Charlie Crist has won Florida’s Democratic primary election to face Ron DeSantis in his re-election bid this fall, a major test for Democrats to slow the Republican’s ascent to the national stage.
Throughout his campaign, the 66-year-old political centrist – who previously served as governor of Florida from 2007 to 2011 as a Republican and is now serving his second term in the US House as a Democrat – has had the governor and likely 2024 presidential candidate in his sights, sending a warning to voters that his opponent poses an existential threat to democracy.
Mr Crist is projected to defeat Nikki Fried in the closely watched Democratic primary election on 23 August, according to the Associated Press.
The governor has meanwhile raised tens of millions of dollars for his campaign while drawing national scrutiny and Republican praise for a hard-right agenda and stumping for GOP figures in other states as well as 29 candidates for school boards at home.
Mr Crist has pitched himself as the candidate most likely to be able to defeat the governor and foil his growing national profile, elevated by his opposition to stringent Covid-19 measures and embrace of a “parental rights” agenda condemned by opponents for threatening LGBT+ students and teachers and restricting classroom speech.
In a recent television ad, Mr Crist plainly undercuts the DeSantis agenda: “Ron DeSantis bullies schoolchildren. He wants to outlaw abortion even for victims of rape and incest. He opposes any background checks on guns, even for violent criminals, and he cares more about running for the White House than your house.”
“We need to realise what this guy is doing. He wants to be president of the United States, and he’s using Florida as his proving ground to do it,” Mr Crist recently told The Guardian. “The leadership of today’s Republican party is gone. … It’s lurching from one culture war to another, attacking the LGBTQ community, attacking African American voters, attacking women and the right to choose.”
For some voters, Mr Crist’s candidacy is similar to Joe Biden’s in the 2020 presidential election – a pragmatic candidate with decades of experience perceived as most likely to be able to defeat a Republican incumbent.
The state has recently seen a slate of crucial Republican victories. In 2018, Mr DeSantis defeated Democratic candidate Andrew Gillum by roughly 32,000 votes, or less than half a percentage point.
Despite early projections, Donald Trump won the state in 2020 by roughly 3.4 percentage points, improving his performance from 2016 against then-candidate Hillary Clinton, and marking the largest margin of victory for any presidential election in the state since 2014.
And last year, the number of Florida voters registered as Republicans surpassed Democratic voters for the first time in the state. Florida’s roughly 3.8 million unaffiliated voters form a potentially decisive bloc.
Mr Crist, a nearly lifelong Republican before his departure from the GOP in 2012, has been a mainstay in Florida politics for more than three decades, after he was first elected to the state senate in 1992, then as an education commissioner in 2000, and state attorney general two years later.
He served as governor of the state from 2007 to 2011 before stepping away to campaign – for a second time – for a US Senate seat, ultimately losing the Republican nomination to Marco Rubio.
In August 2012, he said the GOP “pitched so far to the extreme right on issues important to women, immigrants, seniors and students that they’ve proven incapable of governing for the people”.
He endorsed Barack Obama in that year’s presidential race and condemned the GOP’s far-right embrace, one that is “so far to the extreme right on issues important to women, immigrants, seniors and students” to the point that its leadership has “proven incapable of governing for the people”.
“I didn’t leave the Republican Party,” he said at the Democratic National Convention that year. “It left me.”
He ultimately won the Democratic nomination for governor in 2014 but lost the general election to Rick Scott. He then won a race for the 13th Congressional District seat in 2016 and was re-elected in 2018.
His late-career move to the Democratic Party has been criticised as a strategic one, with the glad-handing stalwart of Florida politics sensing a political opportunity. (“Apparently he discovered racism in the party after the polls showed him trailing Rubio by 20 points,” the political editor of The Tampa Bay Times told The Washington Post in 2014.)
Ms Fried has also criticised Mr Crist for his record on abortion rights, an issue magnified by the US Supreme Court’s decision to revoke the constitutional right to abortion care, Florida’s recently passed law supported by Governor DeSantis to outlaw abortion at 15 weeks, and looming legislation to further restrict access in the state.
“I have been pro-choice my entire life,” Ms Fried said last month during the only debate of the Democratic primary race. “I have made sure that I’ve stood on the side of women. Charlie cannot say the same thing.”
Mr Crist responded in a campaign ad touting his record vetoing anti-abortion legislation “to protect your right to choose” and his “perfect record” from abortion rights groups Planned Parenthood and NARAL.
“Why do Republicans like Ron DeSantis not honor and respect a woman’s right to choose?” he said at the debate. “A woman’s right to choose is at stake. … I’ll fight for it.”
