DESANTISLAND TOO
Two hurricanes stir up voter backlash to Florida Republicans’ climate denialism
Richard Luscombe in Miami
Sun 27 October 2024
Hurricane-damaged homes on Manasota Key in Florida in October.Photograph: Dirk Shadd/Tampa Bay Times/ZUMA Press Wire/REX/Shutterstock
The climate emergency was already a hot-button political issue in Florida long before devastating back-to-back hurricanes named Helene and Milton barreled into the state in recent weeks.
Ron DeSantis, the Republican governor who considers global warming “leftwing stuff”, angered environmental advocates by signing a bill in May scrubbing the words “climate change” from state statutes and in effect committing Florida to a fossil fuel-burning future.
They saw his comments and actions as merely the latest acts of an extended period of climate denialism by state leaders – including Rick Scott, his predecessor as governor who is seeking re-election as US senator next month in a tight race with the Democrat Debbie Mucarsel-Powell.
Scott also censored talk of the climate crisis. Nicknamed “Red Tide Rick” by opponents for slashing $700m in water management funding intended to fight toxic algae blooms, Scott “systematically” disassembled “the environmental agencies of this state”, according to the Democratic former senator Bill Nelson.
Related: How the ‘climate voter’ might matter in a down-to-the-wire US election
Now, as weary Floridians head for the polls next month, many in areas still devastated by the deadly storm surge and high intensity winds from two hurricanes, there is evidence that the twin disasters are fueling something of a backlash.
DeSantis is not on the ballot, but Scott is, and so are many among the Republican supermajority in the state house and senate who have been blindly loyal to both governors’ agendas.
Some voters say climate issues have become uppermost in their minds, having experienced or witnessed the wrath of Helene and Milton, as well as other recent Florida cyclones, and frustration over the long history of inaction or denial in the face of rising sea levels and record ocean heat that experts say is powering ever-stronger storms.
The movement is pronounced among younger and first-time voters, whom advocates say have been registering and voting early in unprecedented numbers.
Jayden D’Onofrio, chair of Florida Future Leaders, said canvassing efforts by his group and others have spurred “record-breaking early turnout” on several campuses including Florida State University, Florida Atlantic University and the University of Miami, with students fired up by the climate debate.
“There was a video of a meteorologist in south Florida who ended up crying on air. A number of my friends, who are not political, sent me that video saying, like, ‘Hey, pretty insane dude. What the hell is going on over here?’” he said.
“So if something like that resonates with youth voters who just generally are out of the political sphere, that says a lot, and that’s why we are hammering hard on that issue. We’re distributing over 175,000 pieces of literature all across the state, and 40,000 are on climate change.”
D’Onofrio said his group was deliberately targeting politicians for their records.
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“Rick Scott is the worst of the worst on climate, so we’ve sent thousands of text messages to youth reminding them about climate change and how the Republicans have voted on the issue, especially Scott,” he said.
“You have all these Republican congressmen that voted no on Fema [Federal Emergency Management Agency] funding. When we’re campaigning in these districts that have those congresspeople it’s an easy thing for us to bring up: ‘Hey, your congressman voted no on federal funding for Fema and emergency supplies in your county, which just got absolutely hit by a hurricane. What do you think about that?’
“Of course, the answer is like, ‘What the hell is wrong with that guy or girl or whoever it is?’ It really is so simple.”
Tatiana Bell, 20, a third-year student studying business administration at the Tampa campus of the historically Black Florida A&M University (Famu), said the hurricanes were a “stressful” time, with both Helene and Milton at one point forecast to make a direct hit on the city.
“They’re like, ‘OK, all students can stay in their dormitories,’ then like a couple hours later they’re like, ‘OK, students have to leave campus, you have to go to shelters or simply go home,” said Bell, a campus representative for DoSomething, a youth-centered service and activism group.
“People were very anxious, trying to find out if you can go home. Not every student is fortunate enough to be able to get on a plane or do different things to find safety in a situation like this.”
Bell said that anxiety and threat to their personal safety from severe weather events had made many students even more cognizant of the climate emergency as an election issue.
“Honestly, it’s like top two, just after funding for our universities. It shouldn’t be like this, [you start] the fall semester and next thing you know hurricanes are coming,” she said.
Related: What's at stake in the US election? The climate for the next million years | Bill McKibben
Ben Groenevelt, a resident of Coral Springs, relocated to south Florida from Wisconsin with his family in 2009, and has become increasingly concerned by changes to the environment. Last year, he won election to the board of a local water management district and helped save thousands of trees it wanted to fell so they would not be a threat during hurricanes.
