Charlie Crist

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Charlie Crist (2017) Signature of Charlie Crist

Charles Joseph "Charlie" Crist Jr. (pronunciation: / ˈtʃɑːrli ˈkrɪst / ; born July 24, 1956 in Altoona , Pennsylvania ) is an American politician . Since 2017 he has represented Florida's 13th congressional electoral district in the US House of Representatives for the Democratic Party , of which he has been a member since 2012 . By the summer of 2010 he had been a member of the Republican Party for 36 years and was now non-party.

From 1992 he was a member of the Florida Senate , from 2003 to 2007 he was Attorney General and from 2007 to 2011 the 44th . Florida Governor . In the 2010 election he was defeated by Marco Rubio for the US Senate and in the 2014 election for governorship by his successor Rick Scott .

Family, education and work

Charlie Crist is the son of Charlie and Nancy Lee Crist. His mother had Irish ancestry , his grandfather Adam Christodoulou emigrated from Cyprus to Altoona in 1912 at the age of fourteen . He has three sisters. The family moved from Pennsylvania to Saint Petersburg on the west coast of central Florida when he was a child . His father, who shortened the family name to Crist as a young man , was a doctor and in the 1960s chairman of the School Board of Pinellas County ; Charlie Crist's first political experience was handing out campaign leaflets for his father. He attended Saint Petersburgh High School and was the class speaker there. He studied from 1974 at Wake Forest University and then at Florida State University , where he was vice president of the student body and which he graduated in 1978 with a bachelor's degree in government (government affairs). Crist then studied law at the Law School of Samford University in Birmingham , Alabama , which he graduated with a Juris Doctor in 1981 .

From 1982 to 1987, Crist was the General Counsel for minor league baseball . From 1987 and again from 2011 he worked as a lawyer and in 1988 was State Director of the Republican US Senator Connie Mack .

Charlie Crist with his wife Carole

In 1979, Crist married Amanda Morrow; the marriage was divorced in 1980. On December 12, 2008 he married the entrepreneur Carole Crist b. Rome. In 2017, the couple announced their split. Crist is a Methodist and lives in Saint Petersburg.

Political career

State Senate and offices in the state government from 1993 to 2007

Crist began his political career in 1986 when he first ran for the Florida Senate in the 18th constituency . He applied for this upper house of the State Legislature again in 1992 and won there in the 20th constituency, which he represented in the State Senate from 1993 to 1999. In the 1998 election he ran for the United States Senate , but lost 37 to 62 percent of the vote to the Democratic mandate holder Bob Graham . A year later, Governor Jeb Bush brought him into his cabinet as Deputy Secretary of Commerce ( Department of Business and Professional Regulation ). In a 2000 by-election, he was elected Florida's Education Commissioner , an office that was abolished with Crist's resignation in 2003 and incorporated into the Ministry of Education. From 2003 to 2007 he was the state's Attorney General , the first Republican elected to that office in Florida.

Florida Governor 2007 to 2011

Governor Crist (center) on a visit to residential areas after the destruction caused by tornadoes in March 2007

In 2006 he was nominated by his party as a candidate for the upcoming gubernatorial election and elected with 52.2 percent of the vote against the Democrat Jim Davis . He took office on January 2, 2007 and subsequently proved to be a moderate Republican governor who sought and found consensus across party lines. Right at the beginning of his tenure, Crist campaigned for the abolition of voting computers in Florida, which had been criticized in particular in the controversial election result in Florida for the 2000 presidential election in the United States , which was decisive for the victory of George W. Bush . Unlike most Republican governors, Crist accepted the Florida State grant from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, which was enacted by US President Obama in early 2009 . This enabled him to mitigate the sharpest effects of the financial crisis , which had hit Florida particularly hard (housing boom), by saving around 30,000 jobs.

As governor, Crist represented conservative positions on the death penalty and on the issue of gun rights . At the same time, he advocated environmental protection measures such as the ban on oil production off the coasts (offshore), stricter regulation of immissions and reduced emissions of greenhouse gases . The United States Sugar Company sees the purchase of large areas of sugar cane planted in southern Florida as a special achievement in order to better regulate the water balance of the Everglades further south , which are considered to be ecologically very endangered. However, due to the financial crisis in Florida, the amount originally earmarked for this by the State of Florida has been reduced from 1.75 billion dollars to 536 million dollars, which has led to considerable criticism. In this connection the governor was accused of having overestimated the land price of the land he had bought; the area bought is too small for an effective rehabilitation of the Everglades. In 2010, Crist organized the protection of the Northwest Florida coast after the Deepwater Horizon oil rig accident .

