Sunday with the Senators: Florida

Florida “should” be a solidly red state. The Senate race should be a cakewalk for Medicare Fraudster Rick Scott (MAGA). Remember, he oversaw the largest Medicare fraud in history, resulting in a $1.7 billion dollar fine.  Yes, that is “billion” with a “B”.

In 2018, he beat Bill Nelson by a scunch, 50.05% to 49.93%, or 10,033 votes. In 2023, he wrote a proposal he wanted the GOP to adopt. You can read it here, but you won’t, so here are the “highlights”: raising taxes on poor and middle-class Americans, and working to do away with Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, and the rest of the social safety net. Rick wanted to be Moscow Mitch. His proposal didn’t fly – it didn’t even fly with his party.

Most of the 2018 elections in Florida were, like the Senate race, squeakers. There were a couple blow-out ballot initiatives, but the vast majority of races (even for governor) were quite close. The 2022 Florida elections were much more tilted to the GOP, likely on the strength of Ron DeSantis’ 59.4% - 40% routing of Charlie Crist.

This year may be different, and for the reasons I detail below, I believe that while everyone else says Florida will be ruby red, I think that there’s a 50/50 chance we win the Senate seat.

First, the candidate: Debbie Mucarsel-Powell. She won election to the US House of Representatives in 2018, beating incumbent Carlos Curbelo. Carlos is now a recovering Republican, and a frequent guest on MSNBC. In winning, Mucarsel-Powell became the first Ecuadorian to be elected to the House. She was the first woman to represent the district. She lost to Carlos Giménez in 2020, in a rejiggered and gerrymandered district. As an aside, Carlos Giménez was a big supporter of Hillary Clinton in 2016, and later became a MAGA pod-person.¹

After leaving the House, Mucarsel-Powell joined Giffords, the anti-gun organization. While I don’t believe polls on candidates, I do look at trendlines. There has been no public polling in Florida since early June, but the trendline took her from being down double-digits last year to being down by 2 points in June. That’s within the margin of error. And we’re still 3 months out.

As of the last disclosure, both Medicare Fraudster and Mucarsel-Powell have about $4 million cash on hand. BUT – only 11% of Fraudster’s money came from small donors, while 46% of Mucarsel-Powell’s funds came from small donors. Fully 47% of Fraudster’s money was self-funded. You can see the full breakdown here. Why does this matter? Because if you or I give $5 to a candidate, there’s a very high chance we will vote for them. Approximately 60% more voters gave less than $200 each to Mucarsel-Powell than to the Fraudster. That’s huge. Those are votes. And yes, the Florida primary is still a month away, but Mucarsel-Powell will walk away with the Democratic nod.

The candidate is running as a Latina, as a mother, as an immigrant, as a principled person, and running on kitchen table issues, guns, and above all, abortion. Part of her pitch is that her mother brought her and her sisters for both freedom and safety from Ecuador. Then and now, abortion is banned in Ecuador.

Amendment 4 is on the ballot in Florida this year. This amendment would establish a constitutional right to abortion before fetal viability. In a state with a 6-week abortion ban. Amendment 4 is polling at about 60% in multiple polls.

The cognitive dissonance of voters always confounds me. A rational person would assume that if a voter was in favour of legalized abortion, or gun restrictions (I’m thinking about you, Parkland, Florida) then they would understand that Democrats are their candidates, and Republicans will endeavor to undo any Constitutional amendments or ballot initiatives that, say, enshrine abortion rights, or enact red flag laws.

But this has not been the case in the red states (Montana, Kansas, and Kentucky) that passed post-Roe legislation enshrining abortion rights, or in the case of Ohio, rejected a proposed amendment that would have made it harder to pass an abortion-rights ballot initiative. And so, the win of Amendment 4 may not carry over to the Senate race.

As a complete aside, and only because data fascinates me, Amendment 4 (and all Democrats) will lose in Sumter County, Florida. This place has red to blue registration at 3:1, but the fun fact here is that Sumter County has the highest median age in the country at 68.8. That’s right, fully half the people are 70 or over. Luckily, it’s a small county by relative population. If you’re a data nut like I am, there are great visualizations from the Census Bureau here.

But back to the Senate race. Mucarsel-Powell is out there campaigning ON ISSUES and independent of whomever is the Democratic nominee for President. If you listen to her stump speech, it is geared toward the issues of import to voters. She is relatively young, and very photogenic. It’s sad, but voters care what women look like. (Yeah, I hate it too.) In an old state, she is talking about making sure that Social Security and Medicare are not vanquished. She is talking about making sure that taxes do not go up, as they would under Project 2025. She is talking about working to keep children from getting shot to death at school.

If she can leverage her positions with the voters who are all in for Amendment 4, it’s at least a 50/50 shot, making it a toss-up state. All the pundits have it either likely or solidly Republican, but my gut says it’s better than that.

1. Pod People: In the 1956 movie Invasion of the Body Snatchers, which was a corollary for communism, people would go to sleep, and actual aliens would put a pod next to them. Overnight, the pod transformed into the person, who was now all-in with the aliens. No one has proven to me that something similar has NOT been infecting people who are MAGA. I’m not saying it’s actual pods, it could be the bugs that crawl in through people’s ears like in the TV show BrainDead. It could be some drug – but it’s certainly something causing these people to become cult members.