‘I’m supporting incumbents’: Rick Scott would back Marco Rubio over Ivanka Trump

Sen. Rick Scott. Image via NRSC.

The head of the National Republican Senatorial Committee threw cold water on a potentially heated primary challenge to a Florida Senator running for reelection in 2022.

When Capitol Hill reporters asked whether he would back an Ivanka Trump challenge to U.S. Sen. Marco Rubio, Sen. Rick Scott showed no interest in what would be a sizzler of a Senate primary in the Sunshine State.

“I’m supporting incumbents,” the first-term Republican and ally of former President Donald Trump said Thursday.

Scott’s declaration of disinterest comes as global media continues to stoke a narrative about Ivanka Trump seeking to run for Senate.

The Jerusalem Post, for example, did in recent days a “rumors swirl” piece about the former President’s daughter exploring a run. And the entire Trump family has moved to Florida, meaning that for any potential statewide campaign, surrogates who have come to know the peninsula well in recent years would be available to attack Rubio and drive news cycles as needed.

Scott, who assumed stewardship of the Senate campaign arm this month, has struggled with initial branding and perception issues after he decided to vote to invalidate Pennsylvania’s election results even after pro-Trump rioters stormed the Capitol, waylaying the certification process.

The Senator has since contended that his vote didn’t matter because his objection was to election administration in the Keystone State, and it wouldn’t have changed the results of the election.

“My vote objecting to Pennsylvania’s process wasn’t about the 2020 election. It would not have changed the outcome,” Scott wrote earlier this week. “My vote was about elections to come, in 2022, 2024 and beyond, and seeing that they are conducted fairly.”

In the same interview where Scott threw cold water on the Ivanka Trump Senate boomlet, he also avoided pressuring his fellow Senate Republicans on how they might vote during a Senate Impeachment trial.

“Oh, everybody I think has got to decide that on their own. I think we ought to focus on, you know, where we’re going, not the past, but everybody will get, will make their own decisions,” Scott said, according to a CBS News reporter on the scene.