There is a crook trying to get inside the governor's mansion.
Unfortunately, many of the state's Republicans want to give him the key.
Tuesday, Rick Scott defeated Florida Attorney General Bill McCollum in Florida's primary to earn a spot on November's general election ballot.
To be fair, not every Republican in the state voted for Scott - not even a majority. Scott won 46 percent of the votes against McCollum's 43 percent.
For those who don't know, Scott is a millionaire businessman who, in April, decided he wanted to buy something new: the governor's office. And as of right now, he's doing a pretty good job of it.
One of Scott's main rallying points was his self-financing of his own campaign. Scott refused to take any money from interest groups or outside organizations, making his victory his victory alone.
But is it really a good thing for a corrupt health care CEO to be in office and responsible only to himself?
The funny thing is that his money has come from taxpayers, or at least the ones his company scammed. Scott was CEO of Columbia/HCA, a for-profit health care provider. This is the same company that, while Scott was CEO, committed the largest case of Medicare and Medicaid fraud in history.
The company would eventually settle with the government for about $1.7 billion, and Scott was removed from his position as CEO by the board of directors.
Scott claimed he would run the state as a company and be the "CEO" of it as he has been successful in that position in the past.
Does that mean our state is now going to be a corrupt company? Because that's the only type of company Rick Scott knows how to lead and squander.
Scott also ran on a campaign of being a fresh face and not being a career politician like his opponent McCollum.
So instead of getting a career politician, we get a corrupt career businessman.
Sounds like a step in the wrong direction to me.
The truth is while he might be a career politician, McCollum has done a darn good job of it.
While acting as attorney general, McCollum brought a lawsuit against Obama's "Obamacare" along with other states' attorneys general. This is, of course, the same health care bill the majority of Floridians were opposed to in the first place. McCollum's office also fought against child predators, trying to make Florida a safer place.
Scott was able to flood the airwaves with ads, many of them spewing lies, with the backing of his seemingly bottomless wallet.
He was able to tell lies about his opponent and about himself with the $50 million he has spent in his campaign so far.
He has come very close to buying the governor's office.
What were Floridians thinking when 46 percent of Republican voters thought this would actually be a good idea?
Simply put, they weren't.
They believed his personal propaganda without bothering to check if anything he was saying was even true.
Scott is so far out that the Republican Governor's Association didn't even officially support him. In fact, they tried to do everything they could to make sure McCollum won.
At the end of the day, the voters, and Scott's money, spoke. And it looks like Scott is that much closer to pulling off his takeover of the governor's mansion.
Chris Dodson is a first-year journalism and finance student. His column appears every Monday.
