The primary is still a decent way off (August) and Charlie Crist is still not showing any signs of giving up the fight. But at least as of this moment, I’m not sure I can recall a more precipitous collapse for a major political figure (when no apparent scandal or triggering event is involved) than we’ve seen with Florida Gov. Charlie Crist. The latest poll out this morning has the upstart challenger, Marco Rubio, beating Crist by an eye-popping 60%-28% margin. And that’s not far our from our current composite TPM Poll Average which stands at 54.9% to 30%.
To get some sense of the scale of this move, remember that as recently as December/January the two were tied and back in August the two were essentially flipped. A Quinnipiac poll from August 17th of last year had Crist up over Rubio 55% to 35%.
And as Eric Kleefeld explains here, if the toplines are bad, the internals of this poll actually manage to be worse.
You can see the pretty unmistakable trend here …
This isn’t just a rhetorical question. Can you think of another poll who has collapsed this rapidly excluding cases where the guy or gal was hit by some devastating scandal? Drop me a line if you can think of one.
