Democrat Could Make Rick Scott Spend It All in Florida’s Senate Race

Back in 1980, former West Virginia Governor Arch Moore was running a hopeless campaign against his successor Jay Rockefeller, whose immense family wealth extinguished any real hope for an upset. His campaign deployed a legendary bumper sticker that read: “Make Him Spend It All, Arch!”

That could also be the slogan for Democrat Debbie Mucarsel-Powell’s long-shot campaign against the richest member of the U.S. Senate today, Florida’s Rick Scott. Florida is a state that has been trending sharply Republican in recent years, as my colleague Gabriel Debenedetti explained in 2023 after a notably disastrous election cycle for Democrats:

Although Obama won it twice, no Democrat has been elected governor in the state since 1994, and recent years have seen Democrats encountering problems turning out Black Floridians. In probably the best-known shift, Democrats have also begun struggling more than ever before with Latino voters in south Florida.

One casualty of that trend was Mucarsel-Powell, who briefly represented a Miami-Dade County congressional district before being upset in 2020. Now she’s doing a very creditable job in her first statewide race, hammering Scott for MAGA extremism generally and for reactionary views on abortion in particular. Scott has a large war chest combining $13 million in self-funding (as of the end of July) with the big donor base he developed as past chairman of the Senate Republicans’ fundraising arm. But it’s likely he’ll drop a lot more dough before it’s over: in his first Senate race in 2018 and in two previous (successful) gubernatorial runs, he spent a total of more than $150 million of his own money on his campaigns. Democrats love to remind voters that their senator made his bundle in stock and severance pay after leaving a burning building at the for-profit hospital chain he founded, Columbia/HCA, which soon got zapped with over a billion smackers in fines for Medicare fraud (Scott himself was never charged with criminal wrong-doing).

While Scott continues to plunder his children’s inheritance, polls continue to show this race as closer than expected and perhaps getting closer. The incumbent leads in the RealClearPolitics averages by 4.3 percent, but each new poll shows Mucarsel-Powell gaining; most recently a September survey from Emerson showed the race statistically tied, as The Hill reported:

Scott leads Mucarsel-Powell 46 percent to 45 percent among likely Florida voters, well within the survey’s plus or minus 3.4 point margin of error. Nine percent of voters said they are undecided. 

Among independent voters, 47 percent said they back Mucarsel-Powell and 34 percent broke for Scott, while 19 percent said they are undecided. Mucarsel-Powell leads Scott by 5 points among women voters, and Scott led Mucarsel-Powell by 8 points among men. 

The poll also found Mucarsel-Powell polling ahead of Scott with the state’s Hispanic vote by 6 points, while Scott led Mucarsel-Powell by 19 points among white voters. 

One problem Scott has brought onto himself stems from his recent efforts to make himself a power in the Senate Republican Conference and a national MAGA star. He feuded with and unsuccessfully challenged Mitch McConnell, and he’s running again as the Trumpiest option for succeeding McConnel. Perhaps in preparation for these gambits, in 2022 he released (and then subsequently toned down slightly) a truly wild “11-Point Plan to Save America” that is to Florida Democrats what Project 2025 has become to Democrats nationally. It included a total sunsetting of federal programs every five years (he later remembered the state he represents and exempted Social Security, Medicare and the U.S. Navy from this death sentence), and minimum income taxes on working poor people whose tax liability is eliminated by tax credits.

Like other Florida Republicans, Scott has also been wrong-footed by Ron DeSantis’s presidential-campaign-driven six-week abortion ban (which Scott initially supported, but then, like Trump, suggested was a bit too strict) and the subsequent ballot initiative to restore Roe v. Wade’s protections for pre-viability abortions as part of the State Constitution. Scott naturally opposes this amendment, which will likely win a majority of the vote in November and may top the 60 percent supermajority required for enactment. Mucarsel-Powell is criticizing Scott constantly for being on the wrong side of this issue. In another parallel to the national campaign, the Democrat is also pounding Scott for his vote against a bipartisan border deal and for having nothing constructive to offer on immigration policy (Mucarsel-Powell is herself an immigrant from Ecuador). Scott, of course, is labeling his opponent as a “socialist” who is relying on non-citizen voting for victory. Mucarsel-Powell was smart to get out in front of one issue by harshly attacking Venezuela’s Maduro regime and its recent efforts to reverse an apparent election defeat.

The possibility that Scott could actually lose this race is manna from heaven for Democrats not just in Florida, but nationally. They are hanging onto control of the Senate by their fingernails. And with Joe Manchin’s seat already lost and Jon Tester’s in grave peril, an upset win over Scott or over his fellow MAGA bravo Ted Cruz–who’s having his own problems with Republican extremism on abortion–could produce the miracle they need (in addition, of course, to a Harris presidential win that would make Tim Walz the Senate tie-breaker). But if nothing else, maybe Mucarsel-Powell can indeed make Rick Scott spend it all.