Bill Nelson Concedes to Rick Scott in Florida Senate Race After Manual Recount
Florida Republican Rick Scott said Democratic Senate incumbent Bill Nelson called him to concede the race they had fought in the courts since the Nov. 6 election, after Scott held onto his narrow lead following two rounds of reviewing ballots.
“Now the campaign truly is behind us, and that’s where we need to leave it,” Scott said in a statement. “We must do what Americans have always done: come together for the good of our state and our country.”
The manual recount that concluded Sunday gave Scott a 10,033-vote lead over Nelson out of almost 8.2 million cast, according to official results. The tally, a slight tightening over a machine recount last week, appeared to continue Scott’s record of winning very competitive statewide races. He won his two races for governor by less than a percentage point.
Moments before the new results were made public, Nelson’s campaign announced the senator would make a statement at 3 p.m. local time, without indicating what he might say. Florida’s canvassing commission meets Tuesday in Tallahassee to certify the results.
The outcome would give Republicans 52 seats in the Senate — with Mississippi’s race heading into a runoff Nov. 27 — which means that the midterm elections left the party of President Donald Trump with a slightly larger but still thin majority in the chamber responsible for confirming administration appointments and judicial nominees. With far less than the 60 votes needed to overcome a filibuster on most legislation and a Democratic majority in the House, Republicans will increasingly need to work across the aisle to get bills passed.
Florida’s Senate race proved yet again how a tiny fraction of votes in the country’s third largest state can determine the outcome of elections. The challenge for candidates seeking to woo demographically and culturally diverse voters will be a top priority for political strategists looking ahead to Trump’s 2020 re-election bid.
Florida famously decided the 2000 presidential election after weeks of lawsuits, ballot inspections and a U.S. Supreme Court ruling that gave the win to George W. Bush. Following that national attention, Florida’s legislature implemented an automatic-recount process dictated by the margin between candidates.
Scott initially declared victory on Nov. 6, while a spokesman for Nelson said he was disappointed in the outcome. But Scott’s lead began to shrink as more ballots were tallied overnight and into the following day. A machine recount that ended Nov. 15 put Scott ahead by just 12,603 votes — well within the quarter of a percentage point margin that triggers a manual recount.
Both Republican and Democratic volunteers, together with teams of lawyers and observers, reviewed ballots that either didn’t record a vote for senator (known as an undervote) or appeared to select more than one candidate (known as an overvote).
Scott and other prominent Republicans, including Trump and Florida Senator Marco Rubio, questioned whether local officials were committing fraud to reverse the result. But state electoral officials said they had observers in various counties and they hadn’t found evidence of criminal wrongdoing.
Nelson’s campaign insisted that they were only seeking to ensure that every vote was counted. His legal team, led by Marc Elias, filed almost a dozen lawsuits to question why some ballots, including those with apparent signature mismatches, were discarded.
U.S. District Judge Mark Walker issued rulings over the past two weeks that both disappointed and cheered Nelson’s campaign.
Florida’s gubernatorial race was decided by less than half of a percentage point. Republican Ron DeSantis’s win over Democrat Andrew Gillum was confirmed last week in the machine recount of ballots and wasn’t close enough to go to a manual recount. Gillum conceded on Saturday.
