jobs. i hate to keep coming back to that but there s a lot of people in florida suffering and need a job. the unemployment rate is probably realistically 15%. the when you consider people not on the rolls anymore. that and we re sinking as a ship financially. we get downgraded, and that needs to be the focus. we introduced the constitutional balanced budget amendment, which didn t go anywhere, but at least we got a vote on it. it was a big issue that you pushed, joe. but at the end of the day, it needs to be about getting our financial house in order. we re $15, $16 trillion in debt, going to $20 trillion. my first year here, we spent $2.7 trillion. our revenues are down $500 million and now we re spending $3.7 trillion. where else can you get away with that for the last three years? it s unbelievable, unbelievable. verne, thank you so much. thank you, verne. michael, thank you. final question, important question, the miami heat, will they win it all this year or will lebron chok
it s like a food fight in a fifth grade cafeteria and unfortunately, we re talking about presidential politics. joining us now from new york, nbc news political director and host of the daily rundown chuck todd. and also with us from the beautiful waterfront in tampa, nbc s peter alexander. that s a nice shot. look, we re beaming to peter, it s dramatic tv. where now is peter? we ll do the reveal. and then zoom in. he nods his head lick a model. let s go to chuck todd. chuck, you re from the sunshine state. i m sure you ve been hearing us debone both of the leading candidates. and i m dead serious here. are we too close to this? or does this strike you even in new york as one cynical, negative soul-crushing experience of a political campaign?
problems for these two candidates? and is there any glimmer of hope for say rick santorum moving forward? i am curious that the santorum number. in our poll, we showed post-debate, he actually got, if you think about predebate, post debate, he got a five-point bump, which translated into an overall three-point bump. i m curious to see if he can break 20. and the higher he gets, that s obviously bad for gingrich. one of the last-minute exit poll questions that the consortium added had to do with the impact of these ads. and you know, one of the things in the last, in many ways, romney is borrowing from the rick scott campaign playbook of 2010. which was sort of, go over the media, you may be having a lot of negatives. but just saturate the state with television ads. rick scott did that. he won the campaign. he has been digging out politically ever since. so you know, there is a price to be paid sometimes when you have
that negative ads win. uh-huh. sometimes they do. but i ve also seen many times a lot of candidates that live and die by negative ads. winning in the short run, losing in the long run and i go back to rick scott, florida s governor, he won by running one negative ad after another. it was endless, it was oversix months. he did destroy bill mccullum. and then when he got sworn in, he had a 35% approval rating. and he s about 30% now. because, yes, he won, he destroyed bill mccullum, but nobody liked him in the end because of it. except in this case we re talking about newt gingrich. so i m not sure the same dynamic applies i m serious. and i m not trying to be facetious. it doesn t matter who he s running against. no, it does. it does not, people want to know why does mitt romney have nothing to say about mitt
it s a reality. and you know what? it burns families. it hurts people s future thoughts about themselves. that s a reality that all floridians are living with. there s not one person here who doesn t have a house that is worth less than when they got a mortgage for it. there s not a person here who doesn t know somebody who has, or in the process of losing their homes. that s a reality we re facing on a daily basis in florida. i ve got to tell you, we re going into nevada, those are issues that are happening throughout the country. and that, you re absolutely right, mike. we re talking about kosher food and we re talking about how you treat dogs, which is all important stuff, i guess. but people are losing homes, man. people are families are breaking apart. that was extremely well put. thank you very much. we ll be right back. i want to hear what happened. live from miami beach on primary day.