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LeMieux wins GOP women club’s straw poll

Posted Feb 20, 2012 by William March

Updated Feb 20, 2012 at 12:49 PM

George LeMieux was “the decided winner” of a straw poll held by the Florida Federation of Republican Women Sunday after a candidates’ forum in Tallahassee, the FFRW has announced.

The FRRW didn’t announce the actual numbers, but said LeMieux had a significant margin in the vote, in which he was matched against Connie Mack IV and Mike McCalister. The 117 voters in the straw poll were all members of the organization’s executive committee, consisting of the group’s statewide officers, committee chairs, and representatives of the 50 local Republican Women organizations around the state.

The vote followed a forum in which each candidate appeared on stage and took questions from FFRW members.

The poll outcome is interesting in part because Mack has been leading substantially in polls of Republican primary voters, although with large numbers of undecided voters. The FFRW activists who took the vote are likely to be involved in working for a candidate in the primary, and in the November general election, in which the GOP nominee will face incumbent Democratic Sen. Bill Nelson.

The are also the kind of party insiders among whom former Gov. Charlie Crist, once LeMieux’s political patron, is now anathema after leaving the party to run as an independent in the 2010 Senate race. LeMieux has struggled to overcome the association, but FFRW President Cindy Graves of Duval County said when questioned about the link during the forum, “He gave a very good answer and satisfied the listeners.”

Graves said many participants came to the meeting undecided, and she believes LeMieux won them over.

“He connected with the women, told them what they wanted to hear,” she said. “It was his stances on issues, and also the way he presents himself – what he’s done and what he accomplished in the very short time that he was in the Senate.”

She said the FFRW members “don’t want to nominate a moderate.”

Asked whether the vote contradicts the conventional wisdom about who’s leading the primary race, Graves said, “I don’t know who the frontrunner in the race, but I don’t think anybody else does either.”