Florida Senator Rick Scott will seek to retain his seat in the November elections as he faces a challenge from former Representative Debbie Mucarsell-Powell.
Scott, a two-term governor, is currently facing a close race, as the latest polls show him ahead by a few percentage points.
FiveThirtyEight's tracker indicates that the most recent survey, conducted in late July by the University of North Florida Public Opinion Research Lab, has Scott with a four-point lead, 47% to 43%.
What's more, Scott's advantage seems to have been narrowing over the past few months. In mid-April, two polls showed the incumbent with a comfortable, double-digit lead. Both were conducted by the Florida Atlantic University's PolCom Lab/Mainstreet Research.
The one that interviewed registered voters showed Scott beating her rival by 52% to 35%, while the one among likely voters yielded a 53%-36% advantage for the Republican.
However, by mid-May a survey by YouGov among over 1,100 likely voters saw the gap reduce to the single digits, 45% to 37%. And two in early June already displayed a difference lower than five percentage points.
The only outlier is a poll by The Tyson Group, which interviewed over a 1,000 likely voters between June 6 and 9 and concluded that Scott had a 46%-43% lead.
Both candidates have been clashing over the issues dominating the state's agenda, the fallout from the Venezuelan presidential elections being the latest one. Mucarsell-Powell has been heavily critical of the Maduro government's decision to claim victory despite a lack of supporting data.
On Thursday she held an event in Miami with members of the Venezuelan diaspora to call the Biden administration to recognize the opposition candidate, Edmundo González Urrutia, as the rightful president of the country, something the government effectively did later that day.
Rick Scott made the same call after speaking with María Corina Machado, the opposition's top actor. The senator, however, blamed the current situation on the Biden administration, saying they are a "clear result of the Biden-Harris administration appeasement policies toward Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro."
"Ever since the failed agreement was announced for the first time, Senator Scott has been pushing the White House to stand for freedom and democracy in Venezuela; unfortunately, the administration has failed the U.S. and the people of Venezuela," he added in a press release.
Mucarsell-Powell also used the conversation to take aim at Scott. Making reference to her personal heritage (she was born in Ecuador), she said that the senator "uses the term socialism, but does nothing to fight the far-right fire he has provoked here in the U.S." "He has no idea what it's like to live under a socialist dictator. My family does and I will ALWAYS fight against authoritarian regimes."
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