The deadline to register as a candidate for federal posts that correspond to Florida in the November elections closes today and the list is from the current governor, Rick Scott, who wants to be a senator, to a well-known journalist and the daughter of a famous singer.
The campaign by the federal Senate of the Republican governor, which seeks to snatch the seat from Democrat Bill Nelson and hopes to win over Hispanic voters, will focus the race in Florida.
In a state with more than 20% of the Hispanic population, Scott has been courting these immigrants over the last few years, especially Cubans and Venezuelans and more recently Puerto Ricans.
From a few years ago, Scott’s words against Raúl Castro, who has just left the Presidency of Cuba, and Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, and his subordinates, who he has called “dictators” and “several times”, have become frequent. band of thugs “.
In addition to directing words in Spanish in the city of Doral (Miami-Dade County), where the Venezuelan population predominates, and meeting on several occasions with exiles from Venezuela, Scott has promoted measures to prohibit Florida state agencies from doing business with officials in charge of Maduro.
This week he also made an urgent appeal to the new Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo, to focus on the region “to stop the expansion of totalitarianism and repression from Cuba.”
Scott has also been seen surrounded by the growing Puerto Rican community, which has been displaced in recent years to central Florida due to the fiscal crisis on the island and also the chaos caused by Hurricane Maria.
“From María, we have worked hand in hand with (Governor) Ricardo Roselló and have made five trips to Puerto Rico to offer our total assistance and resources,” the governor said on Twitter on Thursday.
The conservative also showed his support for the option to turn Puerto Rico into a new US state, which was supported in 2017 by a non-binding plebiscite by more than 96% of Puerto Rican voters, headed by Rosselló. .
Scott, one of the first Republicans to support the US president, Donald Trump, when he was just a candidate for the White House party, has been compared with him to emphasize that as businessmen, away from politics, they are accustomed to “solve problems”, a premise on which he now bases his campaign on the governorship.
The 65-year-old conservative now faces Nelson, 75, a moderate Democrat who will compete for the fourth time to maintain his seat and who has a good relationship with the other Florida senator, Cuban-American Republican Marco Rubio.
Rubio, who supported Scott in his campaign for governor, who will leave office in 2019 after eight years in office, has even had to answer about his reluctance to “attack” Nelson.
On November 6, the 27 seats of the federal House of Representatives that correspond to Florida are also at stake.
One of the most famous battles is already District 27, which includes a large part of Miami-Dade County that has been in the hands of the Republican Ileana Ros-Lehtinen for years.
In 1989, the first Cuban-American and the first Latina elected in Congress, who has shown herself contrary to several policies of Trump, mainly on the issue of migration, announced in April 2017 that she was not going to stand for re-election. for familiar motives.
The post for District 27, where Hillary Clinton beat Trump by about 20 points in the 2016 presidential election, is one of the “most vulnerable” to the Republican Party in the country.
The primaries to choose who will be the candidates of both parties for that district are scheduled for next August 26.
Donna Shalala, former president of the University of Miami and the Clinton Foundation, who raised more than a million dollars in its first month of campaign last March, and David Richardson, state representative, are part of the Democratic bouquet.
On the Republican side, candidates have appeared outside the political spectrum, among them Cuban-Americans Maria Elvira Salazar, well-known journalist and Miami presenter, and the daughter of popular Cuban singer Willy Chirino, Angie, who is a teacher and singer-songwriter.
Salazar points out that his goal is to represent “all Hispanics” regardless of whether they are Republicans, Democrats or independents and to encourage small entrepreneurs, while Chirino intends to be “a candidate of the people,” not of the “system.”
In addition to Scott and the candidates for the federal House of Representatives, applicants for the judiciary and positions of state prosecutor and public defender had until today to deliver the documentation to the state of Florida that qualifies them for the contest.
