Florida Gov. Rick Scott, candidate for the U.S. Senate, greets supporters at a campaign rally Tuesday, Sept. 18, 2018, in Orlando, Fla. (AP Photo/John Raoux) | AP Photo Scott reinvents record, 30 seconds at a time

TALLAHASSEE — Gov. Rick Scott is using campaign advertising to try to reinvent some key elements of his record in the waning weeks of his battle to unseat Bill Nelson, with ads that position him as more of a centrist and downplay his close alliance with President Donald Trump.

Technically speaking, Scott has left the campaign trail to focus on hurricane recovery efforts. And his campaign rejects the notion that he’s buffering his public image. But his campaign ads continue, and there are clear discrepancies between three 30-second commercials rebutting attacks from Nelson and other Democrats — on health care, Puerto Rico and school policy — and Scott’s rhetoric and record over his eight years in office.


In one of his most recent commercials, released Tuesday, Scott tackles an issue that is bedeviling GOP candidates throughout the nation, and which has proven complicated for him: mandatory coverage for people with pre-existing health conditions — a protection Republicans repeatedly considered weakening when they took control of the House, Senate and White House in 2017.

“I support forcing insurance companies to cover pre-existing conditions,” Scott says in the commercial.

Unmentioned by Scott: he backed a recent Senate GOP plan that stopped forcing insurance companies to cover pre-existing conditions, and expressed a measure of support for House legislation last year that would have weakened protections for people with those conditions.

Scott, once in charge of the largest for-profit hospital chain in the country, has long opposed quasi-government-run health care programs like the Affordable Care Act even while saying he supports covering people with pre-existing health conditions. He penned an April 2017 op-ed when congressional Republicans were debating how to repeal and replace the law that said as much. In 1994, when he was fighting the Clinton administration’s health plan, he told the Dallas Morning News that he wanted to eliminate pre-existing conditions as an exclusion for coverage.

But Scott has also been silent on a lawsuit brought by 20 GOP-led states, including Florida, to undo those protections. Scott isn’t leading Florida’s effort in the suit — Attorney General Pam Bondi is — but he’s never come out against it and has declined to comment on it specifically. If Bondi prevails, and insurance companies return to the way things were before the ACA, more than 3.1 million non-elderly Floridians could lose health coverage for diseases they already have.

Scott has not criticized Bondi, a friend and ally, over the lawsuit to end pre-existing conditions, and he has refused to criticize the Trump administration, which backs the court fight.

Scott also pulled his rhetorical punches with Trump in another, unrelated controversy: the president’s false conspiracy theory that Democrats were inflating the death toll in Puerto Rico from Hurricane Maria “to make me look as bad as possible.” The governor waited two hours to issue a mild rebuke on Twitter by saying, “I disagree with @POTUS.” He made a similar statement to ABC News.

Yet one of his latest Spanish-language ads concerning Puerto Rico says he “confronted President Trump.”

When asked how Scott’s tweeting “I disagree” is the same thing as having “confronted” Trump, Scott spokesman Chris Hartline called the question “bizarre” and directed POLITICO to a previous statement when Nelson attacked him over that matter.

A third Scott ad, released Monday, glosses over massive education cuts made during his first year in office to instead tout record-high spending this school year.

The ad suggests Nelson thinks voters are “naïve, gullible, uninformed” to believe his claim that Scott slashed $1.3 billion from K-12 education during his tenure as governor. This is “a lie,” the ad says, because Florida, in the fiscal year beginning July 2018, had the biggest education budget in history, including more spending per-student than ever.

“Senator Nelson’s ad misleads voters into believing that Florida’s education system is currently experiencing a $1.3 billion cut, which is not accurate. It’s a fact that under Governor Scott’s leadership, Florida has its biggest education budget in history and more spending per pupil than ever before,” Scott spokeswoman Lauren Schenone said about the matter on Tuesday.

When adjusted for inflation, however, Scott’s last education budget is not the biggest in state history. And Nelson’s ad isn’t about Scott’s last budget. It’s about his first.

During Scott's first year as governor, the state’s K-12 education budget decreased overall by $1.3 billion, according to the state Department of Education. More than half of the money that was cut — $872 million — was federal money the GOP-controlled state Legislature declined to replace.

As a result, per-student funding was slashed by about $542 that year, according to the state. From there, education and per-student funding gradually increased each year under Scott.

In 2014, the year Scott ran for re-election, the K-12 education budget reached a new high when not adjusted for inflation — $18.9 billion. That year, Scott signed the largest budget in Florida’s history, trimming just $69 million with his veto pen.

This year, the total $21 billion K-12 education budget is another record high, when not adjusted for inflation. As part of that overall budget, per-student funding is also at a new high of $7,408, according to the state.

Still, the K-12 education budget is not greater than pre-recession levels when adjusted for inflation, according to Politifact.