The aforementioned Mr. Greene of Florida has been one of the most interesting, if not, um, baroque, stories of the current election cycle. A rich guy who made his cash by investing in credit default swaps linked to subprime mortgages (remember them?), he’s put more than $23 million of his own money into his Senate campaign.
He’s definitely running as the outsider in his race against Mr. Meek – his mailings often complain about “career politicians,” for instance. But he’s also not what you’d call a vanilla persona – he is good friends with ex-boxing champ Mike Tyson and owns a yacht so big that, as the Monitor’s Linda Feldmann has written, it “appears to have a life of its own.”
Elsewhere on the Florida ticket, another wealthy first-time candidate, former health-care industry executive Rick Scott, is running in the Republican gubernatorial candidate. He’s also got business-related baggage. His firm, Columbia/HCA, settled a Medicare fraud suit for $1.7 billion in the 2000s, though Mr. Scott was ousted before the settlement occurred.
Scott surged ahead of his main opponent, state Attorney General Bill McCollum, in the spring, but the latest polls show that he has faded and now trails by six to seven percentage points.
Mr. McCollum represented Florida in Congress for 20 years, so he is something of a comfortable old shoe of politics. If he does beat Scott – and Meek beats Greene – it could be seen as a blow to self-funded candidates across the nation.
Generally speaking, though, candidates who pay for much of their campaign from their own pockets often don’t do well. Over the past nine years, only about 11 percent of self-financed candidates won their races, according to a recent study from the National Institute on Money in State Politics.
