Florida Attorney General Bill McCollum has a new ally in the nasty Republican gubernatorial primary — Republican Governors Association chair Haley Barbour. According to Politico, Barbour asked McCollum’s opponent, former hospital executive Rick Scott, to pull down an ad linking McCollum to disgraced former Florida GOP chair Jim Greer.
Barbour says the video, which claims McCollum helped cover up Greer’s alleged financial misdeeds at the state GOP, is false. Scott’s campaign tells Politico it’s not interested in Barbour’s advice on how to run against McCollum.
“It should be no surprise that Bill McCollum once again turns to his D.C. establishment friends to bail out his campaign. With all due respect to Chairman Barbour, Bill McCollum’s statements and actions in the Jim Greer scandal speak for themselves and have been widely documented by the media,” Scott spokesperson Jen Baker told Politico’s David Catanese.
This is not the first time establishment Republicans have stepped in to publicly rebuke Scott. The current state party chair, Jim Thrasher, appeared with McCollum at a campaign stop last week, where he too lit into Scott’s ad.
“This isn’t about insider versus outsider, it’s about what’s true and what’s false and this ad is false,” Thrasher told the Orlando Sentinel. “No one has requested to take down the other six ads the Scott Campaign is running, just the one that is patently not true.”
Politico’s Catanese wonders if all the hand-wringing over Scott’s ad could be more about protecting the eventual GOP nominee against Democratic nominee Alex Sink than it is about defending McCollum from the nasty attacks from Scott.
“While the RGA has not endorsed in the primary,” he reports, “the uncommon move by Barbour to weigh into the race is the strongest signal yet that Republicans are increasingly worried about how the level of attacks in the rancorous contest will impact the party’s chances at holding onto the governor’s office this fall.”
The TPM Poll Average shows McCollum leading Scott 39.7-36.0.
Evan McMorris-Santoro
Evan McMorris-Santoro has covered politics for TPM since 2009. Before that, he was a reporter at National Journal’s Hotline covering election 2008. He started his career covering local politics at newspapers in TN and his native NC.
Facebook Conversations
Questions about commenting with non-Facebook accounts like Yahoo, or other concerns? Click here to read the TPM Commenting FAQ.