Rick Scott Says GOP Must ‘Fight’ After Midterm Losses, Points to Cost-of-Living Gap for Younger Americans

Sen. Rick Scott (R-FL) said Republicans need to start fighting harder for their agenda following midterm elections that cost the GOP significant ground, arguing that government policy over the decades has made basic milestones of adulthood far less attainable for younger generations than they were when he was starting out.

“But guess what? You have you have to fight,” Scott said, adding that he doesn’t believe any Republican senator actually wants to be in the minority.

Asked whether voters had cast ballots for Democrats or simply against Republicans in the midterms, Scott said he thinks the public is frustrated with both parties. “They’re fed up with all of us,” he said. “They don’t think we’re responsive. I think the Democrats have come up here and think they got a mandate. … What they’re going to find out is people are mad, and they should be.”

Scott, the Florida Republican, laid out a comparison between the economic conditions he faced as a young man and what younger Americans face now. He said that when he left the Navy at 21 after joining at 18, he was able to buy a house in the suburbs for $21,000. Today, he said, a starter home costs a million dollars in 242 cities across the country.

He also pointed to the cost of higher education, saying he attended junior college for $200 a semester because university tuition was too steep, and later paid $255 at a university for 21 credit hours. By contrast, he said, some states now charge $18,000 a year in tuition at public universities. He noted that a new car once cost him $1,625, though he acknowledged cars today are nicer but cost several times as much.

“Nobody had student debt back then. None of us went to college. We worked,” Scott said. “We work. We go to school to get a job, a better paying job. We don’t go to school to get a degree that there’s not a better-paying job. Over 40 percent of our recent college graduates don’t even have a job that takes a high school diploma. What are we doing? We got to stop this stuff. We’re hurting them.”

Scott also pushed back on calls from some commentators for more public housing, drawing on his own experience. “I lived in public housing growing up,” he said. “No, you don’t. You don’t want the public housing. You want to get out of the public housing. The public housing isn’t nice. Private housing is nice.”

He characterized some of the Democratic agenda as dangerous, citing border policy and proposals like Medicare for All. “They want to open our borders,” Scott said. “They want to screw up the whole Medicare program by Medicare for All, which will destroy Medicare for the people that rely on Medicare, right? They want to give everything away for free.”

Turning to how Republicans should respond heading into a party meeting, Scott drew on his business background, noting he built a company that at one point employed 285,000 people. “Was it hard to govern? Was it hard to manage? Yeah, but guess what? You figure it out,” he said. “That’s what we have to do. We have to say we are going to figure this out. What’s our plan? How are we going to do it? … What’s our plan over the next 60 days? What’s our plan over the next two years?”