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(WASHINGTON) — Monday night’s debate between Florida’s Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis and Democratic challenger Charlie Crist began with a question about the economy, but both politicians began with the answer they had prepared — previewing what was to come.

“DeSantis has signed a bill that would restrict that [abortion] right, even in cases of rape or incest,” Crist said.

With his time, DeSantis said, “Charlie Christ has voted with Joe Biden, 100% of the time.”

The governor sought throughout the debate to compare Crist with President Joe Biden, who is unpopular across the country, while describing himself as an advocate for his state’s interests, such as the economy and education.

DeSantis, seeking reelection four years after evolving from narrow winner to rising GOP star, parried blows from Crist with the stump speech he often gives, not just in Florida but across America: flaunting many of the social issues he has legislated on, such as restricting what is taught in schools.

At the debate, he more often directed his comments to the public than to Crist, whom he rarely mentions on the trail. But he used some chances to sully his rival by saying the former congressman would have made the wrong choices as a leader, weakening businesses during COVID-19 and allowing more abortions.

Crist has aligned himself with Biden throughout the campaign, calling Biden the “best president” and planning to fundraise with him days before the election. But at Monday’s debate he also talked about his own four years as governor, when he was a Republican, and accused DeSantis of being a divisive, fickle figure who would soon abandon Florida for a presidential bid.

Crist — who trails in the polls by some eight points, according to FiveThirtyEight — said he was, by contrast, a “commonsense” uniter of people who wouldn’t take away Floridians’ rights, such as the ability to access abortion. The state’s current law bans the procedure after 15 weeks, even in cases of rape and incest, though there are exceptions for the health of the mother and fetal abnormalities. The ban is being reviewed by the courts.

Again and again on Monday, Crist returned to the issue of abortion access and to his criticism that DeSantis had other career plans. At one point in the debate, he asked DeSantis to “look in the eyes of the people of state of Florida and say to them if you’re reelected you will serve a full four-year term as governor.”

DeSantis paused.

“Yes or no, Ron?” Crist asked.

“It’s my time? DeSantis responded.

“It’s not a tough question. It’s a fair question. He won’t tell you,” Crist said, before the moderator interrupted and clarified that candidates were not supposed to ask each other questions.

DeSantis then shot back: “I know that Charlie is interested in talking about 2024 and Joe Biden, but I just want to make things very, very clear. The only worn-out old donkey I’m looking to put out to pasture is Charlie Crist.”

Throughout the debate, the in-person crowd reacted raucously: yelling, clapping, cheering, jeering. At one point a voice yelled out “liar!” as DeSantis spoke.

Below, more highlights from the night:

Immigration and flying planes to Martha’s Vineyard

Crist called DeSantis’ move to use tax funds to send migrants to Martha’s Vineyard a “stunt,” while the governor defended the move as bringing attention to a serious issue at the southern border.

“We have an immigration problem … but it doesn’t mean that you use Florida taxpayers’ dollars to charter jets to go to Texas, lie to people to get them onto planes, fly them up to the northern part of our country,” Crist said, adding, “It’s not right, and you were inhumane.”

DeSantis responded by saying it was “sad that it comes to this” but that sending the migrants to what he called liberal, elite areas of the country put the issue “front-and-center.” He linked immigration to the flow of deadly narcotics into the U.S.

“I think we need to secure the border, because the fentanyl is absolutely out of control,” he said.

Abortion restrictions

DeSantis and Crist were asked at what point in a pregnancy should abortion become illegal.

“You deserve a better governor who cares about women and your freedom, your freedom and your right to choose and your right to vote,” Crist said.

“I’m proud of the 15 weeks that we did,” DeSantis said, before going on to accuse Crist of supporting a wide range of abortion procedures such as “until the moment of birth.”

Crist called that a lie.

DeSantis then attacked Crist for having switched parties — and political views: “He used to support a federal constitutional amendment that outlawed all abortion regardless of any type of exceptions. Now he’s taken the other extreme position.”

