A former congresswoman elected to a single term in the House is challenging Rick Scott for his Florida Senate seat in a race that will test whether the state has become reliably red.
Ex-Rep. Debbie Mucarsel-Powell, a Democrat who represented a Miami-based congressional seat from 2018 to 2020, anchored her campaign launch around her background as an Ecuadorian immigrant.
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“I’m an immigrant, a Latina, a mother,” she said in an announcement video on Tuesday. “And we made history together when I became the first South American immigrant ever elected to Congress. I’ve already fought guys like Rick Scott and beat them.”
Mucarsel-Powell has a daunting task in front of her — although Scott barely unseated Democrat Bill Nelson in a 2018 race that went to a recount, he now has the advantage of incumbency, not to mention deep pockets. The senator, estimated to be worth more than $250 million in 2018, spent over $60 million of his own money to get elected to the upper chamber.
The political climate has also shifted dramatically. Florida, once a swing state, has in a matter of years transformed into a red bastion. Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) won there by 16 percentage points in 2022. Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL) won his race by almost 20 points.
Party leaders encouraged Mucarsel-Powell to launch a bid, but faced with an unfavorable Senate map, national Democrats may be reluctant to invest heavily in Florida.
Mucarsel-Powell, who beat a two-term incumbent Republican in the same year Scott was elected to the Senate, is betting he is vulnerable with Florida’s large population of seniors.
She came out of the gate attacking a plan Scott wrote as the head of the National Republican Senatorial Committee last cycle that proposed sunsetting all federal programs, including Medicare and Social Security.
Scott has since amended the proposal, which became fodder for Democrats, including President Joe Biden, to exempt those programs.
An ad her campaign released also warned that Scott would vote for a national abortion ban, signaling that Mucarsel-Powell will run on the same platform of abortion access that benefited Democrats in the 2022 cycle.
The ex-congresswoman is not the only Democrat to enter the race. She must first get through a primary fight with Phil Ehr, a retired Navy commander and former Republican, and former Rep. Alan Grayson.
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The Scott campaign responded to her entry by labeling her a “socialist,” a tactic he used in his 2018 campaign against Nelson.
“We’d like to welcome yet another failed congressional candidate to the crowded Democrat primary,” Communications Director Priscilla Ivasco said in a statement. “Former Congresswoman Mucarsel-Powell is a radical socialist who voted 100% of the time with Nancy Pelosi during her short tenure in Congress, which is why the voters of South Florida booted her out of office the first chance they got. Floridians already rejected her once and they will reject her again.”
