While most polls have indicated Lakeland City Commissioner Scott Franklin is favored to keep Florida’s 15^th Congressional District seat red next week, the Alan Cohn campaign is touting an internal poll released Monday that shows the race to be dead even going into the final days of the 2020 campaign.

That poll from Change Research shows Franklin leading by just two points, 46-44%. A St. Pete Polls survey released last week had Franklin up eight points, 49-41%.

Cohn is a veteran TV journalist who is running for the CD 15 seat (which encompasses parts of Polk, Hillsborough and Lake counties) for the second time in six years. He defeated Adam Hattersley and Jesse Philippe in the Democratic primary in August.

Franklin is a U.S. Navy veteran and businessman whose only electoral experience has been his two years on the Lakeland City Commission. He stunned incumbent Ross Spano in the Republican primary race in August.

“We’re going to win,” Cohn boasted on Monday morning in Plant City. “This is a race where the differences could not be clearer. You have a guy who is from the Lakeland Yacht Club and talks about actuarial tables and raising the retirement age (regarding Social Security), and a guy who is fighting for every man and every woman who lost their job a couple of years ago, got a new job that doesn’t pay nearly enough and can’t pay their monthly bills, and they want to see somebody who has their back.”

Franklin has discussed reforming Social Security, but emphasizes that any such plans would not affect seniors currently in the program or people approaching retirement age.

“I have three kids just entering the workforce,” he says. “They’re in their twenties, and they’re concerned. They see Social Security taxes coming out of their paycheck, and everybody tells them it’s not going to be there when they retire. So I think that in some form or another, we need to have some really honest conversations about the things that we need to do to make sure that the program is available when those kids are at retirement age.”

Cohn says that discussing raising the retirement age for Social Security is “really rich for a guy who is not worried about the mundane concerns of people who are hoping to retire one day.”

“That is an example of the class warfare and the division that’s come into politics, that we have to get away from,” Franklin counters. “We’re trying to make enemies out of people over nothing.”

Franklin is currently the managing partner of the Lakeland-based Lanier Upshaw insurance agency. He was previously the CEO before the firm was bought out by a Tampa-based firm last December. He doesn’t apologize for the fact that he’s been financially successful.

“I grew up certainly middle-class to lower-middle class starting out, but I always aspired to work hard and have the opportunity to maybe one day be successful in business and took the risk and rolled the dice, and it worked out for us,” he says. “If we take that away from people then we’re killing the American dream.”

Cohn is running on a health care platform that includes revamping the Affordable Care Act (ACA). He does not support a Medicare for All proposal which would create a single-payer health system run by the government. Like Joe Biden, he does support a public option, which would be a health insurance plan run by the federal government that would be offered alongside other private health insurance plans on the insurance marketplace.

Franklin would like to see the ACA eliminated but insists that any replacement proposal would preserve having pre-existing conditions covered. And he criticizes congressional Republicans for their failure to come up with a viable alternative to the ACA.

Cohn marched in a Black Lives Matter protest this summer following the death of George Floyd and supports police reforms such as banning chokeholds and so-called “no-knock” warrants, which authorize police officers to enter certain premises without first knocking and announcing their purpose. He also criticizes the Trump administration for dismantling some accountability reforms for law enforcement enacted by Barack Obama’s administration.

When asked about Black Lives Matter, Franklin says he supports the sentiment behind the movement but not the organization itself. “I get it,” he says. “African-Americans have gotten a raw deal for a large part of this country’s history. I do think we do need to make changes.” 
As for BLM?

“I don’t agree with the political leanings of some of the founders,” he says.

On foreign policy, the two candidates differ when asked who they consider to be the United States’ greatest foreign adversary at this time.

Cohn says it’s Russia.

“Russia tried to interfere with how this country votes. They’re continuing to try to do it, right now,” he says. “They have sowed the seeds of polarization in this country and taken advantage of a weak president who buddies up with Vladimir Putin to expand their influence around the world where our influence has waned.”

Franklin says it’s China. 

“They own us outright in so many different areas, and we’ve seen that during the pandemic,” he says. “Whether it’s medicine or manufactured equipment, we cannot be so beholden to them.”

The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee has targeted the CD 15 seat for nearly two years, shortly after it was learned that incumbent Ross Spano had allegedly violated campaign finance laws by accepting nearly $200,000 in loans from two personal friends and then used those loans to fund his campaign. 

Franklin admits he never would have challenged Spano in a primary if it weren’t for Spano’s ethical issues. He defeated the Dover Republican by 2.4 percent in August.  

Now, with just days before the general election, both campaigns are accusing the other of violating campaign finance laws. 

A complaint has been filed with the Federal Election Commission accusing Cohn of illegally receiving more than $200,000 from a joint fundraising committee which was not authorized by his campaign at the time he received it.

Cohn dismissed the allegation on Monday, saying that it was simply a paperwork error that has been rectified.

Franklin acknowledges that it may be just a matter of clarifying paperwork and seems more upset that the Cohn campaign boasted last week that it had raised nearly a million dollars for the most recent fundraising quarter by including that disputed contribution in his haul. 

“Now, if they fix it after the fact, that’s fine, but he was making a lot of hay of all of the money that they raised and how it was all small dollars, and that simply wasn’t accurate,” he says.

Meanwhile, Cohn says it’s “outrageous” that Franklin’s most recent campaign finance report omits employer and occupation information from a quarter of its contributors. In a press release, his campaign named several contributors to Franklin’s campaign whose occupations and employers were not listed. Among those contributors was Tallahassee-based lobbyist Brian Ballard, whose firm has worked with the Turkish and Qatar governments.  

“That is outrageous and absolutely incredible, because you are who you take your money from,” Cohn says. “And when you take money from lobbyists who represent brutal foreign dictators, that is who you are.”

Franklin responds that while donors are supposed to include their employer and occupation when sending in a check, that doesn’t always occur. 

“We receive the check, we know who they are, but if they didn’t decide to write their employer and occupation on their check, then we have to go ahead and report it, and then go back and find it out,” he says. “So if you look on our reports, it says ‘information requested.’ And so some we know, some I don’t know, but the most important thing is – you’ve got to get the report filed on time. And then we go back and correct it. And that’s why every candidate has amended reports. There’s nothing hiding there.”

According to the most recent voter registration numbers, 36 percent of the voters in CD 15 are Republicans, 35 percent Democratic and 28 percent with no party affiliation.