Florida’s Floundering Fishback
By most metrics, Rep. Byron Donalds is the frontrunner to win the GOP nomination in the Florida gubernatorial election this year. He’s been endorsed by 17 of Florida’s 20 Republican representatives, as well as Florida U.S. Sen. Rick Scott. He also has the backing of President Donald Trump, which is as close to a golden ticket as you can get in a GOP primary.
While there remains some grumbling from the camp of current Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis about Donalds, thus far, they’ve not been able to rally around a viable alternative. Florida Lieutenant Governor Jay Collins and former Florida state House speaker Paul Renner, both candidates considered to be aligned with DeSantis, have failed to attract significant support. A recent Emerson poll, for example, found Donalds with 46 percent support among likely GOP primary voters; no other candidate received even 5 percent.
Why, then, is Azoria CEO and upstart candidate James Fishback getting so much attention?
“So much attention,” if anything, understates the case. According to Google Trends, Fishback has over three times the search interest as Donalds, and roughly 32 times the search interest as Collins and Renner, both of whom are polling around Fishback’s level. One cannot scroll social media without seeing some sort of viral content featuring the GOP gubernatorial hopeful.
And that’s not because Fishback has any great groundswell of support, despite his high profile. Polls of likely voters taken since February have found him averaging just 5.8 percent, marginally behind Collins and ahead of Renner.
Perhaps the most obvious reason is that Fishback, as a matter of style and deliberate strategy, has courted controversy. Among other attacks, he’s criticized Donalds as a “slave” to corporate interests, and that he would turn Florida into a “Section 8 ghetto” (Donalds is black, if that wasn’t apparent). Fishback has also praised far-right influencer Nick Fuentes and his supporters.
The candidate’s policy proposals, such as they are, are less inflammatory but no less unorthodox. Unherd’s Nikos Mohammadi wrote of Fishback that while “he trades in racist invective and has ties to open anti-Semites… these antics mask a somewhat reasonable populist agenda.” Fishback’s economic message is largely centered on affordability, a focus he credits to New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, a Democrat. He’s proposed a 50 percent sin tax on OnlyFans creators, raising teacher pay by 25 percent, and expanding paid maternity leave. He also opposes the construction of more AI data centers due to environmental concerns and is a harsh critic of the H-1B visa program.
Fishback has also had to battle legal woes as he seeks public office. Most prominently, he has been engaged in a complex legal battle with Greenlight Capital, his former employer. He sued them in 2023 for defamation over a dispute about his job title. In 2024, Greenlight countersued for alleged misrepresentation of his role, breach of his employment agreement, and defamation.
In 2025, Greenlight and Fishback reached a settlement in which Fishback admitted that he had shared confidential information and that obligated him to pay Greenlight’s legal fees. However, he has thus far been unable to do so. As a result, a court ordered that Fishback turn over his Azoria stock to them, and his Tesla Model Y was seized by U.S. Marshals to help satisfy the judgment against him. On April 1, a federal judge stopped short of holding him in contempt for refusing to turn over related documents, but gave him two weeks to either hand over the documents or swear that they don’t exist.
Fishback’s non-payment doesn’t just extend to his opponents’ legal fees: his own lawyers in the matter have sought to drop him as a client for not paying them. Fishback defended himself by saying that his lawyer had “lost my case… why on earth would I pay him for losing?” He added that as governor, he would make that official policy, a proposal that seems as impractical as it is self-interested.
Accusations of sexual misconduct have also been levied at Fishback. The Broward County School District cut ties with his high school debate organization, Incubate Debate, over allegations that he was having an inappropriate relationship with a female student who was, at the time, a minor. He has denied all wrongdoing in connection with the allegations, and he was never criminally charged or convicted in relation to them. Fishback did have a relationship with the woman in question after she turned 18; she later sought a restraining order against him, alleging that he harassed her after the relationship ended. A judge declined to do so, however, citing a lack of evidence.
Recently, when questioned by a voter concerning the allegations, Fishback said that the man, who is black, should be “lynched.” In typical Fishback fashion, he added that he would also “lynch every Epstein criminal in this country,” though it’s questionable if the Florida gubernatorial office has the authority to do so. Fishback is, of course, entitled to the presumption of innocence. Why he doesn’t extend to alleged Epstein clients the same deference he demands for himself is less clear.
Fishback has been compared, implausibly, to William F. Buckley. A more credible comparison might be to Patrick Buchanan, the populist upstart who challenged George H.W. Bush in the 1992 Republican presidential primary and whose campaign portended the rise of Donald Trump. There’s a key difference between the two, however. Buchanan was chasing a real underserved bloc of voters: the Middle American Radicals.
By contrast, Fishback seems to have made the same error as many in the mainstream media about the nature of the Republican coalition. While some Trump voters, especially young ones, might seem sympathetic to Fishback-ism, it would be a mistake to see them as a coherent voting bloc.
Many of these voters hold traditional political norms about what you can say and how you can act in contempt. Some readily admit to finding influencers such as Fuentes amusing. But, by and large, these disaffected Trump voters are not ideologically committed adherents to the philosophy of the radical right, or any philosophy at all. Trump was able to rally them through his unique, personalist appeal, rather than any specific ideology.
Whatever your view of Fishback’s personal merits or demerits, it’s quite clear that he’s no Donald Trump. While some liberal reporters who have an interest in making Fishback and those like him the face of the American right might disagree with that assessment, Florida voters writ large evidently don’t. That’s why, despite all of the coverage he’s getting, Fishback’s real-world support appears to be marginal. In other words, the Fishback feeding frenzy is just a media mirage.
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