Mitch Perry
A new Quinnipiac survey says two-thirds of Floridians don’t know enough about Alan Grayson to form an opinion. However, the Florida congressman surely knows his main Democratic opponent in the 2016 Senate race, U.S. Rep. Patrick Murphy, is even less well known. The Q-poll says 81 percent don’t know enough about Murphy to form an opinion.
So the Orlando-based Grayson is trying to define Murphy as a do-nothing legislator. He takes as his information source a questionable survey released this month by InsideGov.com that called Murphy one of “the least-effective members of Congress.”
Last week, Florida PolitiFact disputed the claim that Murphy hasn’t passed a bill out of committee. The new Grayson ad claims that Murphy hasn’t passed any bills out of the House of Representatives overall, which may be accurate, but some would claim is unfair, considering that the GOP House doesn’t pass too many Democratic sponsored pieces of legislation.
Grayson, on the other hand, passed 10 bills in the 113th Congress, also controlled by Republicans. PolitiFact wrote that, “The 10 bills he sponsored ended up passing as part of other bills, not as stand-alone measures. Of those 10, all but one ultimately landed in the same bill that passed with a fairly wide margin.”
Joshua Karp, a spokesman for the Murphy campaign, notes that PolitiFact report in his response, saying, “Alan Grayson should apologize to the millions of fans of Schoolhouse Rock who don’t want to see their favorite video from civics class used in political attack an independent fact-check has already called false.”
