- Associated Press - Saturday, October 13, 2018

TALLAHASSEE, Fla. (AP) - Florida’s 2018 midterm election is one of the most important in years. The governor’s office and all three Cabinet seats are on the ballot; Republican Gov. Rick Scott is challenging three-term Democratic U.S. Sen. Bill Nelson; several congressional seats will be competitive; and Floridians will vote on several proposed constitutional amendments. The following are items of political interest from the past week.

AMPED UP ABOUT ADS

Hurricane Michael this past week ravaged Florida’s Panhandle, leading to multiple deaths and leaving a trail of destruction from the coast all the way to the Georgia border.

The storm led both Democratic gubernatorial nominee Andrew Gillum and Gov. Rick Scott to shift their primary focus away from day-to-day campaigning. Republican gubernatorial nominee Ron DeSantis and other Republican statewide candidates collected relief supplies and delivered them to Panama City on Saturday.

But that did not mean that campaigning ceased throughout the entire state.

All the major campaigns continue to blanket the airwaves, although some campaigns did cease some negative ads that were airing in the regions impacted by the storm.

And some were crying foul over some of the ads.

Scott is running for U.S. Senate and his campaign wrote a letter demanding that television stations take down an ad paid for by Senate Majority PAC. The ad paid by the group supporting U.S. Sen. Bill Nelson faults Scott over education budgets cuts he approved during his first year as governor back in 2011.

Steve Roberts, an attorney for the Scott campaign, wrote that the ad was “false” and “misleading” and that airing the ad while the state was dealing with Hurricane Michael “diminishes the ability of the state’s government to communicate emergency safety information to Florida residents.”

A spokesman for Senate Majority PAC told the Miami Herald this week that the committee stood by the ad.

Meanwhile, the campaigns of Gillum and DeSantis traded blows over some of the ads running in their race.

The Republican Party of Florida launched a new attack ad that says the Tallahassee mayor is “running from an FBI investigation.” The FBI is investigating Tallahassee city government, but Gillum has said he is cooperating with the probe and says he is not the target of the investigation. The first open knowledge of the probe came in June 2017 when a federal grand jury subpoenaed five years of records from Tallahassee and a local redevelopment agency that involved high-profile projects and developers, including an ally of Gillum.

Gillum’s campaign fired back with its own ad that featured five sheriffs calling the new ad “false” and “pathetic.”

STORM KNOCKS OUT DEBATES

Hurricane Michael is knocking out some of the debates planned in Florida’s two closely watched races.

Scott and Nelson were supposed to hold a live debate next Tuesday on CNN. In a statement this past week, the cable network said that both campaigns agreed to the delay so the candidates can focus on response and recovery to the storm.

Then Gillum announced late Saturday that he could not resume campaigning for several more days. In a Facebook message, Gillum said he could not leave town as long as thousands of residents remain without power. More than 110,000 customers of the Tallahassee-owned electric company lost power as a result of Hurricane Michael’s high winds that brought down hundreds of trees across the city. Late Saturday there were still about 30,000 city customers still in the dark.

Gillum was supposed to debate DeSantis on Tuesday in Orlando. There are still two debates between the two candidates scheduled for later this month.

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