Conservative columnist George Will thinks that conservative Republican former state House Speaker Marco Rubio will pull off an upset and defeat Charlie Crist in the 2010 GOP Senate primary:

In January 2011, one Floridian will leave for the U.S. Senate. He is unlikely to be a former governor at odds with his party's nominating electorate, or the probable Democratic nominee, Kendrick Meek, a hyper-liberal congressman. Rubio intends to prove that "in the most important swing state, you can run successfully as a principled conservative." He probably will.

If the straw polls taken around the state by Republican County Committees are any indication, Rubio will indeed defeat Crist.  In fact, since my last round-up of FL-GOP straw polls, which included the following rundown:

Pasco County: Rubio wins, 73-9
Lee County: Rubio wins, "7-to-1 margin" [60-9]
Highlands County: Rubio wins, 75-1
Bay County: Rubio wins, 23-2
Volusia County: GOP Committee censures Crist
Palm Beach County: GOP Committee almost censures Crist as motion fails on a 65-65 tie, still a stinging rebuke
Broward County: GOP Committee attempts a straw poll, blocked only by Crist acolyte eager to avoid embarrassment for Crist

we can add Florida's Hernando County GOP Committee to the list.  Fernando County is a "poor (median income- $32,572), very white rural area north of Tampa" whose County GOP just backed Rubio in a straw poll over Crist by a vote of 46-0.  Yup, 46-0.  To that, we can also add:

Marion County: Rubio 40, Crist 8
Gilchrist County: Rubio 11, Crist 1
GOP Women's Club of Duval Federated: Rubio 65, Crist 4
Northwest Orange GOP Women Federated: Rubio 49, Crist 3
Jefferson County GOP: Rubio 30, Crist 6
Florida Federation of College Republicans: Rubio 19, Crist 6

If you add up the eleven straw polls conducted, the total is Rubio 491, Crist 49.  In other words, among recorded Republican activists in Florida, Rubio is crushing Crist by just over a 10-to-1 margin.  But Crist has the support of the Republican "establishment." To which Rubio says:

"If you are unhappy with the Republican establishment, then let's get a new establishment."

Rubio may be well on his way to accomplishing just that in the FL-GOP.

For daily news and analysis on the U.S. Senate races around the country, regularly read Senate Guru.

There's more...

Once again, I'm inviting the folks at MyDD to try the straw poll system at Indaba.org. I still believe that if you try it you'll like it, since it employs pretty much the same open-source ranked ballot tool you're used to, while adding lots of enhancements.

1. What's undeniably unique about Indaba.org is how its visual display of results can show the finer details of each candidate's ballot depth, and each distinct segment of vote transfers, plus the macro behavior of swarms, all within a single screen of information. If that's not cool, I don't know what is. To see Indaba.org's rendition of your mid-June poll results (as amended by Chris Bowers), try this link:

http://www.indaba.org/election.php?eid=6 8

There's more...

MyDD June Reader Straw Poll (6/13, 1,775 votes)

Candidate	1st Choice	2nd Choice	3rd Choice	4th Choice	Last Choice
Obama	33.1%	23.2%	15.5%	9.6%	1.6%
Edwards	30.4%	23.7%	14.3%	9.3%	3.0%
Richardson	12.6%	10.6%	13.9%	16.2%	2.3%
Clinton	6.3%	8.8%	14.3%	14.4%	9.1%
Dodd	2.8%	8.6%	14.8%	16.2%	1.3%
Biden	0.7%	5.0%	7.7%	8.3%	7.2%
Kucinich	1.4%	4.3%	4.9%	5.7%	10.6%
Gravel	0.7%	2.1%	3.0%	3.0%	20.9%
Other	9.4%	10.0%	6.7%	6.1%	--
Unsure	2.7%	3.8%	5.1%	11.1%	43.9%

