With less than two days to go until Floridians head to the polls, millions of dollars in television buys continue to pour into Florida from Winning Our Future and Restore Our Future, PACs supporting Newt Gingrich and Mitt Romney respectively. Romney’s campaign is also running one particular ad featuring only NBC’s Tom Brokaw reporting about Gingrich’s ethics investigation in Congress in the late 1990’s. Winning Our Future’s latest ad blasts Romney for supporting an exception to a parental consent law allowing a minor to obtain permission from a judge, rather than her parents, to have an abortion. Left unsaid by the ad is the fact that Florida’s parental consent law, written by the GOP-dominated legislature and added to the State Constitution by voters in 2004, contains the very same judicial exception.
Romney has opened an 11 point lead on Gingrich in the state, according to a Tampa Bay Times/Miami Herald/Bay News 9 poll conducted January 24-26 by Mason-Dixon. Romney has the support of 42% of respondents, with 31% for Gingrich, 14% for Rick Santorum, 6% for Ron Paul, and 7% undecided. Since Thursday’s debate, both Gingrich and Romney have focused on South Florida’s Hispanic population with appearances last week at a forum sponsored by Univision and the Hispanic Leadership Network. Importantly, the poll reveals that Romney is carrying South Florida by more than 26%. Voters along the I-4 corridor appear to favor Romney, as well, with the Mason-Dixon poll showing Romney’s lead at 16 percent in Tampa Bay and just over 5 percent in the Orlando metropolitan region.
Media reports indicate that nearly 450,000 absentee ballots were requested from Republican voters across the state, and by the middle of last week more than 75% had been returned to county elections supervisors. There has been a decade-long effort to make absentee voting easier across the state and both major parties have strongly encouraged their faithful to vote by mail. Absentee voting, together with early voting that, until yesterday, had been open for a full week statewide, account for a significant percentage of votes which will already have been registered when polls open at 7:00 am on Tuesday.
Former presidential candidate Herman Cain’s endorsement of Gingrich yesterday may help the speaker narrow the gap going into Tuesday. Recall that Cain’s win in Florida’s Presidency V straw poll last September catapulted the candidate from the middle of the pack to the lead in national polls. Cain remained popular in Florida throughout the fall and his support may encourage voters to take another look at Gingrich. Without the funds to compete in Florida’s media markets, Santorum has focused on select appearances in central and southwest Florida after his strong debate performance in Jacksonville on Thursday.
