At Duval GOP monthly meeting, CD 4 race is hot topic

The race to succeed Ander Crenshaw as the GOP representative in CD 4 hasn’t exactly begun yet, but it was part of the package at the Duval Republican Executive Committee meeting Monday.

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One would-be candidate not running is Sen. Aaron Bean.

Bean was collecting petitions … not for CD 4, but for his re-election campaign for the State Senate.

Sen. Bean decided to “pass this time” on running, he said, citing his family at home and a realization that there was still more he wanted to accomplish in the Florida Senate.

Bean said Adam Putnam warned him of the difficulty of making weekly trips to and from DC, and the separation from family that entailed.

Yet ruling it out in 2016 doesn’t mean it’s ruled out altogether.

“These things come back around,” Bean said.

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One candidate possibly running: Duval GOP Chair Lake Ray, who announced his exploratory committee Monday.

If Ray runs, it would be in his first federal race, and the financial rules between federal and state races are, of course, different.

Ray is still mulling a run.

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FloridaPolitics.com talked to two other candidates, Deborah Katz Pueschel and Bill McClure, who were also at the GOP conclave.

McClure, a St. Johns County Commissioner, briefly made the news last year for an unauthorized transaction from a shared business account that got legal scrutiny before charges were dropped. He told FloridaPolitics.com that St. Johns County voters comprised 30 percent of the district.

“I was prepared for [Ander Crenshaw not running],” McClure said, but waited on the incumbent’s announcement to file.

His campaign committee has been set up for months, McClure said.

McClure believes “our nation is at a crossroads” and that his brand of “fiscal conservatism” will help negotiate said crossroads.

Though McClure says he has filed, as of yet he’s not registered in the Department of State’s candidate listing.

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Pueschel is a perennial candidate, and has the campaign literature to prove it. She told us her brochure was 14 years old, with pictures of her with her husband and other family members.

Her focus: the $21 trillion national debt.

She recognizes this will be a “very short campaign,” and urges voters to not discount her chances against likely frontrunner John Rutherford, likening her situation to David vs. Goliath.