A Florida House candidate used taxpayer money to invite people to leave New York. Now he’s attacking his opponent for moving from New York to Florida

The irony here is almost too on the nose. A Florida mayor spends public money luring New Yorkers south, then turns around and hammers his primary opponent for being one of the people who actually took him up on it. You can't run the ad and then get mad when someone reads it.

There's a real argument to be made in Florida politics about who's "really" from Florida versus who just got off a plane during the pandemic. Fair enough, that's a legitimate lane of attack in a lot of these races. But you forfeit that argument the moment you've spent taxpayer dollars begging people to do the exact thing you're now criticizing your opponent for doing. Either moving to Florida from New York is a good and welcome thing, worth advertising with public funds, or it's a liability you can hang on a rival. It can't be both depending on who benefits.

This is the kind of self-inflicted mess that turns a serious primary into a punchline. Voters in that district don't need a lecture on New York migration patterns, they need someone who can hold a consistent position for longer than one campaign cycle. If a candidate can't keep his own talking points straight from one press release to the next, that's worth knowing before anyone marks a ballot, regardless of who ends up winning the nomination.