“Since we moved, I’ve been seeing more powerful hurricanes, more issues with rising sea levels, flooding, and things like that,” he said.
“It’s such a big issue here, and we need more awareness of what is going on. On a personal level, I think that to deny it, especially being a leader in the state of Florida, I just don’t think that’s an appropriate position they have.”
Groenevelt will vote for Democratic candidates on 5 November. His middle daughter of three, Whitney, has just turned 18 and will be voting for the first time.
“We have conversations, and there’s definitely a concern when they’re talking and thinking about their own futures, and what it’ll be like, you know, is there going to be snow or no snow? Will it be too hot? Or too cold? These things come up,” he said.
D’Onofrio said it would be younger voters, such as Groenevelt’s daughters and the students he has been working with on campuses, who will drive a generational change in climate politics, which is why he said the work of groups such as Florida Future Leaders was so important.
“One thing people always say is that youth voters don’t turn out, but my answer is always it’s not that they don’t care, it’s that they’ve never felt seen, or heard, or talked to,” he said.
“What’s different now is because we are all youth talking to youth, we understand our generation, we know how to talk to them. You don’t want an 80-year-old talking to a 20-year-old about climate change, or any issue. It just doesn’t work. We’re all 20-year-olds talking to 20-year-olds. We understand it, so it resonates.”
Florida Democrat Blasts Republican Sen. Rick Scott Over State's Home Insurance Crisis
Alexander C. Kaufman
Sun 27 October 2024
Wetter, more destructive hurricanes, like the back-to-back storms that pummeled Florida this fall, are pushing the state’s homeowners insurance market to the brink of collapse.
When asked by Florida Atlantic University pollsters in June who was most responsible for the high cost of insurance in the state, the largest share of surveyed voters blamed Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis. But it was his Republican predecessor, Rick Scott, now a U.S. senator, who lured low-quality insurance companies to the state and left Florida’s publicly owned insurer-of-last-resort agency struggling to provide for more homeowners as private insurers went bust or refused to renew policies in hurricane-prone areas.
Now Scott’s Democratic challenger for Senate, former Rep. Debbie Mucarsel-Powell, is hoping voters can make the connection between Scott’s eight years as governor and the financial squeeze caused as insurers increasingly fail to pay to repair properties damaged in hurricanes Helene and Milton.
As part of a years-long crusade to force more Floridians into the private insurance market, Scott raised premiums and rescinded discounts from the Citizens Property Insurance Corp., the government-backed nonprofit insurer, all while giving private companies extra incentives and protections to operate in the state.
Now that warming-fueled storms are routinely causing billions of dollars in damage across Florida, private insurers are fleeing the state, forcing customers back to Citizens. But now the deals the public insurer offers come with higher premiums and worse coverage.
During her two years in Congress representing a district stretching west of Miami, Mucarsel-Powell helped net $200 million for Everglades restoration. She’s tried since the start of her Senate campaign to highlight the contrast between her own urgent concerns over climate change and Scott’s rejection of basic climate science and his votes to eliminate regulations to curb planet-heating pollution.
Former Rep. Debbie Mucarsel-Powell, the Democratic rival of Republican Sen. Rick Scott, speaks Aug. 28 at a campaign event in Miami before launching a 75-stop tour across Florida. Lynne Sladky/Associated Press
But Mucarsel-Powell said campaigning this month in parts of Florida where hurricane winds scattered tree branches and refuse and tornadoes leveled entire homes opened her eyes to how desperate the situation is becoming for homeowners.
“What these storms did is… really woke up people to the fact that we’re experiencing more and more severe weather events,” Mucarsel-Powell told HuffPost by phone while driving between campaign stops.
“It has raised the alarm to the fact that the climate is changing and no one has done anything to bring down the impacts,” she said. “Politicians have been lying to so many Floridians by not giving them the right information and by selling them on fraudulent policies through some of these insurance companies they’ve brought here.”
She said Scott’s administration failed to oversee insurers by inspecting whether companies kept enough funds available to pay out large numbers of claims after big disasters, leaving them effectively “unregulated.”
Once voters draw the link between the devastation and the inability to get affordable coverage, “you’re going to see people here in the state push back very, very strongly against these electeds that have been here and done nothing,” she said.
“It’s borderline criminal,” she added. “People are so angry, frustrated and exhausted. Helene brought flooding. Then Milton made everything worse.”
A spokesperson for the Scott campaign did not respond to a request for comment.
Scott has faced blowback over environmental issues before.
