This morning, MSNBC hosts Chuck Todd and Savannah Guthrie announced their list of the worst candidates of the 2010 election cycle, with two of the three nominees hailing from Florida. Both outgoing Gov. Charlie Crist and CFO Alex Sink made the list, and the hosts determined Sink to be the worst candidate following her defeat by former health care CEO Rick Scott.
Of Crist, Todd offered the following:
From a top-tier vice presidential hopeful in 2008, a governor with well-known presidential ambitions, to a guy who in three weeks will be unemployed. … Crist began the cycle as a shoo-in for the Florida Senate seat but he never overcame Marco Rubio’s momentum, both in the Republican primary … and then he tried to be an independent and then basically at the end was looking for Democrats’ [votes] … any way to win and he couldn’t do it.
Of Sink, Guthrie said:
She is another Florida under-performer, was not able to beat a guy who settled with the justice department for $1.7 billion for defrauding Medicare, and sent his mother to the final primary debate as his stand-in. And then that video surfaced which seemed to show Sink cheating at a debate. In a change election when Democrats counted on Alex Sink to take the governor’s race in a key 2012 state, Alex Sink failed to deliver and lands on our list.
Also on the list for the “Chuvannah Awards” was Alaska’s Joe Miller, with the hosts noting how his erratic campaigning and refusal to answer questions led to his defeat by write-in candidate Lisa Murkowski — for the first time in a U.S. Senate race since 1954.
After revealing Sink to have clinched the worst candidate of 2010 position, Todd noted that the election should have been hers to win considering the controversy surrounding Scott’s ties to Medicare fraud in a state that boasts some of the program’s highest enrollment rates in the nation.
“It’s unbelievable,” he said. “Think about it. You lost to a guy who defrauded Medicare… in Florida! More people on Medicare perhaps in the state of Florida than any state.”
The segment:
