Trujillo: What Does Charlie Crist Really Believe?
Florida gubernatorial candidate Rep. Charlie Crist, D-Fla., giving a victory speech after defeating gubernatorial candidate, Commissioner of Agriculture Nikki Fried, in the primary election: Aug. 23, 2022 in St. Petersburg, Florida. (Octavio Jones/Getty Images)
By Carlos Trujillo | Monday, 12 September 2022 01:04 PM EDT
Charlie Crist is consistently inconsistent.
All we really know is that whatever he believes today will likely change in six months or a year when it’s time to run for reelection.
Our votes are too valuable to spend on a candidate who so readily abandons the platforms on which he got elected. Crist is no stranger to politics; this is his fifth decade running for office.
In the last 15 years he served as a Republican governor in 2010, he ran unsuccessfully for U.S. Senate, then he switched parties registering as an Independent.
He became a Democrat in 2012, ran for governor in 2014 as a Democrat, and lost. Crist did win a U.S. House seat in 2016, and today he's running for Florida governor, as a Democrat.
Education
Floridians are passionate about school choice, the process that gives parents options to decide which educational opportunities best fit their child's needs.
As governor, Crist supported school choice and signed an expansion bill in 2010 that funded more opportunities for students and parents. Then, when he ran as a Democrat a few years later, he wanted to defund the program.
Today, anti-choice Crist chooses a school union leader as his running mate.
Karla Hernández-Mats has publicly disdained parents; last October she tweeted a meme on parents who express their views at school-board meetings to serial killers and horror-movie villains and commented, "For any of you following the school board meetings, you know the craziness is real."
Immigration
In 2010, when Crist was running for U.S. Senate, Crist supported legal immigration and sealing the border.
In an interview, then-Republican Gov. Crist took a stronger position on the pathway to citizenship, saying that illegal immigrants "shouldn’t feel advantaged by the fact that they got here illegally" and "should go to the back of the line, go through the regular process, what the law requires, in order to attain their citizenship."
In 2014, Crist flip-flopped during his campaign against Rick Scott.
Crist’s campaign website said, "We must immediately pass legislation that allows the children of undocumented parents to attend Florida colleges and universities at in-state tuition levels.
"It simply isn’t fair to punish children of undocumented parents."
In 2017, Crist supported an $827 billion bill funding multiple projects including former President Donald Trump's border wall.
Crist then issued a statement questioning its merit the next day.
In 2019, Crist voted in favor of terminating Trump's emergency declaration at the U.S.-Mexico border. The order had allowed Trump to reallocate funds for the wall by bypassing Congress.
When it comes to foreign relations, Charlie Crist has stood in lockstep with Joe Biden on Cuba and Venezuela. He has played nice with the dictators, and supports the removal of sanctions on Venezuela and the corrupt Maduro regime.
Second Amendment
Crist was a staunch pro-gun supporter.
In 1998, as a state senator, he said, "And for us to make moves that would disarm our law-abiding citizens would be inappropriate."
In his 2006 primary against Republican rival Tom Gallagher, who supported some gun-control restrictions, Crist put out an ad calling Gallagher "anti-gun."
The ad concluded, with "Charlie Crist: endorsed by the National Rifle Association (NRA)."
A few years later when Crist became governor, he appointed NRA favorites to the Florida Supreme Court and signed legislation allowing 500,000 concealed weapons permit-holders to bring their guns to work.
He even garnered an "A" rating from the NRA.
In June of 2022, Crist praised the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act, and supports universal background checks and a ban on sales of assault weapons and high-capacity magazines.
While Charlie Crist has flip-flopped on policies and politics for decades, Gov. DeSantis has never wavered.
DeSantis is a leader who advocates and protects Floridian’s freedoms, the right to go and worship, the right to earn a living, and the right for our children to attend school five days a week.
He championed the largest expansion of school choice in Florida history, stood against dictators, answered the call on illegal immigration, and most importantly, he kept Florida open.
Gov. DeSantis has made the sunshine state a place where people want to live, work, and raise their families.
Carlos Trujillo served as Ambassador to the Organization of American States after he was appointed to the post in 2017 by Donald J Trump. Prior, Trujillo served as a member of the Florida House of Representatives for eight years.