President Joe Biden Campaigns In South Florida For Democrats Tonight

Florida Phoenix

November 1, 2022

President Joe Biden is scheduled to hold a rally for Florida Democratic candidates Charlie Crist and Val Demings Tuesday evening, just one week before Election Day.

Crist faces off with Gov. Ron DeSantis in the gubernatorial race and Demings faces Rubio for the U.S. Senate on Nov. 8, with both candidates trailing in their races.

Biden is scheduled to touch down in Fort Lauderdale this afternoon, shortly before 2 p.m.

At 3 p.m. he’ll appear in Hallandale Beach for an event where he’s slated to deliver remarks about protecting Social Security and Medicare and promote recently passed measures intended to reduce drug prices for those on Medicare.

Democrats have been campaigning intensely this fall on promoting some of the health care provisions of the Inflation Reduction Act passed exclusively by congressional Democrats this summer and signed by the president in August. The law allows for the first time for Medicare to negotiate with manufacturers for lower prescription drug prices and includes a yearly cap on out-of-prescription drugs in Medicare recipients.

Republican U.S. Sen. Marco Rubio – who is running for reelection this fall against Demings – is co-sponsoring legislation that would roll back the government’s authority to negotiate, set and control drug prices under Medicare.

Biden also expected to speak out once again on Florida Senator Rick Scott’s plan that calls for sunsetting all federal legislation after every five years. The president has said it’s an indication that Republicans want to “cut Social Security and Medicare,” a charge that Scott vehemently denies.

“What I want to do is make sure we live within our means and make sure we preserve those programs,” Scott said on CNN’s State of the Union on Sunday. “People paid into them. They believe in them.”

Biden will then headline a private fundraiser for Crist in Golden Beach, before attending a rally for Crist and Demings at 7 p.m. at Florida Memorial University, a historically black university.

Biden had been scheduled to hold a political rally for Democrats two previous times this year, but neither of those events happened. He originally was scheduled to speak at a Democratic National Committee rally in Tampa in July, but that event was cancelled because the president contracted COVID-19. A second DNC event set in Orlando in September was postponed because it was scheduled shortly before Hurricane Ian was approaching Florida. Biden later did visit Southwest Florida in early October, six days after Ian made landfall.

Biden’s visit comes late in the election cycle. More than 3 million Floridians have already voted so far. Republicans are leading, with 137,364 more of its party’s registered voters casting ballots than Democrats, according to Florida’s Division of Elections.

According to the RealClearPolitics average, Ron DeSantis has a double-digit lead over Charlie Crist, 53 to 41 percent. That same website shows Marco Rubio with an 8-point lead over Val Demings, 51 to 43 percent.

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