Florida Republican U.S. Sen. Rick Scott talking to reporters and supporters outside La Teresita restaurant in Tampa on Nov. 5, 2024. (Photo by Mitch Perry/Florida Phoenix)
Rick Scott has never won a statewide election by more than 1.2 percentage points, but he’s maintained a consistent lead over his Democratic challenger, Debbie Mucarsel-Powell, throughout this election cycle.
So when he made a campaign stop at La Teresita, a Cuban eatery in West Tampa on Tuesday, the Phoenix asked him if he was more confident going into tonight than was the case when he ran for governor in 2010 and 2014, or against Democratic U.S. Sen. Bill Nelson in 2018 — a race so close it required a recount to decide the winner.
Scott said he doesn’t trust polls.
“There’s never been a poll that said I was supposed to win, and we won,” he said. “In ’10, I was supposed to lose. In ’14, I was supposed to lose. In ’18, I was supposed to lose — by big margins, by the way. And we won.”
That was well before the great Republican migration took place, with the GOP now holding its biggest lead in voter registrations over Democrats (by more than 1 million voters) in the history of the state.
And surrounded by other Republicans like U.S. Rep. Anna Paulina Luna and Hillsborough County state Sen. Jay Collins, Scott sounded downright giddy that Election Day 2024 could be duplicative of what happened two years ago, when Ron DeSantis won his re-election bid by 19 points and county commissions in both Hillsborough and Pinellas flipped red.
“Look at what’s happening: Hillsborough is turning red. Pinellas is turning red. Miami-Dade is turning red. We have a chance to win in Palm Beach County,” Scott said. “We have a great opportunity to really change the direction of this country. People want a change. They’re fed up with this stuff. We’re up in D.C. It’s a swamp. It’s not fair to you guys. It’s not fair to the voters. They’re not getting what they’re voting for.”
Scott initially told the crowd gathered around him outside the restaurant that “assuming that I can win this race,” he would devote his attention to winning the race to lead the Republican Senate caucus, as his bitter rival, Kentucky Sen. Mitch McConnell, has previously announced he would step down from his leadership role after the election.
The Phoenix asked Scott if he thought he had a chance against the “two Johns” also in the race: Idaho’s John Thune and Texas’ John Cornyn. Scott used the opportunity to bash McConnell.
“Ted Cruz and I have the only competitive races to defend,” he said about the Texas Republican who is also running for re-election. “McConnell hasn’t helped us at all. In fact, in the last three weeks McConnell has trashed Trump and me. That’s crazy.”
Leadership challenge
Scott challenged McConnell as GOP Senate leader following the 2022 midterm election, which infuriated McConnell, who said that Scott did a “poor job” of running the National Republican Senatorial Committee (NRSC), according to a just published book called “The Price of Power.”
“I’m going to win,” Scott said Tuesday when asked by the Phoenix about his chances for the Senate Leadership position. But of course, he can’t run for that race unless he defeats Mucarsel-Powell tonight.
Meanwhile,Mucarsel-Powell conducted her last press call with reporters on Tuesday from South Florida, where she said she intended to visit polling locations to make her final pitch to voters.
“Believe it or not, there are still people that, for whatever reason, may be undecided,” she said on a Zoom call. “So, it’s important for me to answer questions that they may have.”
Given the Republicans’ registration advantage, any chance Mucarsel-Powell has of stunning the political world and knocking out Rick Scott is going to have to come from nonparty-affiliated voters, she acknowledged.
Mucarsel-Powell has trailed Scott in virtually every major public opinion survey throughout this election cycle, but the gap between the two is less than 5 percentage points, according to the RealClearPolitics average. That’s a considerable improvement over Val Demings’ performance in 2022, when she lost to Republican incumbent Marco Rubio by more than 16 points.
“I’m extremely proud of how far we’ve come,” she told reporters. “This is a race that so many people dismissed from the very beginning. No one thought that this could be possible. And here we are today within the margin of error where we will see what happens, but I can tell you optimistically that across the state people have had enough and they have been joining this movement so that we can send Rick Scott to retirement.”
Lack of investment
With Democrats fighting to keep their majority in the U.S. Senate, the Florida contest was essentially dismissed by the aligned outside groups that traditionally have invested heavily in Florida elections. The Democratic Senate Campaign Committee spent just over $1 million in the contest, POLITICO Florida reported last week. The Phoenix asked Mucarsel-Powell what she might have done differently if she had received more financial resources.
“Of course, when you have more resources … maybe you could have invested in a stronger ground game,” she acknowledged.
“Senate campaigns usually rely on the coordinated campaign,” she said, adding, “I didn’t rely on anyone in this race, and I think that’s obvious when you look at where we are right now. The moment I decided to run it was to run for Florida, it was independent of whether someone would come and save us or not. We need to work on this ourselves. We need to rely on the people and the resources that we have right here, and we’ve been able to do that. So, let’s see what happens today.”
The polls close at 7 p.m. tonight, with the first statewide results expected to come in after 8 p.m.