But when national Democrats talk about states where they believe they have good prospects next week, Florida does not make the list. Even though statewide races have been close in recent cycles, Democrats have felt burned by narrow losses and have been reluctant to invest the sizable amounts of money required in a state with so many media markets only to be disappointed again.
Mr. Biden appeared on Tuesday with former Gov. Charlie Crist, who is seeking to reclaim his old office by ousting the incumbent Republican, Gov. Ron DeSantis, and with Representative Val B. Demings, the Democratic challenger to Senator Marco Rubio. Mr. DeSantis leads by roughly nine percentage points and Mr. Rubio by about seven percentage points, according to an aggregation of polls by the political data website FiveThirtyEight.
While the president has made speeches and headlined fund-raisers for Democratic candidates this fall, his rally on Tuesday night at Florida Memorial University, a historically Black college, was his first on the campaign trail since Labor Day. Democrats chose a modest arena, assembling a far smaller crowd than typically mustered by another Florida resident, former President Donald J. Trump.
The president appeared most irritated by attacks on him over inflation. In Hallandale Beach, he pointed to his efforts to limit health care costs for seniors. “They talk about inflation all the time,” he said. “What in God’s name?” He added, “If you have to take a prescription and it cost you an arm and a leg and I reduce that, you don’t have to pay as much. That reduces your cost of living. It reduces inflation.”
To bolster his contention that Republicans are aiming to undercut Social Security and Medicare, Mr. Biden once again cited a legislative agenda put forth by Senator Rick Scott of Florida, the chairman of the Senate Republicans’ campaign arm, that has been disavowed by other Republicans, most notably Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the party’s leader in the upper chamber. Mr. Scott’s legislative agenda called for “sunsetting” all federal legislation every five years, meaning programs like Social Security and Medicare would expire unless reauthorized by Congress.
Before the president’s trip to Florida, Mr. Scott said on Sunday that his position had been twisted and that “I don’t know one Republican” who favors cutting Social Security payments or cutting Medicare benefits.
“I believe we’ve got to preserve them and make sure that we keep them,” Mr. Scott told Dana Bash on “State of the Union” on CNN. “What I want to do is make sure we live within our means and make sure we preserve those programs. People paid into them. They believe in them. I believe in them. I’m going to fight like hell to make sure we preserve Medicare and Social Security.”