“Is this an honest change of heart?” DeSantis said. “Or is this a guy that’s going to shift with whatever wind he needs to, to try to keep his political career alive? I think we all know the answer to that question.”

The economy

DeSantis largely spoke about his credentials, taking few shots at Crist while touting his own record, particularly in the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic when Florida did not institute some of the restrictions that other states did in an attempt to curb cases and deaths.

DeSantis said that doing so would have ruined the tourism industry that beats at the heart of the state.

“I kept this state open and I kept the state free, and we now have the biggest budget surplus in the history of Florida,” he said, as he often does on the road as he stumps.

On the subject of home insurance — average insurance costs have roughly tripled in Florida since DeSantis’ tenure began — the governor blamed “Biden/Crist” policies and costs of litigation.

Crist laid the blame for some cost-of-living issues with DeSantis.

“Since you’ve been governor, every utility rate increase has been granted for Florida Power and Light … They’ve all gone up and up and up. When I was governor, they went down,” he said.

“We need to have a governor who will do what’s right for the people of Florida, all the time, all year-long, not just when it’s right before a reelection,” he said.

DeSantis hit back on oil and gas prices, which polls show are also top of mind for voters.

“Then why are fuel and natural gas prices up — because of the Biden/Crist energy policies?” he said, which he said were also fueling high inflation.

“He’s locked together with these policies that have hurt so many people,” DeSantis said of Crist, who responded by focusing on other issues.

“I think it’s incredible that we hear this out of Ron DeSantis … everybody watching tonight knows that your property insurance is up under him,” Crist said. “You deserve a governor who has your back. I always did. And I always will.”

Crist said that as a congressman after being governor, he had voted for a major infrastructure bill under Biden “that got the Sanibel bridge built back up as quickly [as] you took credit for.”

Hurricane Ian

Despite Biden’s praise of DeSantis for his handling of Ian — the deadliest storm in the state in at least 60 years — Crist said the governor “failed” by not getting Florida more prepared. He accused DeSantis of attending a high school football game the Friday before the storm.

Crist echoed some criticism that Lee County should have been more forcefully encouraged to evacuate. The area was the epicenter of where Ian made landfall in Florida.

“That’s not a good record. That’s not good leadership,” he said.

DeSantis shot back by citing Crist’s trip to Puerto Rico during the earlier Hurricane Fiona.

“You know what he was doing during this?” DeSantis said. “He was in hiding out in Puerto Rico. He wasn’t helping his community here, and then when he got back what did he do? His campaign was soliciting campaign contributions from storm victims. That is unacceptable, and that’s not what a leader would do in a time of despair.”

Of the local hurricane response for Ian, DeSantis said, “I stand by every one of our local counties. They stood up and learned, and they made the best decisions with the information that they had.”

He and others have previously said the hurricane prediction models limited how quickly officials could respond because the models were inconsistent.

Education

When the debate turned to education and what was appropriate in public schools — particularly on LGBTQ topics and teaching race and American history — DeSantis reiterated that he viewed it as a parental rights issue and a question of what was “appropriate.” He said he didn’t want race to foment hate in classrooms.

Crist challenged him: “Here you go again Ron. It’s all about culture wars, it’s all about dividing us … whether it’s blacks against whites, whether it’s gay and straight, whether it’s young versus old.”

DeSantis responded by pointing to Crist’s own comment earlier in the campaign that DeSantis supporters had “hate in their heart,” which Crist said on his first day of being the Democratic nominee.

“I’m endorsed by every police group in the state of Florida. I’m endorsed by the firefighters, I’m endorsed by the truckers, the nurses, anesthetists, Retail Federation, Farm Bureau, the whole cross-section of the state of Florida is backing me. They do not have hate in their hearts because they reject Charlie Crist,” DeSantis said.

On critical race theory — historically a university-level subject that conservatives argue has started to influence grade schools — DeSantis said that all history should be taught but “what I think is not good is to scapegoat students based on skin color.” The governor this year signed a law to ban certain concepts related to critical race theory from schools.

