“I think Rick Scott will say and do anything to try and get elected,” Sen. Bill Nelson said Monday on CNN. | Alan Diaz/AP Photo Florida’s Nelson, Scott trade first jabs in Senate race

Hours after Florida Gov. Rick Scott announced his plans to challenge Sen. Bill Nelson (D-Fla.) in the November midterm elections, the two opponents took to competing cable news networks to issue some of their first broadsides in what’s shaping up to be one of this year’s most contentious and costly races.

“I think Rick Scott will say and do anything to try and get elected,” Nelson said Monday on CNN.


The Democrat, who has represented the Sunshine State in the U.S. Senate since 2000, criticized Scott’s failure to expand Medicaid in Florida and accused the governor of being too cozy with the oil industry.

“There are so many differences between the two of us,” Nelson said. “But I always thought if you just try to do the right thing, the politics is going to take care of itself.”

Roughly a half hour later, Scott appeared on Fox News to lay out the anti-establishment, pro-business tenets of his campaign.

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“We have to send people to Washington that are not politicians,” said Scott, a Republican who won his second term as Florida governor in 2014.

“The problem with D.C. right now is their ideas are tired, their ideas are old,” he added. “I’m going to bring to D.C. exactly what we’ve done in Florida.”

Scott said he would work toward instituting term limits for members of Congress, and looked forward to implementing his “business attitudes” and “new ideas, new energy” on Capitol Hill.

“It’s going to be exciting this year,” he said.

