CLEARWATER Marco Rubio easily won a straw poll of Pinellas County Republican Party activists on the U.S. Senate primary Monday - a stinging defeat for Gov. Charlie Crist in his home county.
Rubio got 106 votes to Crist's 54 among the members of the county's Republican executive committee; three other candidates got a total of nine votes.
The committee is the governing body of the local party, including representatives from most voting precincts. Of its 240 members, 177 were present to vote.
It was only the latest in a series of more than a dozen straw polls won by Rubio, most by large margins, in county Republican parties or GOP clubs. Those voting are the party's base supporters - people who attend party meetings, volunteer to work in campaign boiler rooms and rarely vote across party lines.
The votes have no official effect. But coming in the county where Crist and his family have lived since his childhood, and where his political career began and grew into a statewide powerhouse, the Pinellas vote has strong symbolic importance.
Meanwhile, former Assistant State Attorney Pam Bondi of Tampa, also close to her home turf, easily won the party's straw poll in the primary for attorney general.
Bondi, with 123 votes, beat Lt. Gov. Jeff Kottkamp, with 28, former state health administrator Holly Benson, with 15, and Jim Lewis, with 1.
That capped a good campaign day for Bondi, who earlier Monday reporting having raised slightly more than $200,000 in the opening month of her campaign.
"It's humbling," Bondi said of her win. "I have a great base in the Tampa Bay area." Asked whether she can extend that outside her Tampa Bay area home, she said, "That's what we'll do next quarter."
In the agriculture commissioner pri
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