Former Florida Rep. Debbie Mucarsel-Powell kicked off her campaign to unseat Republican Sen. Rick Scott on Tuesday, a development that gives national Democrats the recruit they want for what will be a challenging contest. Mucarsel-Powell, though, is hoping that Scott's own vulnerabilities, as well as a backlash to Gov. Ron DeSantis' far-right agenda, will give her the chance to score an upset in a longtime swing state that veered sharply to the right in 2022.
Mucarsel-Powell, who flipped a competitive Miami-area House seat in 2018 but lost it two years later, first needs to win the primary, but she begins as the strong favorite to become the first Latina Democrat ever nominated for statewide office. The only other notable candidate who has launched a bid is Navy veteran Phil Ehr, who raised $2 million for his 2020 campaign against the nationally infamous Rep. Matt Gaetz in the safely red 1st District, but he's so far attracted no major allies. Former Rep. Alan Grayson also is talking about running and even filed FEC paperwork in late June, but his deliberations have attracted little attention now that he's well into the perennial candidate stage of his career.
Scott, who became wealthy running what was the nation's largest for-profit hospital chain, HCA, used his vast personal resources to win two tight races for governor in 2010 and 2014 before narrowly unseating Sen. Bill Nelson in 2018.
His political fortunes, though, took a sharp downturn last cycle after a chaotic tenure as head of the NRSC that was defined by a feud with Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and saw the GOP manage to defy history by actually losing a seat. One of Scott's many mistakes came early in 2022 when he unveiled a plan to "sunset" all federal legislation, including Social Security, after five years, an agenda that Democrats were only too happy to make Republican Senate candidates answer for.
Scott's proposal received new attention earlier this year when President Joe Biden attacked it in his State of the Union address—a pile-on that McConnell was only too happy to join. "I think it will be a challenge for him to deal with this in his own reelection in Florida, a state with more elderly people than any state in America," said McConnell of the senator who months before had tried to oust him as the GOP's Senate leader. (The bad blood between the two camps continues to linger, with one unnamed McConnell ally using just two words to describe Scott to Time magazine in April: "Ass clown.")
Scott soon edited his "sunset" plan to include "specific exceptions of Social Security, Medicare, national security, veterans benefits, and other essential services," but Mucarsel-Powell made it clear this week that his belated about-face wouldn't deter her from making Scott's blunder an issue. "He wrote the plan that could take away the Social Security and Medicare you worked and paid for," she said in a kickoff video that also insinuated Scott had shirked his duties to the public while becoming even richer during his time in office.
The former congresswoman went on to highlight the most notorious chapter of Scott's business career: his company's 2003 guilty plea in what the Department of Justice at the time proclaimed was "the most comprehensive health care fraud investigation" it had ever undertaken. (HCA wound up paying a record $1.7 billion in fines.) The scandal was never quite enough to deny Scott victory in any of his previous elections, but Mucarsel-Powell is hoping it will help her frame this race as a battle between an immigrant from Ecuador who "worked for minimum wage in a donut shop" and a wealthy incumbent "who cuts taxes for himself, but he'd raise them for you."
Mucarsel-Powell is also hoping to get some help at the top of the ticket if she's to give Florida Democrats their first win in a federal statewide race since 2012. Donald Trump carried the Sunshine State 51-48 in 2020 even as he was losing most other swing states, but it was landslides by DeSantis and Sen. Marco Rubio in 2022 that truly left Democrats in a funk. However, there are signs that Joe Biden is serious about keeping Florida in play next year, as his campaign included the state as part of a new $25 million TV and digital buy covering several battlegrounds.
And Democrats have some reason to be optimistic that, if serious resources are allocated here, their message could gain traction. Abortion rights advocates are collecting signatures for to place a constitutional amendment on next year's ballot that would both undo the six-week abortion ban that DeSantis signed into law in April and allow the procedure to take place up to 24 weeks into pregnancy. That could create problems for Republican candidates like Scott, who backed DeSantis' ban and has indicated support for a federal ban as well.
The former congresswoman is also betting that voters are tired of other parts of DeSantis' agenda. "These out-of-touch extremists cannot continue to wield the levers of power in our state," she declared last month. Democrats are hoping that Donna Deegan's upset win in the May race for mayor of Jacksonville was an early sign that Floridians are indeed growing weary of what the DeSantis-era GOP has to offer. They'll also have an early chance to prove that victory was no fluke in a Jan. 16 special election where they'll try to flip a competitive state House seat in the Orlando area.
Democrats also hope that Mucarsel-Powell, who was the first immigrant from South America ever elected to Congress, will be able to appeal to the many Latino voters who switched sides and backed Trump in 2020 after voting for Hillary Clinton four years earlier. Mucarsel-Powell herself experienced that swing the hard way in 2020 as the old version of her 26th Congressional District, which is home to a large Cuban American electorate, veered from a 57-41 win for Clinton all the way to a 53-47 Trump victory, a transformation that helped Miami-Dade County Mayor Carlos Giménez unseat her 52-48.
"Yes, the fear of socialism is real and engrained for those of us who fled dangerous places in search of the American dream," Mucarsel-Powell wrote in a Twitter thread two weeks after her defeat. "My own father was murdered by a criminal with a gun in Ecuador. But it's not why I lost and it's not the only reason South Florida went red."
"There were many factors," she continued, including "a targeted disinformation campaign to Latinos; an electorate desperate to re-open, wracked with fear over the economic consequences; a national party that thinks racial identity is how we vote." Mucarsel-Powell went on to argue that state and national Democrats need to "step back and deeply analyze how we're talking to Latinos and every voter." Now she'll have the chance to test out her own prescription statewide.
This story has been corrected to identify the country that Mucarsel-Powell emigrated from and to reflect that Biden’s $25 million buy is both TV and digital.
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