“The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race,” he said.

Crist replied: “He talks about not teaching about the history of our country that might offend some people in our schools. We ought to teach facts in our schools … We shouldn’t have a whitewashed approach to educating our children.”

He then pivoted.

“You’re taking away from all these other issues because you don’t want to talk about taking away a woman’s right to choose. That’s unconscionable,” he said.

COVID closures

Both Crist and DeSantis addressed their decisions during the early months of the pandemic.

Crist said he “would have listened to scientists, unlike the governor” — accusing DeSantis of being “so arrogant that you won’t listen to their advice.”

“Ron, I wouldn’t pat yourself on the back too much about your response to COVID,” he said, invoking the state’s death toll of more than 80,000.

“When you look at the Thanksgiving table, one of those empty seats is probably one of those people for many families watching tonight,” he said.

DeSantis said his policies focused on protecting the vulnerable — like older people — while trying to ensure businesses wouldn’t close under government restrictions to slow infections.

“I can tell you, as Charlie Christ and his friends in Congress were urging you to be locked down, I lifted you up,” DeSantis said.

He also highlighted how he stopped schools from requiring COVID-19 vaccines.

Attacked Walt Disney

Disney — one of the state’s most prominent employers — also came up at the debate

Crist pointed back to how DeSantis and Disney were at odds over a law banning discussion of sexual orientation and gender in some public-school classrooms. Crist also invoked DeSantis’ disagreement with cruise lines over COVID-19 vaccination requirements.

“You’re the most anti-business governor I’ve ever seen,” Crist said.

“Except for all the businesses that are moving down here and leading the nation in net immigration,” DeSantis said back.

Gender transition for minors

Each candidate was asked where they stood on gender confirming procedures and therapies when used by minors.

“When they say ‘gender-affirming care,’ they mean giving puberty blockers to teenage girls and teenage boys,” DeSantis said, arguing that transgender children were seeking out and being given major surgeries like mastectomies.

“It’s inappropriate to be doing that,” he said.

Crist again pivoted to abortion access.

“This reminds me of your position on a woman’s right to choose: You think you know better than any physician or any doctor — or any woman in a position to make decisions about their own personal health. You want to be the judge,” he said.

Local prosecutor suspended

When DeSantis’ suspension of Andrew Warren — a local prosecutor who said he wouldn’t bring charges over abortion — arose, Crist cast the issue in non-legal terms, saying DeSantis was silencing a critic.

“When you start removing people from public office, that’s the job of the people. He was twice elected state attorney in Tampa Bay,” Crist said.

DeSantis said he removed a law enforcement official who had said he could act outside the law: “I acted appropriately and I would do it again.”

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(WASHINGTON) — With early voting underway in more than half of Florida’s counties as of Monday — 15 days before Election Day — Gov. Ron DeSantis is urging supporters to cast their ballots sooner rather than later, despite calls from Donald Trump and some other Republicans to wait until Nov. 8.

DeSantis has made election integrity a key issue since Trump began trumpeting false claims of a stolen 2020 election and has supported various measures to that end, including the creation of an election police force which made controversial fraud arrests in August.

But the governor has also repeatedly noted that Florida voters should feel confident in their own elections — and feel confident voting early or by mail, two methods that Trump has baselessly criticized as allowing fraud.

After returning to the trail in the wake of Hurricane Ian, DeSantis split with Trump on this issue. The former president told Nevada rally-goers on Oct. 9 that voting early would make it easier for Democrats to cheat. He didn’t provide evidence.

DeSantis’ message, though, is: Any form of voting will do.

At campaign events, he sometimes takes a tally. “

How many of you are going to do a mail ballot?” he asks.

“Early in person?” he adds.

Silence turns into cheers when he asks about “Election Day.”

On Sunday in Bal Harbour, DeSantis pushed back on that preference, telling a packed Jewish community center to get to the polls as soon as possible to avoid a “mulligan” in two weeks.

