The race to succeed retiring Senate GOP leader Mitch McConnell just got more competitive. In a Dear Colleague letter sent Wednesday afternoon and linked below, Senator Rick Scott (R., Fla.) announced that he will throw his name into a heated race that already includes Senate GOP whip John Thune (R., S.D.) and former Senate GOP whip John Cornyn (R., Texas).

This announcement isn’t surprising. Back in February, NR reported that Scott was another “name to watch” in the shadow race for the retiring Kentuckian’s seat. The Florida senator has spent years publicly tangling with McConnell over the direction of Senate GOP leadership and even challenged him unsuccessfully for his position after the Senate GOP’s drubbing in the 2022 midterms, the same cycle Scott served as chairman of the Senate Republicans’ campaign arm.

Over the next few months, the race for Senate GOP leader will usher in lots of fascinating questions about the direction of Republican foreign and fiscal policy under new leadership. As NR reported in February:

More-populist members hope the next Senate GOP leader will have a closer relationship with former President Donald Trump, the likely 2024 GOP nominee with whom McConnell hasn’t spoken in three years following the storming of the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021. Others are eager to elect a successor who will scale back the 82-year-old Kentuckian’s interventionist foreign policy and continued robust support for Ukraine amid Russia’s unprovoked invasion — a hallmark of his leadership style that has clashed with some of the more isolationist members of the conference in recent months.
… “This shouldn’t be personality contest,” Wisconsin GOP senator Ron Johnson, one of ten GOP senators to support Scott’s November 2022 bid against McConnell, told NR Wednesday afternoon. “This should be something grounded in: what is the conference’s mission? What are our goals? And who’s going to be committed to that mission statement, those goals and lead into more collaborative process? That’s what we need to flesh out here.”