Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) will serve another six years as Florida’s senior senator after defeating Rep. Val Demings (D-FL), meeting expectations as the state shifts further to the right.
Rubio, a two-term incumbent, was leading Demings by an average of 9 percentage points before Election Day, according to FiveThirtyEight and RealClearPolitics, respectively. Rubio holding on to Florida has denied Democrats political cover should they not succeed in defending their current collection of seats in the evenly divided Senate nor pick up any other opportunities on the 2022 map.
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Similar to contests across the country, the focal points of Rubio’s and Demings’s campaigns were the economy and abortion. Demings’s almost four years as Orlando’s first black female police chief seemed to inoculate her against Republican attacks on Democrats regarding crime, alluding to herself as a top cop instead of a congresswoman in her promotional materials.
Although Demings, a third-term House lawmaker who rose to national prominence as one of former President Donald Trump‘s first impeachment managers, tried to amplify Rubio’s strict anti-abortion positions after the Supreme Court decided Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, he pressed her to define reasonable restrictions in return.
“I believe that we should pass the Women’s Health Protection Act that will codify the protections and provisions in Roe v. Wade,” Demings told the Washington Examiner in Miramar, Florida.
Rubio and Demings’s other major disagreement concerned guns. Rubio, in particular, rankled the family and friends of 2018 Parkland school shooting victims by recanting his previous support of raising the age limit for sales.
Despite Demings’s perch on the House Intelligence Committee, Rubio demonstrated his command of foreign policy on the trail as Russian President Vladimir Putin‘s war in Ukraine has repercussions at home and abroad.
“Ukrainians have to know no country in the world can afford them,” Rubio told the Washington Examiner in Key Largo. “I’m 100% supportive of what Ukraine is doing … but I don’t think our foreign engagement is ever a blank check to anybody.”
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Demings raised $72 million and spent $68 million, according to OpenSecrets last month. In comparison, Rubio brought in $46.5 million and spent $43 million.