First-choice trend

Candidate	June	May	April	March	February
Obama	33.1%	31.2%	34.3%	36.1%	41.3%
Edwards	30.1%	41.2%	43.2%	33.1%	37.0%
Richardson	12.6%	10.1%	7.9%	9.7%	8.8%
Clinton	6.3%	4.7%	3.8%	4.7%	5.4%
Dodd	2.8%	1.9%	0.7%	1.1%	0.7%
Kucinich	1.4%	1.5%	1.4%	2.0%	2.7%
Gravel	0.7%	1.3%	0.4%	0.3%	1.4%
Biden	0.7%	0.8%	0.5%	0.5%	0.5%
Other	9.4%	5.6%	5.9%	10.6%	NA
Unsure	2.7%	1.5%	2.0%	1.9%	NA

Looks like a pretty sharp drop for Edwards this month, as Obama leads the straw poll for the first time since March. Outside of Edwards and the Fox News trio (Biden, Kucinich, and Gravel), every other candidate, including "other" and "unsure," saw slight rises. To a certain extent, this mirrors the national situation, where Edwards has been somewhat struggling in the polls lately. More info on past straw poll results can be found here and here.

Reconstructing these results was a real challenge given the huge amount of stuffing. As always, I did my best to present the most accurate results possible. You can read my methodology on how I try to clean the data up here. Also, you can see the master data by clicking here, and using "mk4jcdo0" as a password. The final, "cleaned up" data I used to calculate these results can be found here.

The June straw poll is up. Go vote.

As always, I will do my best to remove stuffed votes after the fact. You can see my method of doing do here. I will post the final results either tomorrow or later tonight. You can see past results here and here.

I'm heading out to the suburbs today to give a speech at my old alma matter, Ursinus College. As such, I won't be posting much, if at all, until late in the afternoon. So, in addition to the straw poll, this is also an open thread.

Go vote in the straw poll, and tell the world what is on your mind. (Bumped again -- Jonathan)

Update: I'm back from the burbs now. Wow--a record amount of stuffing this time. Going to take a while to sort it all out. I have closed voting on the poll.

MyDD May Reader Straw Poll (5/15, 1,668 votes)

Candidate	1st Choice	2nd Choice	3rd Choice	4th Choice	Last Choice
Edwards	41.2%	24.0%	13.3%	7.5%	2.1%
Obama	31.2%	24.8%	16.2%	8.5%	2.5%
Richardson	10.1%	16.4%	23.1%	16.2%	1.4%
Clinton	4.7%	9.2%	13.8%	16.3%	9.8%
Dodd	1.9%	4.6%	8.7%	14.0%	1.1%
Biden	0.8%	3.2%	5.5%	8.7%	8.0%
Gravel	1.3%	3.8%	4.3%	5.9%	13.1%
Kucinich	1.5%	3.0%	4.6%	4.7%	16.8%
Other	5.6%	6.5%	6.1%	6.1%	--
Unsure	1.5%	4.3%	4.3%	11.9%	45.1%

Note that the candidates are not ranked according to their first place votes. Instead, they are ranked according to the depth of their support across the entire ballot. The deeper one goes into the ballots, it becomes much clearer, for example, that Chris Dodd is thought of much better than Biden, Gravel and Kucinich. Also, the last place votes have been changed, in that every ballot that did not rank the eight candidates is now considered to be an "unsure" vote for last place. Overall, this change and the new information presented gives us a much clearer picture of the depth of support each candidate has on MyDD. Here is a sort of "acceptability" ranking, where the last place votes for every candidate are subtracted from their combined first, second, third and fourth place votes:

Edwards: 84.0%
Obama: 78.3%
Richardson: 64.6%
Clinton: 34.1%
Dodd: 28.1%
Other: 24.3%
Biden: 10.2%
Gravel: 2.3%
Kucinich: -2.9%

Note the gaps between Obama and Richardson, Richardson and Clinton, and Other and Biden. It suggests a four-tiers of candidate support on MyDD: the first tier includes Edwards and Obama; the second tier is Richardson; the third tier is Clinton, Dodd and "Other"; the fourth tier is Biden, Gravel and Kucinich. It is particularly interesting how Richardson is widely viewed as an acceptable candidate, but has relatively few commenters and diarists directly promoting him.

Anyway, as always, I did my best to remove stuffed results. You can see past MyDD straw poll results here .The field gained slightly on Edwards and Obama from April. Also, you can view the raw data for the poll here. The password is emdy1bxf.