Pentagon’s AI initiatives accelerate hard decisions on lethal autonomous weapons

Lattice Mission Autonomy software by Anduril is demonstrated at the Air & Space Forces Association Air, Space & Cyber Conference, Wednesday, Sept. 13, 2023, in Oxon Hill, Md. (AP)
Lattice Mission Autonomy software by Anduril is demonstrated at the Air & Space Forces Association Air, Space & Cyber Conference, Wednesday, Sept. 13, 2023, in Oxon Hill, Md. (AP)
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Updated 26 November 2023
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Pentagon’s AI initiatives accelerate hard decisions on lethal autonomous weapons

Pentagon’s AI initiatives accelerate hard decisions on lethal autonomous weapons
  • Many countries are working on them — and neither China, Russia, Iran, India or Pakistan have signed a US-initiated pledge to use military AI responsibly
  • NATO allies share intelligence from data gathered by satellites, drones and humans, some aggregated with software from US contractor Palantir

NATIONAL HARBOR, Md.: Artificial intelligence employed by the US military has piloted pint-sized surveillance drones in special operations forces’ missions and helped Ukraine in its war against Russia. It tracks soldiers’ fitness, predicts when Air Force planes need maintenance and helps keep tabs on rivals in space.
Now, the Pentagon is intent on fielding multiple thousands of relatively inexpensive, expendable AI-enabled autonomous vehicles by 2026 to keep pace with China. The ambitious initiative — dubbed Replicator — seeks to “galvanize progress in the too-slow shift of US military innovation to leverage platforms that are small, smart, cheap, and many,” Deputy Secretary of Defense Kathleen Hicks said in August.
While its funding is uncertain and details vague, Replicator is expected to accelerate hard decisions on what AI tech is mature and trustworthy enough to deploy — including on weaponized systems.
There is little dispute among scientists, industry experts and Pentagon officials that the US will within the next few years have fully autonomous lethal weapons. And though officials insist humans will always be in control, experts say advances in data-processing speed and machine-to-machine communications will inevitably relegate people to supervisory roles.
That’s especially true if, as expected, lethal weapons are deployed en masse in drone swarms. Many countries are working on them — and neither China, Russia, Iran, India or Pakistan have signed a US-initiated pledge to use military AI responsibly.
It’s unclear if the Pentagon is currently formally assessing any fully autonomous lethal weapons system for deployment, as required by a 2012 directive. A Pentagon spokeswoman would not say.
Paradigm shifts
Replicator highlights immense technological and personnel challenges for Pentagon procurement and development as the AI revolution promises to transform how wars are fought.
“The Department of Defense is struggling to adopt the AI developments from the last machine-learning breakthrough,” said Gregory Allen, a former top Pentagon AI official now at the Center for Strategic and International Studies think tank.
The Pentagon’s portfolio boasts more than 800 AI-related unclassified projects, much still in testing. Typically, machine-learning and neural networks are helping humans gain insights and create efficiencies.
“The AI that we’ve got in the Department of Defense right now is heavily leveraged and augments people,” said Missy Cummings, director of George Mason University’s robotics center and a former Navy fighter pilot.” “There’s no AI running around on its own. People are using it to try to understand the fog of war better.”
Space, war’s new frontier
One domain where AI-assisted tools are tracking potential threats is space, the latest frontier in military competition.
China envisions using AI, including on satellites, to “make decisions on who is and isn’t an adversary,” US Space Force chief technology and innovation officer Lisa Costa, told an online conference this month.
The US aims to keep pace.
An operational prototype called Machina used by Space Force keeps tabs autonomously on more than 40,000 objects in space, orchestrating thousands of data collections nightly with a global telescope network.
Machina’s algorithms marshal telescope sensors. Computer vision and large language models tell them what objects to track. And AI choreographs drawing instantly on astrodynamics and physics datasets, Col. Wallace ‘Rhet’ Turnbull of Space Systems Command told a conference in August.
Another AI project at Space Force analyzes radar data to detect imminent adversary missile launches, he said.
Maintaining planes and soldiers
Elsewhere, AI’s predictive powers help the Air Force keep its fleet aloft, anticipating the maintenance needs of more than 2,600 aircraft including B-1 bombers and Blackhawk helicopters.
Machine-learning models identify possible failures dozens of hours before they happen, said Tom Siebel, CEO of Silicon Valley-based C3 AI, which has the contract. C3’s tech also models the trajectories of missiles for the the US Missile Defense Agency and identifies insider threats in the federal workforce for the Defense Counterintelligence and Security Agency.
Among health-related efforts is a pilot project tracking the fitness of the Army’s entire Third Infantry Division — more than 13,000 soldiers. Predictive modeling and AI help reduce injuries and increase performance, said Maj. Matt Visser.
Aiding Ukraine
In Ukraine, AI provided by the Pentagon and its NATO allies helps thwart Russian aggression.
NATO allies share intelligence from data gathered by satellites, drones and humans, some aggregated with software from US contractor Palantir. Some data comes from Maven, the Pentagon’s pathfinding AI project now mostly managed by the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, say officials including retired Air Force Gen. Jack Shanahan, the inaugural Pentagon AI director,
Maven began in 2017 as an effort to process video from drones in the Middle East – spurred by US Special Operations forces fighting Daesh and Al-Qaeda — and now aggregates and analyzes a wide array of sensor- and human-derived data.
AI has also helped the US-created Security Assistance Group-Ukraine help organize logistics for military assistance from a coalition of 40 countries, Pentagon officials say.
All-Domain Command and Control
To survive on the battlefield these days, military units must be small, mostly invisible and move quickly because exponentially growing networks of sensors let anyone “see anywhere on the globe at any moment,” then-Joint Chiefs chairman Gen. Mark Milley observed in a June speech. “And what you can see, you can shoot.”
To more quickly connect combatants, the Pentagon has prioritized the development of intertwined battle networks — called Joint All-Domain Command and Control — to automate the processing of optical, infrared, radar and other data across the armed services. But the challenge is huge and fraught with bureaucracy.
Christian Brose, a former Senate Armed Services Committee staff director now at the defense tech firm Anduril, is among military reform advocates who nevertheless believe they “may be winning here to a certain extent.”
“The argument may be less about whether this is the right thing to do, and increasingly more about how do we actually do it — and on the rapid timelines required,” he said. Brose’s 2020 book, “The Kill Chain,” argues for urgent retooling to match China in the race to develop smarter and cheaper networked weapons systems.
To that end, the US military is hard at work on “human-machine teaming.” Dozens of uncrewed air and sea vehicles currently keep tabs on Iranian activity. US Marines and Special Forces also use Anduril’s autonomous Ghost mini-copter, sensor towers and counter-drone tech to protect American forces.
Industry advances in computer vision have been essential. Shield AI lets drones operate without GPS, communications or even remote pilots. It’s the key to its Nova, a quadcopter, which US special operations units have used in conflict areas to scout buildings.
On the horizon: The Air Force’s “loyal wingman” program intends to pair piloted aircraft with autonomous ones. An F-16 pilot might, for instance, send out drones to scout, draw enemy fire or attack targets. Air Force leaders are aiming for a debut later this decade.
The race to full autonomy
The “loyal wingman” timeline doesn’t quite mesh with Replicator’s, which many consider overly ambitious. The Pentagon’s vagueness on Replicator, meantime, may partly intend to keep rivals guessing, though planners may also still be feeling their way on feature and mission goals, said Paul Scharre, a military AI expert and author of “Four Battlegrounds.”
Anduril and Shield AI, each backed by hundreds of millions in venture capital funding, are among companies vying for contracts.
Nathan Michael, chief technology officer at Shield AI, estimates they will have an autonomous swarm of at least three uncrewed aircraft ready in a year using its V-BAT aerial drone. The US military currently uses the V-BAT — without an AI mind — on Navy ships, on counter-drug missions and in support of Marine Expeditionary Units, the company says.
It will take some time before larger swarms can be reliably fielded, Michael said. “Everything is crawl, walk, run — unless you’re setting yourself up for failure.”
The only weapons systems that Shanahan, the inaugural Pentagon AI chief, currently trusts to operate autonomously are wholly defensive, like Phalanx anti-missile systems on ships. He worries less about autonomous weapons making decisions on their own than about systems that don’t work as advertised or kill noncombatants or friendly forces.
The department’s current chief digital and AI officer Craig Martell is determined not to let that happen.
“Regardless of the autonomy of the system, there will always be a responsible agent that understands the limitations of the system, has trained well with the system, has justified confidence of when and where it’s deployable — and will always take the responsibility,” said Martell, who previously headed machine-learning at LinkedIn and Lyft. “That will never not be the case.”
As to when AI will be reliable enough for lethal autonomy, Martell said it makes no sense to generalize. For example, Martell trusts his car’s adaptive cruise control but not the tech that’s supposed to keep it from changing lanes. “As the responsible agent, I would not deploy that except in very constrained situations,” he said. “Now extrapolate that to the military.”
Martell’s office is evaluating potential generative AI use cases – it has a special task force for that – but focuses more on testing and evaluating AI in development.
One urgent challenge, says Jane Pinelis, chief AI engineer at Johns Hopkins University’s Applied Physics Lab and former chief of AI assurance in Martell’s office, is recruiting and retaining the talent needed to test AI tech. The Pentagon can’t compete on salaries. Computer science PhDs with AI-related skills can earn more than the military’s top-ranking generals and admirals.
Testing and evaluation standards are also immature, a recent National Academy of Sciences report on Air Force AI highlighted.
Might that mean the US one day fielding under duress autonomous weapons that don’t fully pass muster?
“We are still operating under the assumption that we have time to do this as rigorously and as diligently as possible,” said Pinelis. “I think if we’re less than ready and it’s time to take action, somebody is going to be forced to make a decision.”

 


Thailand’s new PM outlines policies to parliament as consumer mood drops

Thailand’s new PM outlines policies to parliament as consumer mood drops
Updated 12 sec ago
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Thailand’s new PM outlines policies to parliament as consumer mood drops

Thailand’s new PM outlines policies to parliament as consumer mood drops
  • Prime Minister Paetongtarn Shinawatra highlights signature plan for a ‘digital wallet’ handout of 10,000 baht to 50 million people
  • The scheme has been criticized by economists and former central bank governors as fiscally irresponsible, which the government rejects
BANGKOK: Thai Prime Minister Paetongtarn Shinawatra on Thursday outlined her government’s policy agenda to parliament, headlined by plans to give away 450 billion baht ($13.4 billion) in handouts to jumpstart Southeast Asia’s second-largest economy.
Political newcomer Paetongtarn’s cabinet was sworn in this month, after parliament elected her Thailand’s youngest premier following the shock removal of predecessor Srettha Thavisin by a court decision.
The polices largely continue ally Srettha’s agenda and that of their populist Pheu Thai party, including debt restructuring and legalizing casinos to draw in investment and more tourists.
Paetongtarn told parliament her government was facing challenges, including structural economic problems, and said the government would act with urgency to stimulate growth.
“If there are no financial and fiscal measures to support economic growth, it is expected that the country’s economic growth rate will not exceed 3 percent per year,” she said.
That would result in the public debt level approaching the ceiling of 70 percent to gross domestic product (GDP) in 2027, she said. Public debt stood at 63.74 percent of GDP at the end of July.
“Therefore, it is a great challenge that the government must urgently restore the country’s economy to quickly grow strongly again,” Paetongtarn said.
While she highlighted the signature plan for a ‘digital wallet’ handout of 10,000 baht ($300) to 50 million people, some of which Paetongtarn has previously said will be given in cash, there were no updates on how or when it would be rolled out.
The government had said this week it would distribute 145 billion baht ($4.2 billion) of the program to support vulnerable groups later this month.
The scheme has been criticized by economists and former central bank governors as fiscally irresponsible, which the government rejects. It has struggled to find sources of funding.
The government insists the policy is necessary to energize the economy, which the central bank expects to grow 2.6 percent this year, up from 1.9 percent in 2023 but far adrift of most regional peers.
Consumer confidence dropped for a sixth straight month to a 13-month low in August, a survey showed on Thursday.
Paetongtarn, 38, made her debut appearance in parliament as Thailand’s second female prime minister. She is the fourth member of her family to hold the top job.
Among those was her father, the billionaire Thaksin Shinawatra, Thailand’s most influential and divisive politician over the past two decades, who has backed the stimulus plan and is a key figure behind her Pheu Thai party.

