Florida’s Rick Scott fumbled midterms, stumbled in a power play, but still could be a political force | Opinion

Gov. Ron DeSantis and former President Donald Trump are not Florida’s only Republican politicians vying for voters’ attention, not to mention national dominance.

Despite the Republican “red wave” fail, a thwarted victory that Florida Sen. Rick Scott, as head of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, was supposed to make happen, he’s raising his profile and pushing for his kind of Trump-inspired Republican Party.

Right after the midterms, Scott took a swing at engineering a Herculean power play to become Republican Senate leader. He missed, but his move to unseat 80-year-old Sen. Mitch McConnell of Kentucky raised Scott’s profile in Washington like never before, and he is pitching himself as a force to be reckoned with.

Midterm losses

It could be a winning strategy, at some point. But Scott has to recover from a few stumbles. He had been charged with the Senate’s 2022 campaigns and the effort to flip the House and Senate with the help of President Joe Biden’s low ratings and a bevy of off-beat — and off-putting — candidates, including election deniers, such as the Trump-endorsed Dr. Oz, who lost his Senate race, and the voluble former newscaster Kari Lake, who wanted to be Arizona governor.

Then there’s the question of money. Scott went all out with a digital fundraising initiative to lure small donations. It worked, until it didn’t, bringing in more than $180 million by July. However, 95% of it already had been spent, leaving Republicans with less than half of what the Democrats had on hand by then. A New York Times analysis said Scott’s “enormous gamble on finding new online donors has been a costly financial flop.”

McConnell blamed too-negative messaging from the Republicans for turning off some voters. So did Scott in a series of post-election postmortems, and he’s right. But that said, how positive can you be when the party still embraces election deniers, anti-Semites, racists, and anti-immigrant folks? Scott himself is going after the third rails of national politics — Medicare and Social Security.

We know, these are Republicans. We don’t expect them to be Democrats. However, enough midterm voters were alarmed that the GOP has spurned traditional Republican ideals to, instead, embrace misinformation, an intrusive, punitive government — and the crazy.

Obviously, now we know McConnell, who beat Scott in a secret vote of 37-10-1, disagrees on what that Republican ideal should be. Scott’s stumble exposes a growing schism in the Republican Party and an emerging new Tea Party Caucus-style branch led by him.

The fact that Scott tried to unseat McConnell, the face of the congressional Republican Party, was bold and aspirational — and not necessarily political suicide.

‘A new day’

In recent speeches and press releases, a more vocal Scott has said he’s ready to fill a vacuum. He appears to be revitalized, re-energized and planning for “a new day” for the GOP. That also portends division ahead as Republicans sort out what party it will be. It’s a good fight for the party to have, especially if it, ultimately, has the backbone to tell Trump to go fly a kite. We’re not naive, but Trump’s kingmaker status took a hit in the midterms.

Scott respects the current Republican leadership, according to his spokesperson McKinley Lewis. But he clearly is frustrated with the Republican status quo in D.C., as he has said publicly.

Up to now, Scott has been Florida’s lesser-known senator, but now he wants to bring his own vision for the Republican Party to the fore. He says that Beltway Republicans might not share with him, but voters across America do.

Those of us who remember Scott’s eight years as Florida governor know what that can mean. Scott is a fiscal conservative with a “pull yourself up by your bootstraps” mentality. That’s what he did as a child raised in public housing, he says. No handouts, jobs or subsidies from the government. As governor, he refused to expand Medicaid to allow 800,000 needy Floridians to sign up for benefits offered by the federal government. He also stuck the state with a bum unemployment-benefits system that flamed out when COVID lockdowns left thousands of Floridians without jobs.

Fighting words

Scott is a working-class American’s bad dream, but a fiscal conservative’s hero. His vision is laid out in his 12-Point “Rescue America” Plan: lower taxes, smaller government, protected borders, fewer government jobs and more jobs in private industry. It also calls for sunsetting federal legislation every five years, assuming worthy laws would again be reenacted.

Talk about negative messaging. It’s a dangerous proposal that could do real damage to Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid that real people depend upon. It’s vintage Scott, tone-deaf and remote from real people’s everyday challenges. At the same time, however, his views would pull the party back somewhat toward its true conservative underpinnings, at least fiscally speaking.

But then, there’s the tiresome same old same old: “We don’t want just to be a speed bump to the Democrats’ ideas; we want to be a brick wall!” he told the coalition audience.

“You know how everyone says we need to compromise? Well, we should make Democrats compromise,” he said.

The fact is, Floridians now have another politician making moves on the national stage. More evidence that the 2024 presidential race could be seasoned and cooked in the Sunshine State.