Florida Race to Replace Byron Donalds Features Candidates Who Have Already Run for Congress

Ah, Florida. It’s a land of retirees, fresh starts and second acts — even, it turns out, for Republicans running for Congress.

Tuesday’s crowded primary to succeed Representative Byron Donalds, an acolyte of President Trump who is running for governor, features candidates who have run for Congress or served in Congress, all in other states.

The upshot has been a zany primary featuring candidates trying to prove their Florida bona fides and alignment with President Trump.

Who counts as Floridian?

Carpetbaggers? Perhaps. But many Floridians hail from somewhere else. The solidly Republican 19th Congressional District, a swath of Southwest Florida’s MAGA country that stretches from Fort Myers to Marco Island, is home to many former Midwesterners. (And Trump, a New Yorker, adopted Florida as his home state.)

Two of the Republican candidates are former lawmakers attempting comebacks after their first turns in Congress ended in scandal. One is Madison Cawthorn, who lost his re-election bid in North Carolina in 2022 after a deluge of salacious accusations. The other is Chris Collins, who resigned from office in New York in 2019, as he prepared to plead guilty to insider trading charges. Trump pardoned him in December 2020, weeks before leaving office.

Then there are three candidates who have alighted on the district after losing congressional bids elsewhere. They are Catalina Lauf, who lost a Republican primary in Illinois in 2020 and a general election in the same district in 2022; Jim Oberweis, who defeated Lauf in that 2020 primary and then lost in the general election, and Ola Hawatmeh, who lost a Republican primary in New York in 2020.

Not being from Florida has not stopped candidates in the race from accusing the others of being even less from Florida.

“I’m shocked, quite frankly, that some of the other candidates have moved down here and have no experience in the area,” said Oberweis, who served two terms in the Illinois State Senate. He has owned a home in Florida for 46 years, he said, and has lived in the state full time for six.

Trump weighs in

Jim Schwartzel, a local media mogul, is also running in the primary, as are four other Republicans, for a total of 10 candidates. One of the other four, John Strand, served prison time for participating in the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol attack, before being pardoned by Trump.

It is Lauf, who moved to Florida after the coronavirus pandemic and has compared her family to other “blue state refugees,” who has had the momentum in the final days of the campaign. Last week, Trump endorsed her, noting that he appointed Lauf as an adviser to the Commerce Department during his first term. “She has truly been with us from the beginning!” he wrote.

In an interview, Lauf, 33, said Republican voters wanted an outsider. “A lot of these guys represent the Republican Party of the past,” she said.

To try to discredit her candidacy for being a recent Florida transplant is “pretty insulting” to voters, she added. “We’re the party of merit.”

Sheelagh McNeill contributed research.

What else we’re watching tomorrow

• Remember Alex Vindman, the former national security official who was a top witness in President Trump’s first impeachment trial? He’s seeking the Democratic nomination for Senate in Florida tomorrow.

• Donalds, a devoted Trump ally, is the front-runner for the Republican nomination for governor to succeed term-limited Gov. Ron DeSantis, who has not weighed in on the race.

• The embattled Representative Cory Mills, a Republican, is running for re-election in Florida’s Seventh Congressional District. He has been accused of blockault and is under investigation by the House Ethics Committee. He has the support of Trump — but not of all his colleagues in the House, or of DeSantis.

• In Alaska, former Representative Mary Peltola is trying to make a comeback as the state’s Democratic nominee for Senate. But her campaign has been roiled by staff changes in recent days.

• There’s a special election in California to replace former Representative Eric Swalwell. The American Israel Public Affairs Committee has spent heavily to oppose a progressive candidate in the race.

quote of the day

“I’m, like, in the most toxic relationship of my life”

That was Katy Padilla Stout, the Texas Democrat running against the pro-gun influencer Brandon Herrera in a border district that stretches from San Antonio to El Paso.

Padilla Stout was referring to her relationship with the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, which recently added the district as a midterm target, saying that Herrera’s “disturbing history of extremism” had put it in play. Still, the committee has yet to send campaign funds Padilla Stout’s way.

Read more about the messy race from my colleague Bayliss Wagner.

the 10,000-foot view

Is the Democratic Party’s Tea Party moment really here?

A string of primary wins by progressive candidates within the Democratic Party this summer has revealed the strength of a high-energy insurgent movement — but also its possible limitations, Lisa Lerer and Katie Glueck write.

Boldly liberal candidates have shown themselves to be competitive outside deep-blue territory. But some of the voters who have historically been most crucial to the party’s fortunes remain skeptical, raising questions about whether these candidates can piece together a broad enough coalition to win general elections:

• In Michigan, Dr. Abdul El-Sayed trailed in majority-Black townships across the state. He also showed signs of weakness with older voters, who vote the most reliably.

• In Wisconsin, the establishment-backed David Crowley had an edge in metro Milwaukee and in rural counties. The democratic socialist Francesca Hong, who lost to Crowley, showed strength in smaller cities and suburbs, as well as counties that are home to college towns.

• In New York City, the democratic socialist Darializa Avila Chevalier performed well in whiter, younger and higher-income areas, beating Representative Adriano Espaillat. But he was strong across many older and majority-Hispanic areas.

Read more here.

ONE LAST THING

… These Florida democratic socialists sure hope so.

President Trump won Florida by 13 percentage points in 2024. And in many Latin American communities in South Florida, socialism is a dirty word.

But three underdog democratic socialist candidates are trying to prove that the way for the Democratic Party to regain relevance in the state is by embracing the left, not by recoiling from it.

“We are not a conservative state,” Richie Floyd, a democratic socialist who is the vice chairman of the City Council in St. Petersburg, Fla., said at a recent rally. “We are not a right-wing state. We are a working-clblock state.”

A win for any of them would be a major upset.

Taylor Robinson and Jess Bidgood contributed reporting.