Republican gubernatorial candidate Paula Dockery ended her quest to occupy the Governor’s Mansion on Monday, saying she hates to give up the fight but doesn’t have the cash to run an effective statewide campaign.
Dockery’s exit leaves Attorney General Bill McCollum and Naples businessman Rick Scott as the final high profile candidates for the GOP nomination to replace Gov. Charlie Crist.
“People who know me know I’m a tenacious fighter unafraid of long odds, especially when the stakes are so high,” Dockery, a state senator from Lakeland, said in a statement released Monday morning. “But I’m also a realist and understand the costs of effectively competing statewide. At this point in the election cycle, I see no financial path to victory.”
In the first quarter of 2010, Dockery raised more than $325,000 in less than two months. The haul marked an increase over the $291,734 Dockery collected in the quarter that ended Dec. 31, the first of her campaign, but was nowhere near McCollum’s $1.4 million for the period between the beginning of January and the end of March.
A Quinnipiac University poll last month showed McCollum leading Dockery 56 percent to 7 percent. Eighty-five percent of the poll’s 1,250 respondents said they did not know enough of Dockery to form an opinion.
Further complicating matters for Dockery was the late entrance into the race of Scott, who is the former chief executive of Columbia/HCA Health Care. Scott led Conservatives for Patients Rights in opposition to President Obama’s health care overhaul, putting $5 million of his own money into an ad campaign against the proposal. He indicated that he was willing to do the same in the governor’s race, spending about as much on his initial round of television commercials as McCollum had raised in the entire campaign.
McCollum congratulated Dockery on “running an enthusiastic and substantive campaign for governor,” and praised her record in the Legislature.
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