Peter Schorsch
Tuesday night, for maybe the first time in his political career, Rick Scott was sought after.
National reporters were chasing after his spokeswoman.
The talking heads were searching for his shiny head.
The hashtag #WorstGovernorInFloridasModernHistory did not immediately appear next to @FLGovScott on Twitter.
Last night, Rick Scott was a wanted man — and for all the right reasons.
As discussed in Tuesday’s Sunburn, the rumor du jour was that Scott would endorse Donald Trump for president at a news conference Trump planned for after the polls closed on Super Tuesday. In his playbook, POLITICO’s Marc Caputo described the chatter about Scott endorsing Trump as “incessant” and that said chatter only intensified after Trump announced his 9 p.m. event at his Mar-a-Lago resort.
“What is the tail number of Scott’s airplane?” one enterprising reporter asked on social media, in an effort to track’s Scott’s movements.
As Super Tuesday became beyond-super for Trump, with him winning in “well-educated” states like Massachusetts and Virginia and “lower-educated” states like Alabama and Georgia, it almost made sense for Scott to show up in Palm Beach and endorse his fellow political outsider.
Right before 9 p.m., Fox News Brit Hume blurted out on Twitter that Scott would be endorsing Trump. He cited two unidentified sources.
The rest of Fox News picked up on Hume’s tweet, and that’s when Scott, a man derided as “Skeletor” and “Voldemort” even by his allies, was the most popular politician in Florida without a gambling hotel named after him.
“Fla. Gov Scott now telling Fox News there will be ‘no news tonight’ re: endorsements, points to op-ed in which he said he’s made no decision,” Hume tweeted.
And since Hume was wrong, Fox News was wrong.
“There had been rumors there was going to be an endorsement tonight, perhaps by the Governor Rick Scott, not saying that’s going to happen. The Trump campaign say ‘we don’t know anything about it, we are not talking about anything like that,” Fox News chief political correspondent Carl Cameron was forced to report.
Hume further explained himself, “Two sources had earlier said Scott would endorse Trump. Still could happen but apparently not tonight.”
It’s not clear who Hume’s sources were, but it’s certain they are not as good as The Associated Press’ Gary Fineout or the Palm Beach Post’s John Kennedy. Then again, all these Florida reporters did was, you know, ask Scott’s spokeswoman whether he’d be endorsing Trump on Tuesday:
Both of those tweets came several hours before Hume cited his two sources.
In other words, @Fineout’s sources > @BritHume’s sources.
For the record, FloridaPolitics.com was intensely chasing the Scott-endorses-Trump rumor from about 1:30 a.m. on Tuesday. That’s when one of my top sources teased/asked me if I heard any endorsement news. I quickly inquired with two sources both close to Scottworld (one source has a foot in both Scottworld and Trumpworld) and neither had heard of any plan to have Scott in Palm Beach Tuesday.
So the bottom line here is, especially with the Florida primary in less than two weeks, if you want to know what’s really going on in Sunshine State politics, follow the reporters who live and breathe it.