Scott slashed environmental regulations and cut funding for Florida’s water management agency by $700 million, setting the stage for a toxic algae bloom that decimated fisheries and the coastal tourism business in 2018. Scott’s critics skewered him with the nickname “red tide Rick,” and the issue hurt the Republican in the polls. That same disregard for the effects of climate change, Mucarsel-Powell said, was on display when Scott attracted speculative private insurers to a state where coastal living was getting riskier.
“He was ‘red tide Rick’... People living in Florida for a very long time know him very well,” Mucarsel-Powell said.
Following Hurricane Milton, Joseph Guindi on Oct. 12 inspects the damage to the two-story beachfront home his family has owned for two decades on Manasota Key, Florida. via Associated Press
“The homeowners insurance crisis that we’re facing right now started under Rick Scott,” she said.
Just after taking office in 2011, Scott signed legislation eliminating Citizens’ caps on premium increases, causing the cost of coverage to skyrocket.
Citizens then launched a campaign to re-audit homes that state-sanctioned inspectors had already deemed ready for a major storm as part of a process to qualify for an insurance discount. Of the more than 250,000 homeowners Citizens double-checked, three out of four lost discounts, the Tampa Bay Times reported in 2012.
The Scott administration then created extra incentives for private insurers to take on Citizens’ customers. The governor went as far as to allow certain insurers to hand-select the least risky plans in Citizens’ portfolio and veto the legislation unanimously passed in the Florida Legislature to allow homeowners to return to Citizens if private rates went too high.
More than half of the 25 companies that state records show were approved to take on Citizens customers from 2013 to 2018 either left Florida, cut back on services or folded, the Miami Herald found in a new analysis that concluded Scott’s efforts “did not help create a stable insurance market.”
Of the 14 companies put under state receivership and liquidated over the past decade, Florida government data shows, all are insurance companies, and six went bust in just the last two years.
Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.), shown here at a Sept. 3 campaign event for Donald Trump in Braselton, Georgia, is facing blame in his reelection campaign for the homeowners insurance crisis in Florida. Mike Stewart via Associated Press
During that time, some of the nation’s largest insurers either pulled out of Florida or declined to renew tens if not hundreds of thousands of policies at a time. That forced homeowners to return in large numbers to Citizens, but this time with higher rates and worse coverage.
“I think most people know Citizens has not been solvent,” DeSantis said at a news conference in March last year. “If you did have a major hurricane hit with a lot of Citizens property holders, it would not have a lot to pay out.”
In December, the U.S. Senate Banking Committee opened an investigation into whether Citizens has enough money on hand to pay out claims in future disasters.
Citizens told CNN at the time that, if it were to pay out all reserves and reinsurance after a major storm, “it is required by Florida law to levy surcharges and assessments on its policyholders and all Florida insurance consumers until any deficit is eliminated.”
In 2021, Citizens announced that a 1-in-100-year storm could put Florida insurance holders “on the hook for $24 billion in assessments tacked onto monthly premiums for years.” But as more homeowners turn to Citizens after private insurers leave, reinsurance companies projected the number could be as high as $162 billion, CNN reported.
The Miami Herald noted that major factors in the rise in insurance costs were outside Scott’s control, including post-COVID inflation driving up housing costs and the steady growth of expensive properties in areas prone to worsening hurricanes.
In August, Scott proposed a bill to allow homeowners to deduct as much as $10,000 in home insurance expenses from federal taxes. Mucarsel-Powell, meanwhile, backed a proposal from Rep. Jared Moskowitz (D-Fla.) to reduce how much reinsurance insurers need to buy, a cost that gets passed on to homeowners buying policies.
She also pledged to advocate for stronger building codes. The Biden administration has made more than $1 billion available to states to help raise building codes on new homes and make houses and apartments more energy efficient and capable of withstanding extreme weather. But the DeSantis administration refused to accept the funding last year. And Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) introduced a bill last year to block the federal government from modernizing the building codes it uses as a benchmark for home loans.
If elected, Mucarsel-Powell said, she would try “to sit down with Marco Rubio” and “work together to provide solutions.” But she said that stronger building codes are just part of the issue and that the federal government should stop providing financing to property developers building in areas that are forecast to face more flooding as seas rise.
“We need to be responsible in providing mortgage loans for new homes or loans to developers that are building knowing they’re building in areas that would be susceptible to flooding and building in a state where we know we have experienced severe hurricanes,” she said. “That should have already been changed years ago.”
To start, she said, Florida could elect a senator who will show up at hearings investigating Citizens’ finances and vote for policies that crack down on companies she said are taking advantage of the market.
“There has to be oversight,” Mucarsel-Powell said. “And it’s absolutely not going to happen under Rick Scott.”