“If you wait till Election Day, you get a flat tire, you can’t take a mulligan,” DeSantis said then. “Whereas if you vote early, you do it, you’re in the can. If something happens [while you’re on your way], you got another shot at it.”

“We can’t be complacent about this,” he added then.

Democrats, like DeSantis, have been recommending early voting.

“I encourage you not to wait until Election Day,” Val Demings, the Senate nominee challenging GOP Sen. Marco Rubio, wrote on Twitter on Monday.

Florida, a perennial swing state, is the site of several key races this midterm cycle, though Republicans there are optimistic about their chances given voters’ disapproval of President Joe Biden and concerns over the economy and inflation.

DeSantis, for example, is up by about eight points over Democratic opponent Charlie Crist, according to the FiveThirtyEight polling average. He and Crist, a former Florida governor, debated Monday during their lone face-off, in South Florida.

Though early in-person voting began less than a day ago, nearly 1.2 million Floridians have already sent in their mail ballots, state data shows. Michael McDonald, a political science professor and voter turnout researcher at the University of Florida, told ABC News that turnout for this midterm election is shaping up to be on par with 2018, which had the highest turnout of any midterm since 1914.

Registered Democrats have the edge in mail voting thus far, casting almost 50,000 more votes than their Republican counterparts, according to the state Divisions of Elections.

Yet Republicans, who have requested over 400,000 fewer mail ballots, are returning the ones they have at a higher rate. In Florida, whoever requested a mail ballot in 2020 was automatically sent one in 2022. Due to high Democrat mail turnout during the last presidential cycle, it is likely that the disparity in requests is due to the carryover from 2020 and not simply enthusiasm by Democrats about the voting method in 2022, McDonald said.

Historically, Democrats in Florida have turned out more than Republicans for early in-person voting while the GOP then sees larger numbers on Election Day.

But in 2020, as Democrats increasingly favored mail ballots amid the COVID-19 pandemic, Republicans also began to lead in early in-person voting. McDonald said.

“Republicans in the state of Florida don’t see as much of a threat from allowing those different forms of voting and promoting it, because they know that their campaigns are capable of turning their supporters out,” McDonald said.

“DeSantis has very, very deep pockets for his campaign. So they’ve got a machine that can do the voter mobilization,” he added.

Rubio, who is also seeking reelection, held a rally on Monday to promote early in-person voting. He has echoed some of Trump’s suspicions about other early voting methods. At a debate last week with Demings, Rubio said that “there’s danger involved in drop boxes” because someone could attack them.

Republicans in other states have both criticized early voting periods and encouraged their voters to use “whatever way you want,” as Arizona gubernatorial nominee Kari Lake put it earlier this month.

“If you have a mail-in ballot, I think that you should mail it in. I want people to vote,” Lake said then.

Separately, she recently suggested to ABC News that she didn’t like that “Election Day” had become “election season.”

Demings, for her part, has spent the last two days touring from the Panhandle to the Keys to get out the vote.

Although Democrats have a substantial mail-ballot request lead, many of those votes remain outstanding.

“The challenge is going to be for the Democrats to really motivate their voters. And if they can, we’ll start seeing it in the statistics,” McDonald said.

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(ATLANTA) — A two-day trial began in Georgia Monday that will decide whether a six-week abortion ban is legal under the state’s constitution.

The so-called “heartbeat bill” was signed into law in 2019 by Gov. Brian Kemp but was prevented from going into effect following legal challenges.

In July, three weeks after the Supreme Court’s reversal of Roe v. Wade, a federal appeals court ruled the ban could go into effect.

The law prevents abortions from performed once fetal cardiac activity can be defected, which typically occurs at about six weeks’ gestation — before many women know they’re pregnant — and redefines the word “person” in Georgia to include an embryo or fetus at any stage of development.

There are exceptions for rape or incest until 22 weeks of pregnancy as long as the victim has reported the crime to the police. Additionally, a patient can have an abortion past 22 weeks if the fetus has defects and would not be able to survive or if the patient’s life is in danger.