Starmer to say UK’s national health service needs ‘major surgery’

Starmer to say UK’s national health service needs ‘major surgery’
Updated 1 min 15 sec ago
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Starmer to say UK’s national health service needs ‘major surgery’

Starmer to say UK’s national health service needs ‘major surgery’
  • His speech in central London follows the publication of a 142-page investigation which found that the health of Britons had deteriorated over the past 15 years

LONDON: Prime Minister Keir Starmer will warn Thursday that Britain’s state-run National Health Service must “reform or die” after an independent report said the venerated institution was in a “critical condition.”
Starmer, whose Labour party was elected by a landslide in July, will promise “the biggest reimagining” of the NHS since it was founded 76 years ago.
His speech in central London follows the publication of a 142-page investigation which found that the health of Britons had deteriorated over the past 15 years.
The report’s author, Ara Darzi, an unaffiliated Lord in parliament’s upper chamber, said the NHS had fallen into “disrepair” due to a lack of investment, top-down reorganization and the coronavirus pandemic.
“What we need is the courage to deliver long-term reform — major surgery not sticking plaster solutions,” Starmer was due to say, according to excerpts of his speech released to reporters.
“The NHS is at a fork in the road, and we have a choice about how it should meet these rising demands.
“Raise taxes on working people to meet the ever-higher costs of aging population — or reform to secure its future.
“We know working people can’t afford to pay more, so it’s reform or die,” Starmer was expected to say.
Health minister Wes Streeting told Sky News there would be “three big shifts” — moving certain services from hospitals to the community, fully switching from analog to digital and “giving staff the tools to do the job, so that we tackle that productivity challenge.”
He said the government would not “do as the Conservatives did, which is just pour more money into a broken model, and fail to reform.”
Labour dumped the Conservatives out of power on July 4 in part on a pledge to “fix” the NHS, accusing the Tories of having “broken” it during their 14 years in power.
Darzi’s report notes that the NHS is seeing a surge in patients suffering multiple long-term illnesses such as diabetes and high blood pressure.
It says the UK has higher cancer rates than other countries and is lagging behind in its treatment of major conditions.
It also notes that waiting lists have swelled to 7.6 million and that a tenth of patients at accident and emergency wards now wait 12 hours or more before being seen.
Darzi said that he was “shocked” by what he discovered but added that the NHS’s vital signs “remain strong.”
Starmer was expected to outline the three areas of reform for a 10-year plan to “turn around the NHS,” whose universal model is a source of British pride, despite its shortcomings in meeting demand.
Just over a year ago, his Tory predecessor Rishi Sunak announced a 15-year drive to recruit more than 300,000 staff to deal with a chronic shortage of doctors and nurses.
At the time, it was estimated that the NHS would have a staff shortfall of 360,000 by 2037 because of an aging population, a lack of domestically trained health workers and difficulties recruiting and retaining staff, in part because of new visa rules.
“The challenge is clear before us; the change could amount to the biggest reimagining of our NHS since its birth,” the prime minister was set to say.
Starmer, whose mother was an NHS nurse, has spent much of his first two months in power blaming the Tories for leaving Labour a dire inheritance in sectors ranging from health to the economy and prisons.
The Conservatives, whose leader Sunak is the son of an NHS doctor and a pharmacist, accuse him of exaggerating the country’s problems as a way of laying the groundwork for future tax increases.


