Florida Gov. Candidate Scott Eclipses State Campaign-Spending Mark

Republican gubernatorial candidate Rick Scott has shattered Gov. Charlie Crist’s record for spending on a Florida election, reporting Friday that he burned through $22.6 million — almost all of it his own wealth — in his first three months as a candidate.

It took Crist two years and hundreds of personal appeals to donors to raise and spend $19.8 million en route to winning the Governor’s Mansion.

Scott’s $218 million in personal wealth has turned the tables on what had been a forgone Florida political conclusion: that longtime Republican stalwart and state Attorney General Bill McCollum would be the standard-bearer for the GOP in the fall elections.

McCollum on Friday reported raising just more than $1 million in the last quarter, while he spent $4.3 million in a futile effort to keep pace with Scott.

The veteran Florida politician’s campaign is down to its last $540,000, though McCollum accepted $1.26 million in public funding this week.

But with a double-digit deficit in the polls, he was already in trouble. Even that lifeline of public financing made available to match his own fundraising comes at a price: Halfway through Scott’s six-day bus tour across the state, he has blistered McCollum as a career politician with his head at the taxpayer trough.

“I just think it’s ridiculous that we take taxpayer money and spend it on somebody’s campaign,” Scott said Friday while traveling along the crucial Interstate-4 corridor.

The lead Democrat awaiting a winner, Chief Financial Officer Alex Sink, has yet to decide whether to accept public financing. She raised $1.1 million for the quarter and had $5.8 million still left to spend this fall. Her campaign already has recalibrated its focus to Scott and pointed to both Republicans’ souring perception in public polls.

“People are not liking what they’re seeing of him, and $22 million isn’t going to change that,” Sink spokeswoman Kyra Jennings said.

Scott’s own campaign expenditures through mid-July place him within striking distance of the $24.9 million campaign-finance limit that would trigger a dollar-for-dollar match for McCollum. The public-finance law was designed to control the spiraling costs of running for public office, but Scott is challenging the law in court, and unless he steers huge sums of money through outside committees to keep his ads on television, he is on pace to pierce the cap any day.

Scott demurred on whether he would pierce the cap.

Read more from Aaron Deslatte at the Orlando Sentinel