Like this result or not, but Scott is, by any account, running a smart campaign.
lol...who wins an election is basically 95% national environment (barring some giant scandal). nobody in Florida cares about Rick Scott's ''smart campaign.'' Had Hillary won in 2016, Scott would of won without running a single ad or hosting a single campaign event
Jason Kander outperformed Hillary by 15 points, and it had nothing to do with the "national environment". Roy Blunt was not inundated with scandals, as well.
who cares...he still lost. I will grant you that Scott will come closer than anyone before him in defeating Nelson but what does it matter in the end when he still loses.
As you know, elections are not binary "win/lose" contests. People vote for candidates and each one receives a certain percentage of the vote. And although whether a candidate gets 51% or 70% doesn't effect if they win, that difference is extremely important as it provides the basis for basically all political modeling, analysis, and punditry. Jason Kander shows he can outperform the democratic presidential candidate by 15 points in a horrid national environment for Democrats, even if he lost. Rick Scott, running in a much more evenly divided swing state, can similarly outperform what is likely to be a bad national environment for Republicans and beat the incumbent. It's logically incoherent to say "this candidate still lost while outperforming therefore any outperformance isn't enough to win".
Agree with Limo's latest post. Just look at Reagan 1976, Jeb 1994 or Bobby Jindal 2003, just to name a few.