Ukraine businesses hire more women and teens as labor shortages bite

Ukraine businesses hire more women and teens as labor shortages bite
Updated 50 min 7 sec ago
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Ukraine businesses hire more women and teens as labor shortages bite

Ukraine businesses hire more women and teens as labor shortages bite
  • Companies hire more women and young people to fill gaps
  • War and mobilization have hollowed out workforce

KYIV: After spending years in what she described as “boring, sedentary” roles in the offices of several Ukrainian companies, Liliia Shulha landed her dream job as a truck driver with Ukraine’s leading retailer, Fozzy Group.
“I always dreamed about big cars. Instead of (playing with) dolls, I drove cars when I was a child,” she told Reuters.
“Now the situation is such that they take people without experience and they train. I was lucky,” said Shulha, 40, wearing a company uniform in front of a large truck.
As the war with Russia drains the labor force, businesses are trying to cover critical shortages by hiring more women in traditionally male-dominated roles and turning to teenagers, students and older workers.
With millions of people, mostly women and children, abroad after fleeing the war, and tens of thousands of men mobilized into the army, the jobs crisis could endanger economic growth and a post-war recovery, analysts say.
Ukraine has lost over a quarter of its workforce since Russia’s invasion in February 2022, central bank data showed.
Nearly 60 percent of businesses said finding skilled workers was their main challenge, an economy ministry survey of over 3,000 companies showed.
“The situation is indeed critical,” said Tetiana Petruk, chief sustainability officer at steel company Metinvest, one of Ukraine’s largest employers with a workforce of about 45,000. It has about 4,000 vacancies.
“The staff deficit that we feel has an impact on our production,” Petruk told Reuters in an online interview.
“We are not the only ones who feel the staff shortages, all companies in the regions feel that, including our contractors.”
Reuters spoke to representatives of nine Ukrainian companies, from big industrial firms to retail groups and small private entrepreneurs. All said staff shortages and a growing mismatch of skills were big challenges.
Businesses said they were changing recruitment and business practices, automating, rotating existing staff and expanding their job descriptions, re-hiring retirees and offering more benefits, especially for younger workers.
They have also had to increase wages. The average monthly wage is now about 20,000 hryvnias ($470) compared to about 14,500 a year ago.
“There is a noticeable shift away from gender and age bias in candidate selection as employers adjust criteria to attract needed employees,” said the Kyiv School of Economics. “This trend also extends to entrepreneurship, where the share of female entrepreneurs is growing significantly.”
More women
Male-dominated industries are more affected by staff shortages, the central bank said.
The construction sector, transport, mining and others have all suffered because of military mobilization, for which men aged 25 to 60 are eligible. To keep the economy running, the government provides full or partial deferrals for critical companies.
In the energy and weapons production sectors, 100 percent of staff are eligible for draft deferral. In some other sectors, firms can retain 50 percent of male staff. But the process to secure deferral is long and complicated.
As the government toughened mobilization rules this year, the number of men preferring informal employment — allowing them to stay off public data records — grew, some enterprises said.
In the agricultural southern region of Mykolayiv, women are being trained as tractor drivers. Women are also increasingly working as tram and truck drivers, coal miners, security guards and warehouse workers, companies say.
“We are offering training and jobs for women who have minimal experience,” said Lyubov Ukrainets, human resources director at Silpo, part of Fozzy Group.
Including Shulha, the company has six female truck drivers and is more actively recruiting women for other jobs previously dominated by men, including loaders, meat splitters, packers and security guards.
The share of female employees is growing in industries such as steel production. Petruk said female staff accounted for about 30-35 percent of Metinvest’s workforce and the company now hired women for some underground jobs. Metinvest was unable to provide comparative figures for before the war.
Some other women are unable or unwilling to join the workforce because of a lack of childcare. Shulha, who works 15-day stretches on the road, has moved back in with her parents to ensure care for her 14-year-old son and 16-year-old daughter.
Young people
Businesses and economists expect labor market challenges to persist. Employers are turning their attention to young people by offering training, job experience and targeted benefit packages.
Metinvest, which previously focused on students, is now increasingly working with professional colleges, Petruk said.
Silpo is more actively hiring teenagers for entry-level jobs in supermarkets and has launched a specialized internship program for students.
Mobile phone operator Vodafone repackaged its youth program, creating an opportunity for about 50 teenagers in 12 cities to get their first job experience.
“We want to offer the first proper experience of the official job to this young audience. Another objective is to build a talent pool,” said Ilona Voloshyna of Vodafone Retail.
“Also we want to understand the youth,” she said in a Vodafone shop in Kyiv as six teenagers consulted with visitors.
The government and foreign partners have launched several programs to help Ukrainians reskill.
“We provide the opportunity for everyone at state expense to obtain a new profession which is in demand on the labor market, or to raise their professional level,” said Tetiana Berezhna, a deputy economy minister.


