Peter Schorsch
Phil Ehr, a Navy veteran running to unseat U.S. Sen. Rick Scott, raised $100,000 in the first 14 hours of his campaign, according to his staff.
The campaign said Ehr is running an aggressive fundraising push to demonstrate he has the support and financial backing to make Scott a one-term Senator.
“I’m overwhelmed by the incredible response our campaign has received in just the first day since we launched,” Ehr said. “Floridians are ready to retire Rick Scott and stop his extreme quest to destroy Social Security and Medicare, and they know that I’m the right Democrat to accomplish the mission.”
Ehr officially got into the race on Monday with a long-form video introducing voters to his 26-year naval career, including rescuing Cuban refugees in the Florida Straits and undertaking humanitarian aid efforts in Ukraine.
The ad, “Quiet Before the Storm,” also targets Scott, with references to his record of Medicare fraud, controversial statements about Medicare and his alignment with MAGA officials and voters.
He calls Scott — as well as Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and Florida’s Senior U.S. Senator, Marco Rubio — the “axis of lies” and who are supporting former President Donald Trump’s “war on the truth.”
“Rick Scott is a coward,” Ehr says in the video. “We can’t trust him in the battle for our rights, the truth and our future.”
Scott’s team responded with a statement expressing confidence that they would prevail against Ehr.
“It says everything you need to know about Chuck Schumer and the Florida Dems’ recruitment efforts that the best they can do is a guy who lost a congressional race two cycles ago by 30 points,” said Priscilla Ivasco, Scott’s Communications Director.
Until Ehr’s entrance into the race, Democrats’ failure to run a candidate against Scott had been drawing speculation, leading to reports floating celebrity names, including NBA stars Grant Hill and Dwayne Wade.
His campaign released topline results from an internal poll showing Scott underwater with voters by 28 percentage points. That reflects a favorable rating of 24%, with 52% rating him unfavorably. But Ehr will need to get his name out to voters in full force. The same internal poll showed Ehr underwater with voters with a -3 favorability, but a full 73% of respondents said they didn’t know who he was.
Campaigns often release internal polling if the numbers show positive signs for the candidate. In this case, a relatively unknown candidate in Ehr appears well-positioned to give Scott a fight. Asked who they would vote for if the election for U.S. Senate were today, Scott led with 43% support to Ehr’s 38%, a small margin when considering Ehr has barely just hit the campaign trail.
And when asked to choose, the 19% of respondents who said they weren’t sure about the race favored Ehr 15% to 11%, putting Ehr within 4 percentage points of Scott on a combined ballot based on the poll.
The polling also highlights top issues for voters. More than half of respondents said they are most worried about inflation and the rising cost of living, which could pose problems for Ehr, who as a Democrat will face criticism that often plagues those in the party in power in the White House. But 35% of respondents said their top priority was protecting Medicare and Social Security, two entitlement programs Scott has threatened, which Ehr references in his campaign launch video.
At 30%, protecting abortion rights and ending gun violence are also top priorities among voters, which is good news for Ehr. Likewise, protecting gun rights, as well as crime and public safety — two areas where Republicans perform well among voters — are much lower on the list of voter priorities, at 15% in the internal survey.
