Florida Senate Predictions & Polls

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The 2018 Florida Senate election was one of the closest in decades - as Rick Scott won by a breathtakingly narrow 0.12%. At first glance, it would be natural to assume that Scott's last race means his 2024 race would be a tossup.

However, his victory has to be taken in the proper context. First, he won against a sitting Senator in one of the Democratic Party's best national election nights of the last 20 years. Second, Florida has since lurched hard to the right since that election. In 2022, both Governor Ron DeSantis and Senator Marco Rubio won re-election in a double-digit landslide.

Senator Rick Scott has at least one key vulnerability that Democrats will be eager to exploit. He committed the cardinal sin of politics - supporting policies that if enacted could lead to the end of Social Security and Medicare. As the head of the National Republican Senate Committee in 2022, Scott loudly and proudly supported an agenda that would cause all federal programs to be terminated every 5 years unless re-upped by Congress. That would have included Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid - and their survival would be no guarantee considering Congressional dysfunction.

After he faced a sustained and ferocious blowback for his plan, Scott relented and narrowed the scope of his proposal to exclude them from his plan - but his past enthusiastic support for the plan remains a weakness in Florida - a state where 21% of voters are Seniors.

Scott proved to be a strong candidate in 2018, so it would be foolish to underate the former Governor. Nonetheless, Scott’s mistakes have created an opening - one that will need to be exploited expertly if Democrats are going to pull off a major upset. Their odds of doing so rose once they landed a strong recruit in Congresswoman Debbie-Murcasel Powell. Powell was defeated in 2020, but she outperformed President Biden in her district by a little over 2%. Perhaps more importantly, her old district was in Miami. Miami used to be a Democratic stronghold, but DeSantis and Rubio won it outright in 2022. Democrats will need to reverse at least some of the GOP’s major gains in Miami to win.

Every day, the forecast is updated with the latest information. In 2022, RacetotheWH correctly called more Senate races than any other forecaster and came within one seat of perfectly predicting the final balance in the House of Representatives.