Part of the series, Assault on Florida.

Florida’s tea party governor, Rick Scott, must be looking at some really devastating private polling — numbers even more seemingly insurmountable than results of a public poll released yesterday. That news survey from PPP found that Scott’s approval rating was upside down by a whopping 24 percentage points, 33 to 57 percent — and that former Gov. Charlie Crist, who recently joined the Democratic Party, leads him by double digits, 53 to 39 percent, in the 2014 governor’s race.

Devastating poll results could explain why the governor emulated another plutocrat pol, Mitt Romney, this week when he executed a Romney-style 180-degree flip-flop on one of his own signature issues — Florida’s racist voter suppression law.

Of course, to execute a Romney-worthy flip-flop, Scott also had to tell a Romney-esque lie. “The Legislature passed it,” he told a group of African-American state legislators on Tuesday, referring to the racist voter law. “I didn’t have anything to do with passing it.”

Except for the part where he signed it into law, of course, which he did in May 2011. He also authorized his cash-strapped state to spend a half-million dollars defending the law in court.

But that was then. Now Scott says, “Our ultimate goal must be to restore Floridians’ confidence in our election system. We need more early voting days.”

The voter suppression law in Florida back-fired because African-Americans, Latinos and others saw it for what it was: a nakedly racist power-grab by Rick Scott and the neo-Confederates in his party. The voters who stood in Gov. Scott’s long lines on Election Day were driven to exercise their right to vote because they had not forgotten the indignities, beatings and even murders endured by previous generations in the struggle to claim that right for them.

Now, in a complete about-face, Scott says voting access should be restored. “I think it is the right thing to do for our citizens,” he said. “I believe everybody ought to get involved in elections. Of course, I want them all to vote for me,” he said, smiling, but “I think it’s the right thing to do.”