Turning our attention to various gubernatorial races, CNN.com is projecting that incumbent Governor Rick Scott (R-FL) has won re-election, against former Republican Governor Charlie Crist (D), who had campaigned first as an Independent, before embracing the Democratic Party. At almost the same time, WGN-TV is reporting that Bruce Rauner, the Republican candidate for governor of Illinois, has taken a 49%-48% lead (barely 35,000 votes) over the incumbent, Pat Quinn (D).
While the Illinois race remains too close to call, with too many votes still to be counted, the apparent outcome of the Florida race is remarkable. In a contest to determine which candidate was less obnoxious to more voters, Crist was generally regarded to have the upper hand, even if for no other reason than he was "not Scott." With both candidates laboring under clouds of suspicion from their respective terms in Tallahassee, it appears that Florida voters have declined to "change crooks in mid-stream."
In Illinois, on the other hand, the race comes down to a question of which candidate has destroyed the most jobs in the past few years. Quinn, not unjustifiably, has faced charges that his administration's tax-hiking, regulation-increasing policies - abetted by Democratic control of both houses of the General Assembly - has made Illinois inhospitable to business interests. (Full Disclosure: I have been employed full-time virtually since moving to Illinois in October 2013.) Rauner, on the other hand, has not-unjustifiably been pilloried for the job-cutting zeal, in the name of profit growth, perpetrated by the various investment-capital organizations in whose management he has been involved. Rauner has also been accused of tone-deafness for a comment made in a public forum, in which he speculated that "perhaps not every job needs to be in the U.S." Clearly, the voters of Illinois, like those of Florida, faced a less-than-appetizing choice between two obnoxious candidates, to determine which was less obnoxious.
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