Sen. Rick Scott, R-Fla., poured cold water Thursday on The New York Times' report that he is weighing a 2024 Republican presidential primary run.
"What's accurate is I'm running for the Senate; I'm not running for president," Scott told reporters hours after the Times claimed to have sources to the contrary.
This statement echoes the one the Times buried in its suggestive, and now twice-debunked, report.
"It's flattering that some have mentioned the possibility of Sen. Scott running for president, but as he's said many times, he's running for reelection to the Senate," Scott senior adviser Chris Hartline told the Times.
Scott would have represented a Florida overload in the 2024 Republican presidential primary race, which already has former President Donald Trump, Gov. Ron DeSantis, and popular Miami Mayor Francis Suarez in the race.
Scott, a businessman by trade, has been a vocal proponent of severing economic dependence on China, an issue in line with Trump and DeSantis.
The senator, who has had some issues with DeSantis, had been considering entering the race for weeks, sources told the Times.
The field to challenge the far-away leader Trump continues to grow, with now more than a dozen GOP candidates. There are some Trump-backers in the field, but critics have long noted Trump's rock-solid base is unlikely to break from him amid what they see as the continued weaponization of the Biden Justice Department and Democrat-led investigations in Fulton County, Ga., Washington, D.C., and New York City.
Scott led the National Republican Senatorial Committee in 2021 and 2022, but he failed in his campaign to oust Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky.
Also, the senator has differed from DeSantis on Disney, calling for "cooler heads" to "prevail," and preferred Florida to keep its abortion restriction at 15 weeks instead of the first detection of a fetal heartbeat as early as six weeks, the Times reported.
Eric Mack ✉
Eric Mack has been a writer and editor at Newsmax since 2016. He is a 1998 Syracuse University journalism graduate and a New York Press Association award-winning writer.
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