A lot still has to happen for Matt Caldwell to face-off against Heather Fitzenhagen in a contest to represent Senate District 30.
The current occupant, Senator Lizbeth Benacquisto, has to win the special election currently underway in Florida’s 19th Congressional District. If that happens, Governor Rick Scott and Secretary of State Ken Detzner must decide whether to call for a special election outside of the normal election cycle or allow for the election to be conducted within the normal scheduling confines. Either way, both Caldwell and Fitzenhagen would have to give up their safe seats in the Florida House to jockey for a seat in the state Senate. Assuming all of this happens, it’s unlikely that it will be just Caldwell and Fitzenhagen in a race for SD 30.
But…
According to an internal poll, the partial results of which have been provided to SaintPetersBlog by a well-connected Republican strategist, Caldwell is the clear favorite over Fitzenhagen in a hypothetical Senate District 30 match-up.
Caldwell beats Fitzenhagen 57 to 43 percent among likely GOP votes surveyed February 7-10. Caldwell leads Fitzenhagen by eight percent among female GOPers and twenty percent among male Republicans.
The poll as a margin of error of +/- 3.9% and was conducted by CMS Connects.
There is increasing speculation from Tallahassee to Southwest Florida that Caldwell and Fitzenhagen are headed to showdown that would have implications on the inter-party rivalry between Jack Latvala and Joe Negron for the Senate Presidency beginning in 2016.
Here are the slides which were provided to me:
and