SpaceX-Polaris crew poised to attempt first private spacewalk

SpaceX-Polaris crew poised to attempt first private spacewalk
Updated 12 September 2024
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SpaceX-Polaris crew poised to attempt first private spacewalk

SpaceX-Polaris crew poised to attempt first private spacewalk
  • It is the Elon Musk-led company’s latest and riskiest bid to push the boundaries of commercial spaceflight
  • Jared Isaacman has declined to say how much he is paying for the missions, but they are likely to cost hundreds of millions of dollars

WASHINGTON: The first private spacewalk is set for Thursday by a group of astronauts who will leave a SpaceX capsule after a delay of a few hours, testing a new line of spacesuits in the company’s riskiest mission yet.
A billionaire entrepreneur, a retired military fighter pilot and two SpaceX employees have been orbiting Earth aboard Crew Dragon since Tuesday’s pre-dawn launch from Florida of the Polaris Dawn mission.
It is the Elon Musk-led company’s latest and riskiest bid to push the boundaries of commercial spaceflight.
Live streaming of the event is set to begin at 4:55 a.m. ET (0855 GMT), SpaceX said on Thursday, with two astronauts venturing outside Crew Dragon while two stay inside.
The capsule, at an altitude of 700km (435 miles), will be completely depressurized, and the whole crew will rely on their slim, SpaceX-developed spacesuits for oxygen.
Jared Isaacman, 41, a pilot and the billionaire founder of electronic payments company Shift4, is bankrolling the Polaris mission, as he did his Inspiration4 flight with SpaceX in 2021.
He has declined to say how much he is paying for the missions, but they are likely to cost hundreds of millions of dollars, based on Crew Dragon’s price of roughly $55 million a seat for other flights.
The others in Polaris include mission pilot Scott Poteet, 50, a retired US Air Force lieutenant colonel, and SpaceX employees Sarah Gillis, 30, and Anna Menon, 38, both senior engineers.
FARTHEST SINCE APOLLO
Throughout Wednesday the spacecraft circled Earth at least six times in an oval-shaped orbit as shallow as 190km and stretching out as far as 1,400km, the farthest in space humans have traveled since the last US Apollo mission in 1972.
The gumdrop-shaped spacecraft then began to lower its orbit into a peak 700-km position and adjust cabin pressure to ready for the spacewalk, formally called Extravehicular Activity (EVA), the Polaris program said on social media on Wednesday.
“The crew also spent a few hours demonstrating the suit’s pressurized mobility, verifying positions and accessibility in microgravity along with preparing the cabin for the EVA,” it said.
During the spacewalk, Isaacman and Gillis will exit the Crew Dragon tethered by an oxygen line while Poteet and Menon stay within.
Only government astronauts with several years of training have done spacewalks in the past.
There have been roughly 270 on the International Space Station (ISS) since it was set up in 2000, and 16 by Chinese astronauts on Beijing’s Tiangong space station.
The Polaris crew has spent 2-1/2 years of training with SpaceX mission simulations and “experiential learning” in challenging, uncomfortable environments, said Poteet.
Last month the fighter pilot told reporters in Florida that spaceflight preparation was more intense than he had experienced in his military career.
“I can tell you without a doubt this has been some of the most challenging training that I’ve ever experienced,” Poteet said in Cape Canaveral before the launch.
The spacewalk will happen as a record 19 astronauts orbit Earth, after Russia’s Soyuz MS-26 mission ferried two cosmonauts and a US astronaut to the International Space Station on Wednesday, taking its headcount to a rare high of 12.
Three Chinese astronauts are aboard the Tiangong space station.
The first US spacewalk in 1965, aboard a Gemini capsule, used a similar procedure to the one planned for Polaris Dawn: the capsule was depressurized, the hatch opened, and a spacesuited astronaut ventured outside on a tether.
During the mission, the private Polaris astronauts will be subjects for a range of scientific studies on how the human body reacts to deep space, adding to decades of health studies on government astronauts on the ISS.
Since 2001, Crew Dragon, the only US vehicle capable of reliably putting humans in orbit and returning them to Earth, has flown more than a dozen astronaut missions, mainly for NASA.
The agency seeded development of the capsule under a program meant to establish commercial, privately-built US vehicles capable of ferrying astronauts with the ISS.
Also developed under that program was Boeing’s Starliner capsule, but it is farther behind.
Starliner launched its first astronauts to the ISS in June in a troubled test mission that ended this month with the capsule returning empty, leaving its crew on the space station for a Crew Dragon capsule to fetch next year.


