Unless you’re a TV-less hipster (getting all your shows on Hulu/Netflix/HBO Go — yeah, we’re on to you), you’ve been bombarded with the predictable mud-flinging political ads as November elections draw closer and closer. As they’d have you believe, Rick Scott is a reptilian warlord in a human skin suit, and Charlie Crist is a slick turncoat pushing for education cuts.
While those claims aren’t 100 percent true, and while scathing political ads are the new normal, Scott and Crist are on their way to making history as the least popular Florida gubernatorial candidates ever. Preliminary polls have shown that Floridians have, at best, lukewarm feelings for both politicians, which is nothing short of depressing.
Scott has been unpopular for most of his term, and the most recent Quinnipiac University poll found that 45 percent of voters have an unfavorable view of him, while only 40 percent have a favorable view. Crist’s unfavorable-to-favorable ratio was only slightly better, at 42 to 40 percent.
Dismal numbers like these are incredibly rare in this stage of the campaign season, coming third only to former Illinois Gov Rod Blagojevich in 2006 and the 2009 New Jersey election between Chris Christie and Jon Corzine, who “pummeled each other” with negative ads, according to FiveThirtyEight Data Lab. The article on Scott and Crist’s historical disapproval ratings noted that onslaughts of negative ads appear to correlate with elections that include record-breaking unfavorable views of gubernatorial candidates.
PolitiFact Florida has had a field day with the nasty, mostly half-true or downright false ads. Last week, they debunked a hypocritical Crist ad (hypoCristical?) that claimed Rick Scott cut Bright Futures scholarships “in half.” The claim was misleading, they said, because Scott didn’t cut the dollar amount of scholarships in half. The Crist campaign “zeroed in on the number of scholarships that were distributed last year compared to an estimate for the upcoming school year.”
Furthermore, under Crist, the Legislature raised the standards to reduce the number of scholarships awarded. Scott later raised the standards more, effectively cutting the number of scholarships awarded further.
Mudslinging isn’t the only problem in this election, though: The Republican Party of Florida straight-up lied about Scott increasing funding for preschool education. An ad they’ve been circulating claims that Scott oversaw “more funds for preschool education,” but in reality, per-pupil spending dipped during Scott’s first year as governor and remained flat for the next few years. The Legislature did approve slightly higher overall funding appropriation for pre-K education, but the ads are highly misleading. While we hesitate to propose something like ad-campaign regulations and hope that the political ad industry could self-police — well, that just doesn’t seem likely. In the meantime, beware: Scott and Crist are hiding many faces. Many Voldemort-y, overly tanned faces.
[A version of this editorial ran on page 6 on 7/29/2014 under the headline "Negative ads undermine FL gubernatorial race"]
