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The general election to succeed Florida Gov. Rick Scott will be one of the nation’s most important in an increasingly conservative swing state. Election forecasters rate it a toss-up. The preliminary polling shows the race within low single digits.
One Florida political observer said that that Republican Ron DeSantis — who “doesn’t even pretend to have a reason for being governor other than he was endorsed by [Donald] Trump” — is expected to face off against Democrat Gwen Graham, a qualified center-left daughter of a popular former Florida governor and senator who is “not great on the stump,” in the November general election after Tuesday’s primaries.
“The election is going to be about Donald Trump, which is not very original,” Mac Stipanovich, a longtime Republican operative who offered his assessments of DeSantis and Graham, told me. Floridians are persistently and evenly split on the president.
And with Florida’s congressional redistricting coming up in 2020, when the governor elected this year will have veto power, the reverberations of the 2018 election could be felt in Washington for the next decade and longer. Florida is also one of the states that refused under GOP control to expand Medicaid under Obamacare, leaving hundreds of thousands of its poorest citizens without health coverage, an issue that is a clear dividing line between the Democratic and Republican candidates in the governor’s campaign.
But first, DeSantis and Graham have to get through their primaries. DeSantis faces state agriculture commissioner Adam Putnam in the GOP contest. Graham, meanwhile, is contending with former Miami Beach Mayor Philip Levine, businessman Jeff Greene, and Tallahassee Mayor Andrew Gillum.
The anticipated general election match-up is an establishment Democrat and a Trump-backed candidate, a dynamic found in many of 2018’s most important midterm elections. It’s gonna be close. Read more