According to Sunshine State News' nightly tracking poll, in the U.S. Senate race independent Charlie Crist has lost 2 percentage points since the surveys began Oct. 13. Meanwhile, Republican Marco Rubio has padded his lead by 4 points and Democrat Kendrick Meek has picked up a point.
Crist calls himself an "optimist," but his sunny disposition is being tested as never before.
With Rubio running away with the race -- he holds a 47-27 lead over Crist -- the only real contest to be decided is who will finish in second place.
The race for silver is getting tighter by the day, with Meek edging up and Crist falling back. On Oct. 13, Crist led Meek 29-22. Now his margin has shrunk to 27-23.
Some of that decline may be attributable to Crist's lackluster showing in the televised debates, where he has been hammered from both right and left by Rubio and Meek.
In the final debate this week, NBC News' David Gregory, serving as moderator, zeroed in on Crist's shifting stands on issues ranging from abortion to gay adoptions to Social Security.
Crist's slump in the polls also coincides with voters' historic tendency to gravitate back to Democratic and Republican roots as Election Day draws near.
The governor is further hampered by his placement on the ballot. Running with No Party Affiliation, his name appears ninth on a 10-name list of Senate contestants behind a Libertarian candidate, a Constitution Party hopeful and four other NPAs. Rubio and Meek appear fist and second.
Once ranked among the most popular governors in Florida, with a high job-approval rating, Crist still retains strong name recognition. But when he bolted the Republican Party in April, he left behind a well-oiled political machine, and generated lots of skepticism about his true intentions.
The Sunshine State News Poll shows that he garners only 14 percent of the GOP vote while Rubio is statistically tied with him among independents.
Seth McKee, a political science professor at the University of South Florida St. Petersburg, thinks that Crist will hang onto second place.
"I seriously can't fathom Crist finishing third. That said, if Crist ends up third then his political career may be on ice for a long time," McKee said.
But even with that humbling result, McKee wouldn't count Crist out for good. "Crist is a career politician who isn't likely to go into permanent retirement from public life any time soon," the professor said.
So, how does a chastened Crist find his way back?
"In contemporary American politics, the increasing electoral instability created by a large segment of independent and other weakly aligned partisans (who shift with the political winds) makes it very possible that the pendulum swings back in favor of the Democrats by 2012," McKee theorizes.
"An interesting scenario is if Crist re-emerges down the road as a centrist Democrat positioned to defeat Rubio in 2016. Who knows, maybe the governorship will be open again if whoever wins this time only serves a single term."
Pundits predicted that Crist's high water mark in the polls would come immediately after he announced his independent bid for Senate. Initially, and briefly, he pulled ahead of Rubio. But support for the "People's Governor" eroded in the weeks that followed, and those early prognostications of his political flame-out appear to be right on the money.
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Contact Kenric Ward at kward@sunshinestatenews.com or at (772) 801-5341.
