am CDT on Sept. 2, 2008, as a strong category Two (110 mph sustained winds) Gustav continued northwest, spreading hurricane force wind gusts across portions of Southeast and South Central Louisiana.

The 2008 convention went on.

Political Capital predicts the same for the convention of 2012.

Michael C. Bender in Tallahassee and Jim Rowley in Washington contributed to this report. 

Original post is Republican Convention Starting? — Must be a Hurricane (Isaac, Gustav) by Political Capital.