Rick Scott votes early in Naples and urges all Republicans to do so as well

Image via Rick Scott campaign.

On the first day of early voting in 51 Florida counties on Monday, GOP incumbent U.S. Sen. Rick Scott cast his ballot in the 2024 General Election and urged fellow Republicans to follow suit so that there’s “fewer votes that we have to worry about.”

Scott was joined by former Speaker of the U.S. House Newt Gingrich and Florida Senate President Kathleen Passidomo at an early-voting location in Naples, where he lives.

Later, Scott appeared on the “Clay & Buck” radio show, where he emphasized how important it was for Florida Republicans to cast their votes early, whether at the polls or with mail-in ballots, especially with the volatile weather that the Sunshine State has endured with hurricanes Helene and Milton displacing thousands of Floridians over the past month.

“Look at these storms we have, and what if we have another storm (on) Nov. 4, what’s going to happen? You don’t want to take a chance,” he said.

“We’ve got to get our votes out. We had horrible storms on the west coast. Are these people going to be able to vote? They’ve lost their homes. They might have to move out of the state to find a place to live. So, we’ve got to work on getting everybody that’s here — we’ve got to get you to vote.”

The Republican Party of Florida has always supported voting early and voting by mail, but it’s only within the past year that the national Republican Party has embraced that philosophy. In June 2023, then-Republican National Committee Chair Ronna McDaniel said that to beat Joe Biden in 2024, “We must ensure that Republicans bank as many pre-Election Day votes as possible.” She added, “You can’t think you’re going to win the game if you only start scoring in the fourth quarter.”

The RNC has begun sending nearly 300,000 robocalls urging Republicans in swing states to vote before Election Day, CNN reports.

But despite that stance, Donald Trump, the top Republican, has until recently steadfastly refused to get with the program. While he now urges Republicans to vote early, he occasionally still contradicts himself, as he did in during a campaign appearance in Pennsylvania in September when he said early voting was “stupid.”

Scott acknowledged Monday that he was concerned about the number of voters displaced by the storms as he faces former U.S. Rep. Debbie Mucarsel-Powell. “In 2018 we had Hurricane Michael in the Panhandle,” he said. “The estimate was that I lost 25,000 votes. That was a close election so that really mattered.”

Meanwhile, surrogates for Mucarsel-Powell gathered in Tampa’s Cypress Point Park to denounce Scott’s record on the state’s property insurance situation when he served as Governor between 2011 and 2019, as well as reports that he banished the term “climate change” from being used by government staffers (a charge that Scott has always disputed).

It’s not a new charge. When he ran against Scott for Governor in 2014, then-Democratic opponent Charlie Crist alleged that homeowners were paying more for insurance and getting less coverage — a claim cited as “mostly true” by PolitiFact.

“When you combine (his work on insurance issues) with his refusal to accept climate change, this crisis is his,” said former Tampa Democratic state Rep. Sean Shaw, now running for a seat on the Hillsborough County Commission.

“I’m not a Ron DeSantis fan, but we’ve got now this 10-12-year track — this is Rick Scott. This is his policies kind of coming home to roost and nothing to kind of back from it.”

“The solution to insurance property in this state is difficult,” added Shaw, who in 2018 was appointed Florida’s Insurance Consumer Advocate by then-Chief Financial Officer Alex Sink.

“I understand that. I don’t know what 100% of the solution is, but I know what it’s not, and it is not what we’ve been doing over these five-10-15 years and Rick Scott was a huge part of that. And again, when you combine bad insurance with climate change denial, you get yourself in a really bad situation.”

A University of North Florida public opinion research poll released Monday morning shows Scott leading Mucarsel-Powell, but only by 3 percentage points, 49%-46%, with 4% undecided. That same poll shows Trump leading Kamala Harris in Florida by 10 points, 53%-43%.

The poll sampled 977 likely Florida voters and was conducted between Oct. 7-18. The margin of error was +/-3.49 percentage points.

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Mitch Perry reporting. Florida Phoenix is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Florida Phoenix maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Diane Rado for questions: [email protected]. Follow Florida Phoenix on Facebook and Twitter.