Who is Charlie Crist, the former Florida Republican set to challenge Ron DeSantis?

‘I didn’t leave the Republican Party – it left me’

Former Republican Florida Governor Charlie Crist is running to take back his old job, now as a Democrat.

While the 66-year-old has been campaigning for the Democratic nomination, his main focus has been on blasting the Republican Governor of the state, Ron Desantis.

“He’s the most arrogant governor I’ve ever seen in my life,” he told members of a teachers union in Tampa this month, according to The Guardian. “It is shocking, it really is. Enough is enough.”

Primary voters are choosing their candidates on Tuesday and Mr Crist, who has held various elected offices in Florida politics since 1992, is expected to clinch the Democratic nomination against his top challenger, agriculture commissioner Nikki Fried.

A near-constant presence in Florida politics for three decades

Since being elected to the Florida state Senate in 1992 as a Republican, Mr Crist’s presence on the state’s political scene has been close to uninterrupted.

He left the state’s upper chamber in 1998, after losing a race for the US Senate. In 2000, he was elected as the state’s education commissioner, before winning the race for attorney general in 2002, a role he held until he won the 2006 race for governor, serving between 2007 and 2011.

In 2010, he became the first governor since 1964 to not run for reelection in the state, according to Smart Politics.

He chose instead to campaign for the US Senate yet again, losing the GOP nomination to Senator Marco Rubio.

Leaving the Republican Party, citing extremism

That same year, Mr Crist left the Republican Party, arguing that it had been taken over by extremists. He became an independent before joining the Democrats in December 2012 after endorsing President Barack Obama for reelection, according to the Associated Press.

In August 2012, he said the GOP “pitched so far to the extreme right on issues important to women, immigrants, seniors and students that they’ve proven incapable of governing for the people”.

“I didn’t leave the Republican Party – it left me,” he said at the Democratic National Convention that year.

The hug that ended his ‘viable life as a Republican politician’

In his book The Party’s Over: How the Extreme Right Hijacked the GOP and I Became a Democrat, released in February 2014, Mr Crist wrote that his stature in the GOP was ruined after he hugged Mr Obama in Fort Myers in February 2009.

“It was the kind of hug I’d exchanged with thousands and thousands of Floridians over the years,” Mr Crist wrote. “I didn’t think a thing about it as it was happening.”

He said the interaction “ended my viable life as a Republican politician. I would never have a future in my old party again. My bipartisan hopes and dreams, I would discover soon enough to my shock and disappointment, were vastly overstated and hopelessly out of date”.

“I couldn’t be consistent with myself and my core beliefs, and stay with a party that was so unfriendly toward the African-American president, I’ll just go there,” he told Fusion TV in May 2014.

“I was a Republican and I saw the activists and what they were doing. It was intolerable to me,” he added.

‘He discovered racism after the polls showed him trailing’

The political editor of The Tampa Bay Times rejected these comments, telling The Washington Post in 2014, “he was happy as a Republican when the polls showed him leading Marco Rubio by 20 points”.

“Apparently he discovered racism in the party after the polls showed him trailing Rubio by 20 points,” Mr Smith added.

Mr Crist won the Democratic nomination for governor in 2014 but lost the general election to Republican Rick Scott.

Winning his first race as a Democrat

Mr Crist then went on to win the 13th Congressional District seat in Florida in the 2016 election. He has served in the House since 2017.

“The leadership of today’s Republican party is gone. There is no leadership,” he toldThe Guardian this month. “It’s lurching from one culture war to another, attacking the LGBTQ community, attacking African American voters, attacking women and the right to choose.”

He called Mr DeSantis “a barbaric, wannabe dictator”.

“I’m not one to use those sort of strong words, unless they’re true. And in this case, it’s true,” Mr Crist said. “We need to realize what this guy is doing. He wants to be president of the United States, and he’s using Florida as his proving ground to do it.”

“I think we need relief, and a better future. My parents raised me the way they did, and I’m offering that decency to my state,” he added. “I know that most Floridians are good, decent people.”