Democrats claiming Florida Senate seat is in play haven’t put money behind the effort to make it so

Democrats claiming Florida Senate seat is in play haven’t put money behind the effort to make it so
Updated 12 September 2024
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Democrats claiming Florida Senate seat is in play haven’t put money behind the effort to make it so

Democrats claiming Florida Senate seat is in play haven’t put money behind the effort to make it so
  • Democrats hope ballot amendments on abortion rights and marijuana legalization will help boost turnout on their side

BOYNTON BEACH: Florida Democrats made bold claims last week about their chances in a state that has steadily grown more conservative in recent years. But so far they have not matched their words with the kind of money it will take to win there.
“Florida is in play,” proclaimed Debbie Mucarsel-Powell, a former representative from Miami, at the start of a bus tour in defense of women’s reproductive rights in Boynton Beach. Mucarsel-Powell is the choice of Florida Democrats to challenge incumbent Republican Sen. Rick Scott for one of a handful of Senate seats the GOP is defending this election cycle.
According to data from AdImpact, which tracks spending on advertising by political campaigns and their surrogates, Republicans have outspent Democrats on Florida’s US Senate race by roughly a 4-to-1 margin through Sept. 11, $12.7 million to $3.2 million. Based on ad spots currently reserved through the general election, that margin is expected to grow.
The dynamics of the Senate race mirror what has happened in the presidential race in a state that used to be hotly contested by both parties’ top-of-the-ticket candidates. Vice President Kamala Harris did not attend the launch of the bus tour and has not been to Florida as a candidate since she replaced President Joe Biden as the Democratic nominee for president in the race against Republican former President Donald Trump.
The Republicans’ massive spending advantage may help to explain why Scott scoffs at the claims coming from Democrats about Florida being competitive.
“They are so far from what Florida voters believe in, that they don’t have a chance in the world of winning Florida,” he said in an interview last week. “They don’t have a chance of beating Trump, and they don’t have a chance of beating me.”
Mucarsel-Powell says her side is more in touch with voters on issues such as reproductive rights. She says ballot amendments on both abortion rights and legalizing marijuana will help Democrats turn out voters. She also said the switch from Biden to Harris gave Florida Democrats a burst of fresh momentum.
“This is momentum that has been building for quite some time, and her announcement just was like the tip of the iceberg on the momentum and the energy that was building here around the state of Florida,” Mucarsel-Powell said in an interview.
A national AP-NORC survey conducted in July showed that about 8 in 10 Democrats said they’d be satisfied with Harris as the party’s nominee for president, versus 4 in 10 Democrats in March saying they’d be satisfied with Biden as the nominee.
But Mucarsel-Powell’s task remains formidable. Although some polling shows Scott leading narrowly in the Senate race, national Democrats have yet to invest heavily in Florida’s expensive media markets. Harris, who has proven to be a prolific fundraiser since she became the Democratic nominee, recently allocated $25 million of her own campaign funds to help down-ballot Democrats in November — with only $10 million of those funds going to US Senate candidates. Harris’ campaign did not respond to questions on how these funds were being allocated.
The Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee said it has spent money on staffing and digital advertising on the race but didn’t specify how much. In a statement, they did not address plans for spending going forward but said: “Scott’s unpopularity coupled with the strength of Debbie Mucarsel-Powell’s campaign makes Florida one of Senate Democrats top offensive opportunities.”
