In Florida, the stench of K Street didn’t matter — at least not enough to repel voters.

Despite his profession’s dismal approval ratings on matters of honesty and ethics, lobbyist David Jolly edged out Democrat Alex Sink in Tuesday’s special election for the 13th District congressional seat. It’s the latest sign that a D.C. lobbying or consultant background — while far from helpful or positive — isn’t a dealbreaker at the ballot box.

Jolly is the second prominent K Streeter to get a nod from voters in recent months. Lobbying shop founder and co-owner Terry McAuliffe won his Virginia gubernatorial race last fall after asking voters to look past a long history as a consummate party insider and political fixer. Two other prominent candidates with ties to lobbying firms or trade associations will face voters this year: Republican Ed Gillespie in Virginia and Democrat Debbie Dingell in Michigan.

“It’s obviously not a disqualifier," said Haley Barbour, the former Republican National Committee chairman and a founding partner of the firm BGR Government Affairs who went on to win two terms as governor of Mississippi. “But a lot of people are not really aware of what lobbyists do and it has negative connotations.”

Barbour, who has since returned to lobbying since leaving the governorship in 2012, said that his 2003 Democratic opponent Ronnie Musgrove spent thousands of dollars pushing the narrative that Barbour was an out-of-touch corporate lobbyist. The Barbour campaign made a deliberate attempt to own the issue — playing up his lobbying experience as a strength. By the end of the campaign, Barbour’s internal polls had voters saying — by about a 20 point margin — that his government relations experience was a plus.

“You can’t run from it,” Barbour said in an interview. “You have to confront it. And in our case, by election day, people thought it was better to have somebody who had been a successful lobbyist.”

In his race, Jolly faced questions about his work for a businessman advocating major changes to Social Security and his work on energy issues like offshore drilling. McAuliffe’s firm represented tobacco giant Philip Morris, the lead industry trade association, several waste dumping interests, and a company that was fighting to exclude women from certain jobs. Gillespie — a former Republican National Committee chairman — co-founded QGA Public Affairs. Though he hasn’t been a registered lobbyist since 2007, his firm has represented big business interests like the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the National Association of Realtors, AT&T, Microsoft and PricewaterhouseCoopers.

Dingell never worked as a registered lobbyist, but is a former General Motors executive and did public affairs work for an auto-industry backed trade association. She’s running to replace her husband, Rep. John Dingell (D-Mich.), in the House.

Not all lobbying bids for office go so smoothly. Sen. Pat Roberts’s (R-Kan.) 2008 Democratic opponent Jim Slattery, for example, failed to oust the Republican — and faced a barrage of attacks about his work for the firm Wiley Rein. In the same year, mining industry lobbyist Sydney Hay, a Republican, lost her bid for an Arizona House seat.

A December Gallup poll found that only 6 percent of Americans rated the ethical standards of lobbyists as “high” or “very high.” K Streeters ranked lower than any other profession polled by Gallup — coming in just two points below members of Congress.

“Members of Congress are thought of poorly as a class and they get elected,” said Democratic lobbyist Steve Elmendorf.

K Streeters who have worked in politics say what matters is how individual lobbyist-turned-candidates tell his or her story to voters.

“If I was in the candidate recruiting business, I certainly wouldn’t make it a priority to seek out candidates with a K Street background,” said Scott Kamins, a former RNC senior official and co-founder of the firm Burton Kamins Advocacy.

Yet the message management skills that lobbyists develop and master as part of their advocacy work can easily translate to the political arena — especially when it comes to telling their own stories and framing their own work in a positive light, he said.

“Successful lobbyists have honed an ability to effectively frame the debate on a client’s terms, recruit allies, and put the intricacies of the legislative process to work on a client’s behalf,” Kamins said. “So I think one develops a capacity to tailor messaging and an ability to get things done.”

While Jolly founded the lobbying firm Three Bridges Advisors, he also had connections to the district, primarily his service as a top aide to the late Rep. C.W. Bill Young — whose October 2013 death triggered the special election. And Jolly capitalized on those connections —kicking off his campaign by declaring himself a “a Bill Young Republican” with the former congressman’s widow standing by his side.

Andy Stone, spokesman for the Democratic House Majority PAC, said that Democrats and their allies made a deliberate attempt to not only link Jolly to K Street, but to find a very specific issue that would resonate on a gut level with voters. They found their issue in Jolly’s work on social security.

“It was important to make the connection between David Jolly’s lobbying career and something that affected their lives in a very specific way,” Stone said.

Democratic outside groups hammered Jolly for his connections to St. Petersburg businessman and donor James MacDougald. A MacDougald-founded group, Free Enterprise Nation, was among Jolly’s lobbying clients. MacDougald had prominently called for social security to be dramatically reformed, and lobbying records for Free Enterprise Nation listed it as an issue that Three Bridges was working on.

House Majority PAC spent about $1 million total on the race — including $770,00 going to a television campaign hitting Jolly on his work on Social Security.

But ultimately voters in the GOP-leaning district backed Jolly over Sink.

“I think working on K Street — working as a contract lobbyist or an in-house lobbyist — doesn’t have any impact on the electorate,” said David Urban, a former chief of staff for former Sen. Arlen Specter and a Republican lobbyist for the American Continental Group. “People are smart enough to realize how Washington works.”

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