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After Tuesday's elections, Florida looms as the next front in a war between moderates and conservatives that's dividing a Republican Party trying to surge toward the 2010 election.
The state's GOP primary for U.S. Senate has all the ingredients for an ideological powder keg. It pits the sitting governor, Charlie Crist, who embraced President Barack Obama's spending plan, against a scrappy former state lawmaker, Marco Rubio, who's become a darling of the conservative movement.
And it's all happening in the nation's biggest swing state, which typically leans Republican but fell for Obama in the 2008 election and has five statewide seats that will be up for grabs in 2010.
Some conservative groups active in a New York congressional race that forced out a moderate Republican say Florida is next on their agenda.
``There's no question that the Florida race is going to be a focal point of the 2010 election cycle, with its classic David-and-Goliath matchup,'' said Mike Connolly, a spokesman for the Club for Growth, an anti-tax group that spent $1 million in the last month in New York. ``There's no question that Florida is going to attract and energize conservatives.''
The group is expected to endorse Rubio in the coming weeks, raising the prospect of an anti-Crist media blitz that could cut into the governor's fivefold fundraising advantage. FreedomWorks, a group that led many of the anti-Obama ``tea party'' rallies nationwide, is also setting its sights on Florida.
``The small government activists and the tea party movement is drawn to Rubio with great enthusiasm, and they're going to assert themselves,'' said FreedomWorks Chairman Dick Armey, a former Republican leader in the House of Representatives. Read rest of story from Miami Herald |
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