13 Florida candidates file to run for U.S. Senate nomination

There are 13 Floridians vying to win the U.S. Senate seat currently occupied by Republican incumbent Rick Scott.

That’s after the qualifying period for all federal candidates, which ended Friday at noon.

Leading the pack is Scott, who narrowly won the seat six years ago against then 18-year Democratic incumbent Bill Nelson. He will face two candidates in August: businessman Keith Gross and John S. Columbus.

On the Democratic side, while former U.S. Rep. Debbie Mucarsel-Powell has dominated news coverage in the past few months, she still will have to defeat four other challengers to get a chance to face off against the GOP candidate in November.

In addition to Mucarsel-Powell, the other Democrats in the race are Stanley Campbell, Rod Joseph, Brian Rush and former Congressman Alan Grayson.

Rush served in the Florida House of Representatives from 1986-1994. He ran and finished a distant second to Val Deming’s in the Democratic primary for U.S. Senate in 2022.

Grayson is a former star in Florida Democratic politics who hasn’t been in public office since 2016. He represented a Central Florida congressional district from 2008-2010, and again in 2012-2016. But he has lost his last three races – the 2016 Democratic Senate primary against Patrick Murphy; the 2018 Democratic primary in Congressional District 9 to Darren Soto; and the Congressional District 10 primary against Maxwell Frost in 2022.

Grayson says that while the establishment believes that Mucarsel-Powell is the favorite, he begs to differ, saying that there haven’t been any polls of the Democrats in the contest.

“I think that what the establishment is doing is covering up the fact that I’m the only candidate with any statewide recognition,” he says. “I’m definitely in it to win it.”

He says he can do so by concentrating his resources on voter-registration efforts.

In addition to the major political party candidates, there are five other independent and/or third-party candidates who have filed for the U.S. Senate seat.

Three of them are non-party-affiliated candidates: Shantele Renee Bennett, Ben Everidge and Tuan TQ Nguyen. Libertarian Feena Bonoan and write-in candidate Howard Knepper complete the list.