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Florida Governor Rick Scott officially won his third state-wide race by his narrowest margin – just one-tenth of a percentage point – giving Republicans their fourth bet against Democrats in the United States. US Senate.
Florida's law required both automatic and manual counting, because of the proximity of the count, but neither of them significantly changed the final count, putting an end to Democrat Bill Nelson's last hopes of winning a fourth. six-year term. Nelson conceded to Scott in a phone call Sunday afternoon.
Scott, 65, joins Marco Rubio in January to give the state two Republican senators for the first time since the Reconstruction.
Scott's victory – expected since the final count of provisional ballots last week and the remaining margin over 12,000 – means that Republicans have managed to oust Democratic senators in four states led by President Donald Trump in 2016: Claire McCaskill in Missouri, Joe Donnelly in Indiana, Heidi Heitkamp in North Dakota and Nelson in Florida.
But the GOP has failed to beat Sherrod Brown in Ohio, Joe Manchin in West Virginia, Bob Casey in Pennsylvania, Tammy Baldwin in Wisconsin, Debbie Stabenow in Michigan and Jon Tester in Montana – Democrats from six other states that Trump wore in 2016 are campaigning against it.
In addition, Democratic representative Jacky Rosen beat incumbent Republican Senator Dean Heller in Nevada, and Republicans lost the seat held by Jeff Flake, who retired from Republican Rep. Kyrsten Sinema, giving Democrats two seats. . The result is a net gain of only two seats for Republicans despite the most promising Senate card in decades.
Nelson, 76, was in the Senate 18 years after six years as state insurance commissioner and, before that, 12 years in the House as a member of the Space Coast Congress.
Scott is completing his second term as Florida General Manager and could not claim a third term due to term limits. Scott's previous two election victories for the governor had also been bows: 1.1 percentage points each time.
Thanks to her victory, Florida has three times chosen to lead a man across the country who, in the 1990s, ran a chain of for-profit hospitals that had agreed to pay a fine of 1.7 $ 1 billion for systematically defrauding Medicare, Medicaid and veterans health programs. Scott invoked his right under the Fifth Amendment not to incriminate himself 75 times during a testimony in a related civil lawsuit about his role in the fraud committed by Columbia / HCA.
In Scott's first run as governor in 2010, his Republican opponent of the lead candidate and Democratic candidate Alex Sink used the story in negative ads against him. But Scott was willing to spend freely with his personal fortune of hundreds of millions of dollars and managed to win close victories against both.
In 2014, Scott barely won the reelection against Charlie Crist, who had been a Republican governor before Scott, but later became a Democrat.
In fact, Scott's popularity only broke 50% steadily in 2017, after his generally well-regarded management of Hurricane Irma. This improvement in his number of polls, in addition to his constant willingness to spend a lot of money on his own campaigns, made the national republicans believe that Scott had a good chance of defeating Nelson, whose two previous reelections had been opposed to weak opponents.
However, all this was happening before this summer, when the red tide worsened along the southwestern coast of Florida and that thick, blue-green algae from Lake Okeechobee began to stifle Fort Myers in the Gulf of Mexico and Stuart in the Atlantic Ocean. When freshwater algae strike salty seawater along the coast, they die, releasing toxins into the water and into the air – and, according to scientists, provide an additional source of food to the red tidal bacteria, natural. As a result, millions of dead fish, sea turtles, dolphins and manatees, whose carcasses were washed away on the beaches and added to the already pungent stench of red tide toxins.
Many environmentalists have blamed Scott for the calamity. It had reduced the budgets of the agencies responsible for preserving the water quality of Lake Okeechobee and facilitated the enforcement efforts of the polluters.
Scott had to face protests late this summer during campaign stops in Fort Myers and Venice, two Republican strongholds. He largely refrained from visiting the coastal countryside as the red tide extended to the east coast of Florida. He then stopped campaigning completely after Hurricane Michael hit Panhandle in early October.
However, Scott had the advantage of running for the Senate as sitting governor. Voters of a state are well known to voters and can boast of their daily achievements, while senators do not have this level of visibility. The last outgoing US senator to lose elections in Florida was also defeated by a governor: Democratic Governor Bob Graham overthrew Republican Senator Paula Hawkins in 1986.
In the end, the advantage of this tyrannical pulpit combined with the tens of millions of dollars that Scott had invested in his race was enough to win.
CORRECTION: An earlier version of this story said that the Democrats had won the seat previously held by the late Senator John McCain (R-Ariz.). The Democrats won the Arizona seat held by Senator GOP, Jeff Flake, who did not ask to be re-elected.
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