Last Friday yet another poll regarding the 2014 Florida gubernatorial race was released, and in what is becoming something of a trend, Rick Scott held a small lead over Charlie Crist. The Gravis Marketing poll has the current governor leading the former one, 41-39 percent. But perhaps just as significant coming out of this particular survey is that Libertarian candidate Adrian Wyllie was at 6 percent, one of his highest rankings in any survey taken this year (his highest, from St. Pete Polls at the end of last year, had him at 9 percent).Not too shabby, you might say, for a third-party candidate who's received relatively little major media attention so far this year. But Wyllie says his own internal polls show him hovering around 15 percent, because he says certain voters aren't being counted in most media polls.
"What’s happening is the media is sampling a whole lot of the traditional likely voters, or supervoters,'" he told CL on Monday. "Our poll included the people who were likely to vote in this particular election — specifically for Amendment 2 — which are not necessarily the same subset of the supervoters."
As CL noted in its coverage of the Libertarian Party of Florida's annual convention back in May, party organizers feel that the medical marijuana issue will bring hundreds of thousands of new voters onto the voting rolls this fall, and they believe they can swing them over to voting Libertarian.
But Wyllie needs to dramatically raise his name recognition for that to happen, and to facilitate that, he's preparing for a 30-cities-in-30-days tour in August, from Key West to Pensacola. The hope is that such a tour will get him to the promised land, electorally speaking: at least 34 percent of the electorate, taking a plurality of the vote in a three-way contest.
Though the odds are more than formidable against that happening, the current state of the Crist-Scott race could potentially disaffect many more voters over the course of the next four months, potentially boosting Wyllie's poll numbers.
"The bottom line is there's no difference between Republicans and Democrats, and if you really want to change government, you have to change the way you vote," he says. "If you want government out of your wallet, your bedroom, your business and your body, then Libertarian is the only choice for you. And I'm the only candidate for governor that's offering that."