A lawsuit was filed days after the ban went into effect by several groups including the American Civil Liberties Union, ACLU of Georgia, the Center for Reproductive Rights, the Planned Parenthood Federation of America and the SisterSong Women of Color Reproductive Justice Collective.

The groups argue the law violates the right to privacy without political inference protected under the Georgia Constitution.

“For months, countless Georgians have been denied access to the abortion care they need and subjected to the severe, life-altering effects of forced pregnancy and childbirth,” the groups said in a statement Monday. “The impacts have been devastating, especially for Black women in Georgia, who are over two times more likely than white women to die of pregnancy-related causes and face structural racism in our health care system.”

“Georgia’s state constitution clearly prohibits this extreme political interference with people’s bodies, health, and lives. We are asking the court to act quickly to put an end to this crisis, protect bodily autonomy, and restore Georgians’ ability to access this essential health care,” the statement continued.

The governor’s office did not immediately return ABC News’ request for comment.

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(WASHINGTON) — Former President Donald Trump on Sunday called Florida GOP Gov. Ron DeSantis’ endorsement and boosting of moderate Republican Colorado Senate nominee Joe O’Dea, Trump’s political foe, “a big mistake.”

In what may be the first public break amid long-brewing speculation that the two GOP leaders have been privately clashing, Trump paired the statement on his social media platform “Truth Social” with a Washington Examiner article that reported DeSantis, a hardline Republican, recorded a robocall for underdog O’Dea in which he placed full support behind the candidate who has openly sparred with the former president.

“Hello, this is Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis. America needs strong leadership and desperately. That’s why I’m endorsing Joe O’Dea for U.S. Senate. Colorado, please vote for Joe O’Dea,” DeSantis says in the robocall obtained by the Washington Examiner from the O’Dea campaign. “I’ve watched Joe from a distance. And I’m impressed.”

O’Dea, who is trailing incumbent Democratic Sen. Michael Bennet in the polls, said he would “actively” campaign against Trump last week in a CNN interview, if the former president were to run in 2024, in favor of candidates like DeSantis.

Trump retaliated last Monday, calling O’Dea a “RINO” (Republican in name only) and wrote in a statement, “Maga Doesn’t vote for stupid people with big mouths.”

The outcry came as O’Dea was fundraising alongside former President George W. Bush, solidifying a place for him on a small but distinct list of current and former Republicans running in competitive races while speaking out publicly against Trump.

Trump and DeSantis, two GOP champions, have avoided close proximity as the Florida Republican’s national star has risen and speculation that the governor, who was once wholly supported by Trump, might challenge the former president for the Republican presidential nomination in 2024.

Trump has been reported to have criticized DeSantis behind closed doors but had not lashed out publicly until Sunday.

For more from ABC News’ team of reporters embedded in battleground states, watch “Power Trip: Those Seeking Power and Those Who Chase Them” on Hulu, with new episodes on Sunday.

DeSantis has shrugged off questions about whether he is considering a 2024 bid, possibly against Donald Trump — “nice try, man,” he said when pressed about it on “Fox and Friends” in June — though many pollsters have included him in their surveys of future primaries, carving out some favorable odds should he decide to run.

A recent ABC/Ipsos poll found that among Republican registered voters, 72% reported they wanted DeSantis to have either a “great deal” or a “good amount” of influence over the future of the party. Compare that to Donald Trump’s 64%.

While out on the trail, DeSantis has rarely mentioned Trump, who endorsed DeSantis in 2018.

“It’s [DeSantis’] prerogative. I think I would win,” Trump told the New Yorker in June of the prospect of the Florida governor challenging him for the 2024 GOP presidential nomination.

Trump later told Newsmax that he and DeSantis get along well but said he is “very responsible” for the ascending Republican’s success.

Miles Cohen is one of seven ABC News campaign reporters embedded in battleground states across the country. Watch all the twists and turns of covering the midterm elections every Sunday on Hulu’s “Power Trip: Those Seeking Power and Those Who Chase Them” with ABC’s George Stephanopoulos.

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