His back to the glinting waters and dipping pelicans of Sarasota Bay, Charlie Crist wears his usual impish grin and says he smells “something good”.
That, he offers, is the prospect of victory in the race for Florida governor. Or maybe it was a whiff of the sewer that may or may not take him over the line.
Of all the contests in Tuesday’s midterm elections, none have been as rank as this one. It has been the most expensive in the land and the most mean-spirited. A mutual destruction derby of negative advertising has been fuelled by record amounts of money raised by each of the candidates and also poured into the race by outside groups determined to put their ideological stamp on the state.
And it has been personal. Mr Crist has been eviscerated by Rick Scott, the incumbent Republican Governor, for his recent zig-zag past. When Mr Crist held the governor’s mansion from 2007 to 2011 he was a Republican. (Some had expected him to join John McCain’s ultimately doomed presidential ticket in 2008.) In 2012 he ran unsuccessfully for the US Senate as an independent. Now he’s a Democrat.
Mr Scott, whose talents as a retail politician seem scant, has been hammered for the source of his own personal fortune, the stewardship of the country’s largest healthcare company, Columbia/HCA, which came to an end when it was fined $1.7bn (£1.1bn) for defrauding the government of Medicare dollars. Mr Scott repeatedly took the Fifth Amendment when questioned, as Mr Crist relentlessly reminds voters.
But this race has also been rough because it matters more than most. While there are plenty of issues at play that are of genuine interest to Floridians – Mr Crist is in Sarasota to contrast his record on the environment with that of Mr Scott, who when asked if he believed in global warming could only answer, “I’m not a scientist” – for onlookers outside the state this is more about 2016.
While it is widely assumed that Hillary Clinton will seek to be the Democratic nominee in 2016 and that she will have little credible opposition there is also accelerating speculation that Jeb Bush, the brother and son of two former presidents, may be considering seeking the Republican nomination. He is also a former Florida governor. And Florida, of course, is perennially pivotal in presidential years. “There is no path to victory for the Republicans at the presidential level without a victory in Florida,” notes Keith Fitzgerald, a former Democrat in the state house and now a professor of politics in the New College of Florida, adding that Democrats only prevail here when minorities turn out.