It’s a great country, isn’t it? I mean, anybody can run for Florida governor. You, me, a cranky little guy with white boots, a guy whose company was rife with Medicaid fraud. Anyone at all.
Already, the GOP dark horses are running wild, shooting out of the gate and into the next 11 months of campaigning. Matt Gaetz may have tripped over unsavory findings in a House Ethics Committee report and fallen by the wayside. Trump-anointed frontrunner U.S. Rep. Byron Donalds is leading the field. But Groyper poster boy James Fishback and gender-warrior and former state House Speaker Paul Renner are up and running. Lt. Gov. Jay Collins is waiting in the wings. I’m sure I’ve missed a few.
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Pat Beall is an editorial writer and columnist for the Sun Sentinel, focusing mainly on Palm Beach County issues.
And why not? There’s gold in that governor’s mansion.
Ronald Dion DeSantis walked through the doors in 2018 with $765,821 in assets and a little more than $508,850 in liabilities. He reports he will be walking out with $2.1 million in assets and $15,095 in liabilities. He earned it the old-fashioned way. He wrote a political book that his political friends were sure to buy and that other people who needed him to be a political friend — lobbyists, businesses, party leaders, etc. — would have to buy in order to casually drop phrases from it within DeSantis’ earshot, as though they had read it, as though it was on their nightstand. More likely, it was under a 1974 telephone book and the entire Encyclopedia Britannica, but who cares? A sale’s a sale. Greenbacks shower the Governor’s Mansion all the same.
On the other hand, we have wild-card Republican James Fishback. I don’t think he is running for the money, although his Tesla was repossessed and he could use the Uber fare. I think he is running for the sheer whoopsie of it all. This is a man who got on Fox News by saying he was a Musk Doge advisor. Wasn’t. Said he held a senior position at an investment firm. Nope. Said his investment funds were fabulous. Board trustees shut them down.
Fishback, 31, barely edged across the 30-year-old minimum age to run, a likely asset in courting Nick Fuentes and the far-right podcaster’s youthful Groyper audience. This would be the same Nick Fuentes who has split the Heritage Foundation into thirds over the question of whether Fuentes is too Nazi-adjacent, not enough Nazi-adjacent or just the right amount of Nazi-adjacent. But you can’t dismiss the attention economy, as Hillary Clinton learned, and Fishback is terminally online.
Donalds’ golden-ticket Trump endorsement hasn’t cleared the field, but it has put him smack in the middle of the DeSantis-Trump mean girl feud. DeSantis can’t make Trump lose, but he was spotted doing the next best thing; scouting a mega donor to fund a challenger — any challenger — to Donalds. There’s also a Donalds Money Thing. His wife’s charter school income of between $1 million to $5 million wasn’t fully reported on 2023 congressional financial disclosures until Florida Bulldog reporters started sniffing around. The Federal Elections Commission caught him simultaneously raising money for reelection to Congress and the governorship, which could pave the way for diverting millions in federal contributions to the governor’s race. Donalds graciously apologized and immediately set things right. Just kidding! We’re in Florida! His campaign invited the FEC to go jump in a lake. Well. The lake leap was implied. Like the need for ethics.
Of course, it could be worse.
We could be Tennessee. Department of Defense Secretary and all-around Bomb Vivant Pete Hegseth talked about running for governor there back in July but then chose to remain in D.C. to de-beard generals and address the crisis of expanding military waistlines. The grateful voters of Tennessee thank him for his service.
Or we could be Minnesota, where Pillow Guy and all-around political conspiracist Mike Lindell is challenging Gov. Tim Waltz this November. If Lindell emerges as the GOP nominee, “We’d be cooked,” Minnesota Republican strategist Dustin Grage moaned to Politico. “I’d be moving to Florida very shortly.”
Who wants to tell him?