Candidacy for the US Senate in 2010 and party change

At the beginning of 2010, Crist decided, instead of running for a second term in the US Senate election, to succeed Mel Martínez, who was no longer running . At the end of April 2010, he announced that he would resign from the Republican Party. As a moderate Republican, Crist had lagged behind Marco Rubio , a representative of the Tea Party movement , in the polls for the internal party primary . He then ran as an independent candidate. Rubio won the main election in November 2010 with 48.9 percent of the vote, ahead of Crist (29.7 percent) and the Democrat Kendrick Meek (20.2 percent).

In December 2012, Crist moved to the Democratic Party, having previously appeared at their pre- election nomination convention and supporting Barack Obama's re-election .

Candidate for governor in 2014

On November 1, 2013, Crist announced that he was running for governorship in Florida again. In the party's internal Democratic primary election on August 26, 2014, Crist clearly beat former State Senator Nan Rich with almost 75 percent of the vote. In the general gubernatorial election on November 4, 2014, he ran against the Republican incumbent Rick Scott and lost with 47.1 percent to Scott with 48.2 percent of the vote. The latest polls had predicted a head-to-head race after Crist was clearly in the lead in spring 2014.

Crist did not comment on his political future after his defeat. In March 2015, he denied assumptions that he would apply for the vacant Senate seat of Marco Rubio in the 2016 election . Rubio, who beat Crist in the 2010 Senate election, was not allowed to run for the Senate at the same time due to his candidacy in the Republican primary for the 2016 presidential election. After his early departure from the presidential election campaign, Rubio successfully ran for another Senate mandate. Crist supported Rubio's Democratic opponent Patrick Murphy in the election campaign.

Member of the US House of Representatives since 2017

In October 2015, Crist announced that he would run for a seat in the US House of Representatives in the 2016 election for the Democrats .

In the November 2016 election , Crist prevailed in Florida's 13th Congressional constituency , which is in the Tampa area, with 51.9 percent of the vote against Republican David Jolly , who had held the seat since 2014. Crist took office on January 3, 2017. In the 2018 election he was re-elected with 57 to 42 percent against George Buck. Within the democratic faction, he belongs to the centrist associations of the Blue Dog Coalition and the New Democrat Coalition . He is also a member of the non-partisan Climate Solutions Caucus . He is a member of the Finance and Science Committee .

Web links

Commons : Charlie Crist  - collection of pictures, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ FSU alumnus Charlie Crist sworn in as Florida Governor. In: FSU.edu , January 2007; Jennifer L. Lawless: Becoming a Candidate: Political Ambition and the Decision to Run for Office. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 2012, p. 79
  2. ^ Gregory Pappas: Charlie Crist's Turn Around Makes Headlines in Florida Governor's Race. In: Pappas Post , June 28, 2014.
  3. ↑ a b Charlie Christ. In: National Governors Association
  4. ↑ Charlie Crist, Jr.'s Biography. In: Vote Smart.
  5. ^ A deal to save the Everglades. In: The New York Times , March 8, 2010.
  6. ↑ Charlie Crist. In: Florida Governors' Portraits , Museum of Florida History.
  7. ↑ Crist's independent run draws prize - and scorn. In: Orlando Sentinentel , April 30, 2010.
  8. ↑ R. Klüver: Bitter tea. In: Süddeutsche Zeitung , April 30, 2010.
  9. ↑ Examiner: Charlie Crist joins Nan Rich in 2014 FL race to replace Gov. Rick Scott. In: Examiner , November 1, 2013.
  10. ↑ Florida Governor: Rick Scott vs. Charlie Crist. In: Real Clear Politics (poll aggregator).
  11. ↑ Charlie Crist Won't Run For Senate In 2016. In: Huffington Post , March 16, 2015.
  12. ^ Former Florida governor Charlie Crist to run for US Congress as Democrat. In: The Guardian , October 20, 2015.
  13. ↑ Tasos Kokkinidis: Greek-American Congressman Crist Wins Re-election. In: Greek USA Reporter , November 7, 2018.
personal data
SURNAME Crist, Charlie
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Crist, Charles Joseph Jr.
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American politician (Democratic Party)
DATE OF BIRTH July 24, 1956
PLACE OF BIRTH Altoona , Pennsylvania