Byron Donalds, the 47-year-old congressman from Florida’s 19th District, won the Republican gubernatorial primary on Tuesday night with Donald Trump’s endorsement and will become the Republican candidate for governor of a state that has not had a Democratic governor since 1999. He defeated Lt. Gov. Jay Collins and former state House speaker James Fishback, who entered the race with backing from Nick Fuentes, the white nationalist whose endorsement is the endorsement that Republican candidates in 2026 do not want to receive in public and do not always succeed in avoiding. Donalds received approximately 49 percent of the vote with 80 percent counted. Collins and Fishback split the remainder. Donalds will face former Republican congressman David Jolly, now running as a Democrat, in November.
The race produced an outcome but not a clean one, because the political environment surrounding the primary revealed something about the Republican Party in Florida and about the relationship between DeSantis and the man who is now running to succeed him. Ron DeSantis did not endorse Byron Donalds. He did not endorse Jay Collins, his own lieutenant governor. He did not endorse James Fishback. Ron DeSantis, the outgoing two-term governor who cannot run again because of term limits, watched his lieutenant governor lose the primary to a congressman he endorsed 18 months ago and said nothing publicly in either direction. CNN White House correspondent Alayna Treene reported that DeSantis “has essentially come out and made clear he does not want Donalds to be his replacement.” DeSantis has not confirmed or denied this. He has not explained what he does want. He issued no endorsement.
The DeSantis-Donalds tension is the political story running beneath the primary results. DeSantis ran for president in 2024 and lost, ending his campaign before the first primary vote and endorsing Trump, who had spent months attacking him as “DeSanctimonious” and whose supporters had turned against him with a ferocity that DeSantis’s own supporters found disorienting. His return to Florida after the campaign was the return of a man who had left with national ambitions and returned with a gubernatorial term to finish and a legacy to manage. His legacy includes Florida’s education policies, immigration enforcement, the anti-woke legislation that defined his national profile, and the redistricting fight that created the congressional map that made Donalds’s current seat possible. He is choosing to end his governorship without endorsing the man who will govern in his name.
Donalds is running on a platform to “enact the Trump agenda” in Florida, emphasizing immigration enforcement, affordability, deregulation, and lower taxes. He has also campaigned on completing the Everglades restoration, which is the environmental project that Florida governors from both parties have used to signal they are something more than pure partisans. He is 47 years old, a Black conservative Republican in a state whose Republican Party has been overwhelmingly white in its leadership for the quarter century it has controlled the governorship. If he wins in November, he will be Florida’s first Black governor.
His opponent, David Jolly, is a former Republican who represented Florida’s 13th District from 2014 to 2017 and who left the Republican Party in 2018, citing what he described as the party’s abandonment of its principles under Trump. He is now running for Florida governor as a Democrat, supported by a Democratic infrastructure that has not won a Florida gubernatorial election in 27 years. He is running on an affordability message, has cast the election as a decision about what Florida becomes next, and has attracted national attention as a potential vehicle for the theory that Trump’s low approval ratings and the Iran war’s unpopularity might produce competitive conditions in a state the Republicans have dominated for a generation.
James Fishback, the hedge fund manager who finished third, ran a campaign that Raw Story described as a “clown show” before the results came in and whose main accomplishments were attracting Nick Fuentes’s endorsement and demonstrating that a certain cohort of online Republican voters will support a candidate with no political experience and extreme positions if his aesthetic is compatible with their media consumption. He lost by roughly 40 points to Donalds. Fuentes called Donalds a “slave” on social media during the campaign and misspelled his name as “Byrone.” Donalds won anyway, because Trump’s endorsement in a Florida Republican primary in August 2026 is worth approximately 40 points against a challenger backed by the white nationalist movement, which is useful information about where Florida Republicans currently stand on the question of which kind of Republican they prefer.
The November race is the one that matters, and the November race will be different from the August primary in the way that all general elections are different from primaries: the electorate is larger, includes more independents, and is making decisions based on different information. Donalds is running in a state that Trump won in 2024 by roughly 12 points. Jolly is running as a Democrat in a state where Democrats have lost every gubernatorial election since 1998. The political conditions that Newsweek and Raw Story have been citing, specifically Trump’s 33 percent approval rating and the Iran war’s unpopularity, are the conditions that make Florida theoretically competitive. Theory and the actual Florida electorate have a complicated relationship.
Donalds won the primary. DeSantis said nothing. Jolly is waiting in November.
When the outgoing governor refuses to endorse his would-be successor who just won the primary, and the nominee faces a former Republican running as a Democrat, what exactly is the Republican Party running on in Florida?
Sources
Fox News: Byron Donalds wins Florida Republican gubernatorial primary with Trump’s endorsement
Raw Story: Far-right Florida gubernatorial candidate James Fishback gets crushed in Republican primary
HuffPost: Florida and Alaska primaries, Darline Graham’s terrible debate
