‘Inner party turf wars’ hang over annual Florida Republican convention
Florida’s Republican political leaders tried to convince party loyalists at their annual convention Saturday to treat Democrats as their enemy — but intraparty battles loomed over the event instead.
A string of sitting politicians and candidates stoked fears of a Democratic resurgence in Florida and pleaded with the party to unite, culminating their pitch with a campaign ad and rallying speech by gubernatorial candidate Byron Donalds in a ballroom lit up by star-shaped spotlights at the Seminole Hard Rock Hotel & Casino.
Notably absent was the figurehead of Florida Republican politics: Gov. Ron DeSantis, who slammed party chair Evan Power in the lead-up to the event for “insulting the intelligence of Republican voters” and not holding a gubernatorial debate.
“These ridiculous criteria are being used to renege on that promise and to engineer a preferred outcome,” DeSantis wrote earlier this month, after the party set fundraising and polling thresholds to participate in a debate that only Donalds met.
The tension was still on clear display Saturday, with Congresswoman Kat Cammack comparing the “Republicans’ inner party turf wars” to early animosity between Thomas Jefferson and John Adams.
“They’re banking on you not getting out and voting. They want you to stay home. They love us fighting,” she said about Democrats. “Every time the ultra radical left they do something super crazy, we try to one up them. I don’t know why we do that.”
Sen. Rick Scott gave an impassioned speech on the right of anyone to run for office, describing himself as a once-outsider, but defended Power’s decision not to hold a gubernatorial debate.
“I tell people all the time thinking about running for office: ‘You should go run.’ Are they allowed to say whatever crazy thing they want to say, mean, evil, hatred? Absolutely. The First Amendment protects it, but the First Amendment does not require us to hand them a microphone,” Sen Rick Scott told the room.
“It certainly does not require us to be silent about what their words represent and the damage they could do to our party if they got elected,” he added.
Across town, Republican gubernatorial candidate James Fishback — who has appealed to white nationalists on the right — held a competing event where he promised to “burn down” the Republican party that had uninvited him from Saturday’s event.
Preview of Republican’s Florida campaign strategy
While some Republicans talked about affordability at Saturday’s Sunshine State Showdown event, others focused on stoking fear and rage toward Democrats as the unifying message to drive people to vote for their party in November.
In Florida, Republicans hold all statewide offices and a supermajority in the state legislature, making anger toward Democrats for affordability problems a more complicated sell.
“The side that will win in November is the side that is angry and the side that is scared,” Congressman Randy Fine told the room.
He and other speakers repeatedly pointed to Tuesday’s election results in New York — where three candidates endorsed by New York City mayor Zohran Mamdani won their Democratic primaries — as an existential threat to the Republican Party.
Donalds detailed a slightly different attack strategy against Democratic frontrunner David Jolly, a message that will likely be blasted across Florida air waves using the campaign’s $80 million fundraising haul.
Instead of comparing Jolly to Mamdani or other democratic socialist candidates, he compared Jolly to two winning Democratic governors who ran as moderates: Virginia governor Abigail Spanberger and Arizona governor Katie Hobbs, calling them both “radicals” who ran very “nice” campaigns.
“Now it’s coming to Florida, ladies and gentlemen, they will sound very nice. But they will be very radical,” Donalds said.
Power, the state party chair, also opened the event by explaining how he plans to frame moderate Democratic candidates as progressives ahead of November’s general election.
“Gwen Graham campaigns as a moderate, says she shares North Florida values. You don’t share North Florida values if you go to work for Joe Biden’s education administration,” he said.
Jolly is a former anti-Trump Republican congressman who switched parties. He selected Gwen Graham as his running mate, who ran for governor in 2018 to the right of the more progressive candidate, