Biden’s wasted jaunt down in Florida

“Charlie is running against Donald Trump incarnate,” President Joe Biden strangely remarked of Democrat Charlie Crist, who is running against Florida Governor Ron DeSantis. Trump is, of course, still very much in the flesh, and is also Biden’s likely opponent in 2024. But rhetoric is hardly Brandon’s strong suit in his sunset years, so we can surmise that what he meant was there isn’t much difference between Trump and DeSantis.

What Biden doesn’t seem to realize is that, for most Floridians, that’s a good thing.

Biden was in South Florida this week for a three-stop tour to buck up failing Democrats. In what’s becoming an increasingly red state, all state-level offices apart from agricultural commissioner are held by Republicans. Republicans hold two-thirds majorities in both houses of the Florida legislature, as well as both of the US Senate seats and 16 of its 27 seats in the House of Representatives.

When DeSantis was elected by a razor-thin margin in 2018, Florida had 300,000 more registered Democrats than registered Republicans. Today, it has 306,000 more registered Republicans than Democrats. In 2020, Trump added over a million votes to his 2016 total, winning the state with an absolute majority. Most polls suggest that DeSantis will defeat Crist by at least eight points, with some pointing to victory by as much as 14 points. DeSantis’s latest war chest tally is at $94 million while Crist’s languishes at about $4 million. Senator Marco Rubio, who is also up for reelection this year, enjoys a comfortable lead over his opponent, Congresswoman Val Demings, though Demings has had some fundraising success.

The Democrats’ unenviable task has been to convince Floridians they would be better off under their party’s disastrous leadership, or to exploit some wedge issue that might save their sagging fortunes. Crist has tried to pitch his candidacy as a last-ditch effort to frustrate DeSantis’s possible presidential ambitions. He has also focused on abortion rights, which he opposed when it suited him early in his political career.

Without any success on these fronts, Biden has now swooped in to try to scare people his own age in Democrat-leaning South Florida, declaring that Social Security and Medicare may be at risk under a Republican Congress. Incongruously, his target was neither DeSantis nor Rubio, but Florida’s other senator, Rick Scott, who is not up for reelection. Scott, who chairs the National Republican Senatorial Committee, has called for congressional votes to keep all federal programs intact after five years.

No Biden appearance would be complete without at least one humiliating gaffe yet Brandon delivered two in one sentence. First, he blamed inflation and high energy prices on the Iraq war — which he voted to authorize twenty years ago — rather than the current war in Ukraine. He then claimed that the Iraq war was on his mind because “that’s where my son died,” even though Beau Biden, who served in Iraq, died of cancer in Maryland six years after returning to civilian life.

Senile or not, Biden’s last-minute effort was a wasted one. Democrats are vulnerable in crucially important toss-up elections in at least four states and serious Republican challengers are rising in a number of others. Yet Biden came to Florida? More than three million Floridians have already cast their ballots in any case, and there is little indication that Biden’s audiences were packed with independents who could stop DeSantis’s juggernaut or erase Rubio’s strong advantage.

Even in Biden’s presence, Crist and Demings were hardly on message. In a joint appearance at Florida Memorial University in Miami Gardens, Crist droned on about home insurance premiums, reminding the audience that they were lower when he was the state’s governor just a decade ago — an office he held as a Republican. Demings wailed on about abortion, perhaps not realizing the issue has been overtaken by concerns about the economy and crime. According to a recent poll, suburban women, who care most about abortion, have swung since August from a 27-point lean toward the Democrats to a 15-point Republican lean. No data suggests Florida is immune to this swing.

DeSantis seems unfazed by Brandon’s arrival. “I think we all should thank him for coming to Florida,” he said. “He’s reminding every voter that these Democrats are with Joe Biden 100 percent.” For today’s Florida Man, that’s a curse like no other.