Hear Us Out: What If Florida De-Elected Senator Rick Scott?
We might be a little partisan in this one, folks.
Dear Wonketteers, we know we shouldn’t give in to excessive hopiness. Sure, we’re still on a bit of a high from the DNC and the impressive poll numbers for the Harris-Walz campaign, both nationally and in swing states. But there’s such a thing as getting carried away.
Still, goddamn, I really want Democrat Debbie Mucarsel-Powell to beat former Florida Gov. Rick Scott in his bid for reelection to the US Senate. Mucarsel-Powell, who served one term in the US House, easily won last week’s Florida Democratic primary, making her the official opponent to Scott, who’s seeking his second term after previously being the shitty governor who preceded Florida’s current shitty governor.
Not only does Mucarsel-Powell have the distinct advantages of not being Rick Scott and in no way resembling the old Weekly World News mascot, Bat Boy, she actually might manage a surprise win in America’s Dangling Appendage, if everything goes just right. Yes, by Crom, here we go again feeling hopey.
In recent polling, Mucarsel-Powell has come much closer to Scott — trailing by just three percentage points in the most recent poll from Public Policy Polling — than in polls earlier this year. What’s more, Rick Scott remains deeply unpopular, with his approval rating stuck at just 35 percent in a recent survey, with 49 percent disapproving of him. That’s exactly where Scott stood when Yr Wonkette last wrote about the Florida Senate race in January.
Mucarsel-Powell seized on Scott’s most recent low approval rating, pointing out to the Florida Phoenix that Florida voters “know who he is across the state, and that’s why they don’t want to vote for him.”
She added that she’s not even sure Scott’s ads help him much, since
The more money that he puts into this race with his face on television, the more people see him and remember who he is and don’t want to vote for him. I recommend another strategy for him at this point. His brand has become toxic. If there’s a Republican who’s going to lose in Florida, it’s Rick Scott.
That said, while Mucarsel-Powell has come increasingly close to Scott in polls, often within their margins of error, she has yet to top him any polls so far.
But wait, there’s more: Abortion rights are on the Florida ballot this fall, and Rick Scott supports the state’s six week ban on abortions, although he has said he would support replacing it with a 15-week ban, not that he’s a Florida legislator anymore. Then again, like many Republicans who have just this year discovered that most Americans reject complete bans on abortion, Scott has been all over the place on the matter; last year he said he would sign the six-week ban if he were still governor, and as a senator, Scott co-sponsored Lindsey Graham’s 2020 bill for a national abortion ban.
Now that he realizes such extreme positions are poison with voters, though, Scott says Congress should let states decide the matter, yes indeed, just like Donald Trump did. And Scott claims he supports access to in vitro fertilization (IVF) — and has even run an ad saying he’s all for IVF because it “has brought beautiful babies to so many families.” And yet in June he voted against a Senate bill that would have protected IVF from state restrictions.
Not surprisingly, Mucarsel-Powell regularly hammers Scott on his support for banning abortion, and last week, during the Democratic convention, Michigan’s Sen. Gary Peters, chair of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Commission, told MSNBC that he thinks Scott’s seat will flip this year, noting that Scott has never won any of his elections by much over one percentage point, and that Scott is “not popular, he’s taken very extreme positions on abortion […] so that kind of contrast bodes well.”
Polls show support for the ballot initiative, Amendment 4, which would protect the right to an abortion up through 24 weeks, running as high as 69 percent, which is nice, because for it to pass, it will need at least 60 percent of the vote.
Scott continues to say shit that may come back to bite him, becoming just the latest Republican to jump on the weird Trumpian bandwagon of claiming that Democrats favor “post-birth abortion,” which is not and never has been a thing. NBC affiliate WFLA reported Monday that at a recent “faith-based roundtable,” Scott told reporters, “Democrats are extreme. They support allowing a baby born, healthy, born alive, to just cry itself to death. It’s extreme, you just can’t believe it.”
True enough: There's no reason to believe a lie about something that is happening absolutely nowhere.
Will turnout for Amendment 4, plus Scott’s general nastiness, plus the national vibe shift toward Harris-Walz, as well as a lot of Floridians getting sick and tired of a far-right minority trying to cram Christian nationalism down their throats, be enough to put Mucarsel-Powell over the top this fall? Let’s hope so; if you’d like to send some dollars her way, we bet she’d appreciate it!
PREVIOUSLY!
[Florida Politics / Florida Phoenix / Nation / NBC News / Jezebel / Debbie Mucarsel-Powell for Senate]
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Saw this car sticker:
Don't like abortions? Ignore them like you do school shootings.
And of course there's always the fact that he ran a scam health insurance company that defrauded Medicare out of billions and was fined $1.7 billion for their efforts. How he skated from this crime is still a mystery.