Rep. Val Demings (D-FL) told the Washington Post she is open to the possibility of running for Florida governor or U.S. Senate in 2022.
Said Demings: “I certainly would not talk about any private conversations that I’m having. But as I said, there’s plenty of work to do in the House right now. If that would take me to another campaign, then I’m keeping that door open.”
Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL) has “no interest” in mounting a primary challenge to Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) in 2022, the Tampa Bay Times reports.
Politico: “The senior White House adviser is set to decamp to Florida after her father’s presidency comes to a close. And though talk of her launching a primary challenge to Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) has given off the faint whiff of political [fan-fic], in reality, Trump officials say, there have been machinations behind the scenes.”
One person in contact with the president said that Jared Kushner is viewed as “working single-mindedly to protect and promote his wife’s ‘political career.'”
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Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) told Florida Politics he will run for reelection in 2022 and that he thinks Donald Trump will clear the field if he runs for president in 2024.
Said Rubio: “If he decides to run, I think what it means is that Donald Trump will be the next Republican nominee… I still have work to do in the U.S. Senate… I have every intention of being on that ballot in November of 2022.”
Former Rep. David Jolly (R-FL) indicated that he’s considering a run for Florida Governor or the U.S. Senate in 2022, but not as a Republican, Florida Politics reports.
Said Jolly: “I left the GOP and am not returning.”
Sen. Rick Scott (R-FL) “will no longer keep his vast wealth in a blind trust, like he did during his eight years as Florida’s governor,” the Tampa Bay Times reports.
“Instead, Scott said he will report his assets to the public in annual financial disclosure forms required of all members of Congress. He didn’t elaborate further.”
Florida Playbook: “A telltale sign of bad ballot design in Broward (where the Senate race was tucked below the instructions in the lower left-hand corner) was how Broward’s undervote rate in the Senate race was so much bigger than in any other Florida county. Unlike Miami-Dade to its north and Palm Beach to its south, Broward County had fewer votes for the top of the ticket Senate race than governor (as well as the three Florida Cabinet posts). Thousands of people just undervoted the race because they probably didn’t see it on the ballot.”
“If we assume the Senate race would have had as many total votes as the governor’s race in Broward and if Nelson’s and Gov. Scott’s vote-share remained the same, Nelson would have netted an additional 9,746 votes in the county. And that would have dropped Scott’s statewide lead of 10,033 to just 287 votes. Still, that’s a win for Scott.”
“Nearly 3,000 votes effectively disappeared during the machine recount of Florida’s midterm races, according to election records, calling into question whether officials relied on a flawed process to settle the outcome of three statewide contests,” the New York Times reports.
NBC News: “To have a chance at overcoming Gov. Rick Scott’s 12,603-vote lead in their Senate race, incumbent Bill Nelson (D-FL) desperately needed a manual statewide recount to show that tens of thousands of votes here in Democrat-heavy Broward County had been misread by scanners.”
“An unprecedented statewide hand recount is now under way in the Sunshine State, further extending a high-stakes, partisan battle over every last vote in Florida’s crucial U.S. Senate race,” the Miami Herald reports.
“Following a five-day machine recount of the more than 8.3 million votes cast in the Nov. 6 elections, Secretary of State Ken Detzner ordered hand recounts Thursday afternoon in the race between Sen Bill Nelson (D) and Gov. Rick Scott (R).”
“The order gives canvassing boards in the state’s 67 counties three days to pore over thousands of ballots that were rejected by machines because of ‘overvotes’ — a voter appears to have chosen more than one candidate in a race — or ‘undervotes,’ in which a voter appears to have skipped a race altogether.”
“A federal judge slammed Florida on Thursday for repeatedly failing to anticipate election problems, and said the state law on recounts appears to violate the U.S. Supreme Court ruling that decided the presidency in 2000,” the AP reports.
Said U.S. District Judge Mark Walker: “We have we have been the laughing stock of the world, election after election, and we chose not to fix this.”
CNN: “Scott holds a little more than a 12,000 vote lead over Nelson. That amounts to an advantage of about 0.15 percentage points, which is well within the 0.25 point margin needed for a manual recount required by Florida law. This margin may seem small, but for recount purposes, it is actually quite large.”
“According to a FairVote database of statewide recounts from 2000 to 2015, the average recount moves the margin by 0.02 points. Nelson needs the margin to move by nearly eight times as much.”
“Florida’s historic recount was thrown once more into uncertainty Thursday when a federal judge ruled that at least 4,000 voters whose mail-in and provisional ballots were rejected because of issues with their signatures may be given two days to resolve the problem and have their votes counted,” the Washington Post reports.
“The decision by Judge Mark Walker of the U.S. District Court in Tallahassee came hours ahead of the Thursday afternoon deadline for elections officials to complete a machine recount… It was not clear how the judge’s decision would affect the timing of recount, which was expected to move to a manual canvass Friday in the too-close-to-call Senate race, in which Gov. Rick Scott (R) leads Sen. Bill Nelson (D) by fewer than 13,000 votes.”
New York Times: “At least 5,000 ballots from all voters — and perhaps twice that many — were left uncounted across Florida as a result of signature mismatches, according to various estimates from the Florida secretary of state and analysts examining the latest data.”
“The signature battle touches on constitutional questions of equal protection and free speech. But it is rooted in larger societal trends that are rapidly rendering an individual’s handwriting an unreliable electoral hallmark.”
“The Palm Beach County elections supervisor says aging equipment has overheated, causing mismatched results in the recount of ballots in Florida’s U.S. Senate race,” the AP reports.
“The 11-year-old machines began having problems on Monday as early voting ballots were being counted. When the numbers were crunched on Tuesday, they didn’t match.”
Tampa Bay Times: “According to an analysis by the nonpartisan group FairVote, which advocates for electoral reforms that make it easier to vote, out of 4,687 statewide general elections between 2000 and 2016, just 26 went to a recount.”
“Of those 26, just three recounts wound up changing the initial result of the race: The 2004 Washington governor’s race, the 2006 Vermont state auditor’s race and the 2008 Minnesota U.S. Senate race. The average swing in those three elections after the recounts? About 311 votes. … Essentially, Nelson — and to a greater extent, Gillum — would need a systematic error to be discovered during their recounts if their results are to be reversed.”
A Florida judge said he’s seen no evidence of wrongdoing in the vote-counting in Broward County and urged all sides to “ramp down the rhetoric,” the AP reports.
President Trump “called for halting the just-launched recounts in the Florida races for Senate and governor, alleging without evidence that many ballots were missing and forged and that a valid tally was no longer possible,” the Washington Post reports.
Said Trump: “The Florida Election should be called in favor of Rick Scott and Ron DeSantis in that large numbers of new ballots showed up out of nowhere, and many ballots are missing or forged. An honest vote count is no longer possible-ballots massively infected. Must go with Election Night!”
Taegan Goddard is the founder of Political Wire, one of the earliest and most influential political web sites. He also runs Political Job Hunt, Electoral Vote Map and the Political Dictionary.
Goddard spent more than a decade as managing director and chief operating officer of a prominent investment firm in New York City. Previously, he was a policy adviser to a U.S. Senator and Governor.
Goddard is also co-author of You Won - Now What? (Scribner, 1998), a political management book hailed by prominent journalists and politicians from both parties. In addition, Goddard's essays on politics and public policy have appeared in dozens of newspapers across the country.
Goddard earned degrees from Vassar College and Harvard University. He lives in New York with his wife and three sons.
Goddard is the owner of Goddard Media LLC.
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