Poll shows Rick Scott with outside-the-margin lead, but still shy of majority support

A new poll shows U.S. Sen. Rick Scott as the five-percentage-point leader over Democratic challenger Debbie Mucarsel-Powell. However, the incumbent still needs a critical 50% majority to win.

New survey results from Morning Consult show 47% of like voters in Florida intend to support Scott for a second term. By comparison, about 42% plan to support the Democratic nominee.

That puts Scott’s lead outside the poll’s 2-percentage-point margin of error. Pollsters conducted surveys of voters between Aug. 30 and Sept. 8, including responses from 3,187 likely voters in Florida, one of the largest sample sizes of any poll this year.

It also pegged Scott with one of the widest leads he has enjoyed in public polling since Primary voters picked party nominees for the election. An Emerson College poll this week found him with just a one-percentage-point lead.

But every poll taken since the Primary found Scott in the lead, even if most mount him polling under 50%.

The Morning Consult lists some 11% of voters as undecided, and Mucarsel-Powell would need to win over a large number of those voters or convince some who plan to support Scott to abandon the incumbent.

But the poll contributes to a stockpile of data now suggesting Scott won’t enjoy the same cakewalk to re-election as fellow Republican U.S. Sen. Marco Rubio enjoyed when he secured a landslide re-election vote in 2022. Rubio secured a 17-point victory over Democrat Val Demings.

But then, Rubio was seeking a third term and had also won his last election in 2016 by more than seven percentage points.

Scott, a former Governor, has never won a statewide election by more than a percentage point. When he unseated Democratic U.S. Sen. Bill Nelson in 2018, the race was so close it went to a recount, and Scott ultimately won by just over 10,000 votes out of more than 8.1 million cast.