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DAVIE, Fla. — Blistering verbal assaults overtook the race for Florida governor on Wednesday night, as rivals Andrew Gillum and Ron DeSantis delivered an onslaught of negativity in their second and final debate before the November election.
Mr. DeSantis declared Mr. Gillum a corrupt liar. Mr. Gillum all but accused Mr. DeSantis of being a racist.
And so it went for the duration of the debate, which picked up where the candidates left off in their first debate on Sunday. Wednesday’s contentious affair quickly devolved into a contest of raised voices, ignored time limits and wild cheers and jeers from the audience. The extensive personal attacks suggested a hard edge to the last stretch of an already intense contest in the nation’s biggest presidential swing state.
The debate, held at Broward College and hosted by the Florida Press Association and Leadership Florida, began with a question to Mr. DeSantis, a former three-term Republican congressman, about the pipe bombs delivered earlier Wednesday to high-profile Democrats, including Bill and Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and Representative Debbie Wasserman Schultz of Florida, who sat in the debate hall audience. Mr. DeSantis noted that he practiced baseball with Republicans who were shot and injured in Virginia last year.
“I know firsthand that when we start going down that road, it can be very, very deadly, so I condemn that,” he said.
Mr. Gillum, a Democrat and the mayor of Tallahassee, quickly turned the question on Mr. DeSantis, assigning blame to the “collapsing of our political discourse” under President Trump, an enthusiastic supporter of Mr. DeSantis.
“My opponent, endorsed by him, has run this race very, very close to the Trump handbook, where we call each other names, where we run false advertisements,” he said.
The jabs flew from there, with Mr. DeSantis calling Mr. Gillum a career politician who distorted the truth about apparently accepting improper gifts from a lobbyist friend and businessmen who were actually undercover F.B.I. agents investigating Tallahassee’s community redevelopment agency. Mr. Gillum insists he is not the target of the investigation, which began in 2015 and has yet to result in any indictments. The gifts, made to Mr. Gillum during a pair of 2016 trips to New York and Costa Rica, are the subject of a separate state ethics investigation.
“I arrived at the theater and received the ticket from my brother,” Mr. Gillum said “I should have asked more questions to make sure that everything that had transpired was above board.”
Mr. Gillum said he thought his younger brother, Marcus Gillum, had swapped Jay-Z and Beyoncé tickets with Adam Corey, Mr. Gillum’s lobbyist friend, in exchange for the musical tickets. Then, citing Jay-Z, Mr. Gillum tried to turn the debate to policy issues: “In the state of Florida, we got 99 issues, and Hamilton ain’t one of them.”
Mr. DeSantis demanded that Mr. Gillum waive confidentiality in the state ethics inquiry, which will not be completed before Election Day. “Get all the evidence and statements out there so the voters of Florida can know everything is on the up-and-up,” he said.
Mr. Gillum countered that Mr. DeSantis should release detailed travel records of more than $145,000 in taxpayer-funded trips he took to New York to appear on Fox News before resigning from Congress. “Where is the evidence of where you went and how our money was spent to be a junket for you to go to New York and hang out in ‘Faux News and Friends’?” he asked.
Racial politics filled the debate from the start after Mr. Gillum noted that, on Tuesday, a white supremacist group put out a racist robocall against Mr. Gillum for the second time in the campaign.
But matters got uglier later, when Todd McDermott, the debate moderator and an anchor for WPBF, the ABC News affiliate in West Palm Beach, asked Mr. DeSantis about past speaking engagements at far-right conferences and campaign contributions from a donor who called Mr. Obama a racist slur on Twitter. Mr. DeSantis did not take the question well, raising his voice and slamming the lectern.
“How the hell am I supposed to know every single statement someone makes?” he responded. “I am not going to bow down to the altar of media correctness.”
Mr. Gillum looked on, mouth open, with a half-smile on his face.
“My grandmother used to say, ‘A hit dog will holler,’ and it hollered through this room,” he said, spelling out from stage the slur Mr. DeSantis’s donor used. “I’m not calling Mr. DeSantis a racist. I’m simply saying the racists believe he’s a racist.”
“I am not going to sit here and take this nonsense from a guy like Andrew Gillum who always plays the victim, who’s going out and attacking and aligning himself with groups who attack our men and women in law enforcement, attack our military,” Mr. DeSantis shot back.
With 13 days left until the Nov. 6 election, more than 1.4 million Florida voters have already cast ballots early, according to the state’s division of elections. Mr. DeSantis, 40, and Mr. Gillum, 39, have crisscrossed the state in an attempt to get their partisan bases to the polls; on Thursday, Mr. DeSantis is scheduled to campaign with Vice President Mike Pence in Jacksonville, while Mr. Gillum plans to visit three South Florida college campuses with Representative John Lewis of Georgia.
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