Scott, who has his eye on a Senate leadership position if he wins, said he would welcome a bigger effort from national Democrats.
“I hope they spend a bunch of money and waste it, because they don’t have a chance of winning the Senate in Florida,” he said.
Florida Democratic Party chair Nikki Fried said national Democrats showed their support by starting their bus tour in Florida and sending campaign representatives there to support Democratic candidates. Sen. Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota, who is in a strong enough position in her own reelection bid to work on behalf of other Democrats around the country, was one of several Democrats who joined Mucarsel-Powell at the start of the bus tour.
“They could have started anywhere else in the country. They started here in Palm Beach County, in Donald Trump’s backyard,” Fried said. “That shows how important Florida is, and that they are going to continue to watch what is happening on the ground, send surrogates here and making sure that we are in play for November.”
About 150 people attended the bus tour event.
Fried acknowledged that Democrats have been outspent on advertising in Florida, but she said they’re putting their energy into campaigning at the grassroots level. She said 40,000 new volunteers signed up after Harris entered the race and were making an all-out effort to knock on doors and reach out to Florida voters by phone.
This year’s Florida ballot looks different from the one voters saw two years ago, where US Sen. Marco Rubio and Gov. Ron DeSantis led the top of Florida’s ticket. The governor had hoped to ride a wave of momentum from his emphatic 19-point victory to national prominence but was unable to loosen Trump’s grip on the Republican Party nationally.
Trump, now a Florida resident, defeated Biden in Florida by 3.3 percentage points in 2020, further diminishing its status as a swing state.
Brian Ballard, a Republican political strategist who was a top fundraiser for Trump’s 2020 presidential campaign, said the lackluster spending effort by Democrats will make it harder for Mucarsel-Powell to introduce herself to people across the state who don’t recognize her — as opposed to Scott, who was Florida’s governor from 2010 to 2018 and has since then been serving in the Senate.
The lack of spending from the national party, Ballard said, is “usually a sign of a losing campaign.”
“Florida is not in play,” Ballard said. “I hope the Democrats commit and spend a lot of money in Florida on the presidential race. It’ll move the needle not at all. If she’s relying on Democrats spending on top of the ticket, she’s relying on fool’s gold.”
The Florida contest has not drawn much attention from national Democrats, who are trying to hold onto far more Senate seats than Republicans this year. Instead, they have focused much of their energy and resources on defending seats they already hold, including in the red states of Ohio and Montana. Still, the Florida US Senate race was close in late July, just before the Florida Senate primaries, according to a poll of Florida voters conducted by the University of North Florida’s Public Opinion Research Lab.
Scott said in the interview that he isn’t “taking a chance” by treating his own race lightly. And yet he has spent at least some of his time campaigning for other Republicans, including a trip across state lines to battleground Georgia last week for a town hall in Braselton, northeast of Atlanta.
“This is a team sport,” Scott said of his efforts on behalf of other GOP candidates.
Tiffany Lanier, 36, attended the bus tour Tuesday morning in Boynton Beach. Lanier, a Lake Worth civic engagement public speaker, said that although Biden ran on a similar platform to Harris, she thinks Harris’ position and emphasis on abortion rights really excites and motivates people to turn out to vote.
“I think it was more like in my wilder dreams that Florida would be in play for this November,” Lanier said. “I know that we are so very tight in the polls, but I do see that there is an energetic shift. And so, I do see a lot of possibility here.”