As governor, Dockery says she would veto abortion bill she voted for

Although state Sen. Paula Dockery voted for a bill requiring a mandatory sonogram for women seeking an abortion, she said today she would veto such legislation if she is elected governor.

"I ended up voting yes," Dockery, a Republican from Lakeland, said before the Tiger Bay Club at the St. Petersburg Yacht Club. "If I was governor would I sign the bill? No."

She said she supported the legislation because there were other provisions in it she liked, but as governor she would ask the Legislature to "de-couple" the mandatory sonogram from the bill.

Dockery's seemingly contradicting remarks come as she is trailing in the polls - and collecting fewer campaign contributions - than her Republican rivals in the governor's race.

Dockery will face Attorney General Bill McCollum and Naples millionaire Rick Scott in the August primary. Whoever wins is expected to run against Democrat Alex Sink, the state's chief financial officer.

Dockery appears to be losing support among likely primary voters, according to recent polls. This month, a Mason-Dixon poll showed her receiving 7 percent of the vote, a 2 percent drop from a March poll.

Dockery has $478,000 in monetary contributions, compared with Sink's $6.1 million and McCollum's $4.7 million. And, unlike Sink and McCollum, she has borrowed $100,000. Scott, who is bankrolling his own campaign, doesn't have any contributions listed on the Florida Department of State Division of Elections website.

When asked by a member of the audience why she is not using her personal wealth in the campaign, Dockery responded that the election is not a be-all, end-all for her life. She said she is not a career politician and would likely go on to some venture other than politics if she lost.

"It's not my goal to put $5 million in my own race and what difference would it make against 25 million?" she said.

She said that while Scott - favored by 24 percent of the primary votes in the latest Mason-Dixon poll - has spent $6 million, she has spent roughly $700,000 in one particular market and polled 16 percent there.

"It's all about name recognition," she said. "They only know his name because he's been on TV nonstop."

In contrast, Dockery said, she was a candidate who had the knowledge and experience, but not the cash to get her message out.

When asked about the insurance industry in Florida, she said a greater effort has to be made to keep large insurance companies inside the state and allow the free market to hold sway.

First elected in 1996, at a time, she said, when Republicans worked together, Dockery painted herself as a reformer who worked within the system to fight sweetheart insider deals that benefited CSX, Big Sugar and similar corporate giants.

She describes herself as a social and fiscal conservative Republican who is running at a time when some Republican subsets, such as the tea party movement, have grown angry and when too many decisions in Tallahassee are made from the top down.