FL-Sen: On Wednesday evening, a local TV station in Miami, CBS4 News, released a scathing report on Democratic Rep. Patrick Murphy, digging deep into questions about his personal biography that began trickling out last month. The piece is long and not amenable to easy summary, as it goes into great detail about two major claims it makes regarding Murphy's pre-congressional life: that he "never worked a day in his life as a Certified Public Accountant" and that he "never a small business owner."
Murphy's campaign responded hotly, rejecting both assertions and issuing a point-by-point refutation of CBS's report. CBS reacted in a troubling way, though, by editing and deleting several material portions of its article, without saying anywhere that the piece had been changed and corrections issued.
For instance, CBS claimed that "Murphy took the CPA licensing exam nine times before passing the four required sections." That was incorrect. As Murphy's campaign explained, the CPA exam contains four parts, which can each be taken separately; Murphy took two tries to pass three sections and needed three to pass the fourth. But rather than acknowledge its error, CBS simply altered its piece without comment. That's not kosher.
But as Murphy's campaign ruefully observed in its response, these charges "will surely appear in Republican attack ads" even if they've been silently dropped. The more immediate question, however, is whether these questions about Murphy's record, whether legitimate or not, wind up playing a role in the Democratic primary. Democratic Rep. Alan Grayson sent out a press release trying to amplify the CBS story, but he's run a desultory, underfunded campaign. However, crafty Republicans might try to help him out, since they'd much rather face Grayson than Murphy, even with the wounds Murphy's suffered of late.
No matter what, though, Murphy needs the bleeding to stop, since, if he does secure the Democratic nomination, he's likely to face a tougher-than-expected opponent now that Sen. Marco Rubio has decided to seek re-election. A new poll from Republican pollster Vox Populi for the Senate Leadership Fund (a group connected to Mitch McConnell, who begged Rubio to run again) finds the incumbent with a huge 57-5 lead on wealthy businessman and mini-Trump Carlos Beruff in the GOP primary. Those findings are similar to a recent independent poll from St. Leo University taken just before Rubio re-entered the race.
But his renomination is still not assured. Gov. Rick Scott, a close pal of Beruff's who has publicly extolled him before, pointedly declined to endorse Rubio in a statement on Thursday and re-upped his praise for Beruff. Scott compared Beruff's candidacy to his own 2010 bid for governor as an outsider and added, "The opinions of the political class in Washington are not relevant to the voters of Florida." It'll take a lot more than that to stop Rubio, but if the GOP is pleased to see Murphy take some shots, Democrats are happy to see Florida Republicans divided.