Well, well, well.... it looks like the chances just became very good that Rick Scott will be replaced by a Democratic governor in Florida in 2014....
This is probably one of the best examples of the Republican party becoming so extreme that the party is leaving moderate Republicans. Charlie Crist has gone from being a Republican, to being an "Independent", to now officially joining the Democratic Party. And it's really no wonder, since someone who believes in man-made global warming isn't exactly a natural fit with the current Republican Party. And issuing an executive order that automatically restored felon voting rights after they completed probation/parole obviously didn't make Crist popular with reactionary Republicans.
Charlie Crist is popular in Florida. He is likely going to clean Rick Scott's clock in 2014. And he is really big on voting rights, so if he becomes Governor of Florida again, we can expect the election in 2016 to be far more fair than it was in 2012.
The change became official at a White House Christmas reception, the Tampa Bay Times reports, where "President Obama greeted the news with a fist bump."
Crist was a high-profile campaign surrogate for Obama this past election cycle, speaking at the Democratic National Convention in Charlotte this September in support of the president. "I didn't leave the Republican party," Crist said in his speech. "It left me."
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/...
I bet that Rick Scott is a very unhappy man today.
Disenfranchised voters will, on the other hand, be encouraged by the prospect of a Crist run for the governorship. It is estimated that hundreds of thousands(maybe even a million) Floridians are currently ineligible to vote because Rick Scott rescinded Charlie Crist's executive order that automatically restored felon voting rights after they had done their time and gone through probation/parole. As it currently stands in Florida, you have to personally petition Rick Scott to have your voting rights restored even if you were convicted for a minor felony like marijuana possession or drug paraphernalia possession.
And who does this Jim Crow law affect the most? Blacks, of course, as it was intended to. One quarter(!) of all voting-age black Floridians currently are ineligible to vote because of this law. If this racism-driven law had not been in effect in 2000, there would have been no Bush vs. Gore and we would have avoided the whole Bush catastrophe, and if someone like Charlie Crist, who favors voting rights, were governor of Florida, it could very well move from being a swing state to becoming a lean blue state.
For more details on felon disenfranchisement in Florida and elsewhere, here's a clip from a quality segment of the Mellissa Harris-Perry show:
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