On behalf of Republican state Senate nominee Jay Collins, the Florida GOP is plastering his Democratic opponent, Sen. Janet Cruz of Tampa, with negative TV ads and mailers that imply or say outright that she’s a crook.
They’ve called her a “small-time grifter” and implied that she was linked to a fraudulent Hurricane Ian relief charity scheme, among other things. But the connections to Cruz’s record are sometimes stretched.
The Ian accusations are contained in a Republican Party TV ad that says, “Janet Cruz’s cronies tried to swindle people into sending money to a non-existent charity, a fundraising scam that promotes her campaign.”
It then shows Collins, who works for a disaster aid charity called Operation BBQ Relief, distributing meals to disaster victims, saying he “put boots on the ground” to deliver aid after Ian.
The Cruz “cronies” are a liberal advocacy group called “Florida Rising,” which has become a whipping boy for Republican campaigns, in part because it advocates criminal justice reform.
Republicans say it has advocated “defunding the police” in the past, based on tweets from 2020 which are no longer visible on its Twitter page, and accuse it of “anti-law enforcement hate speech.” The group has endorsed Cruz along with other Democrats, but her campaign said she didn’t seek or publicize the endorsement.
Florida Rising has promoted donations to the Florida Ian Response Fund, a project of another liberal advocacy…
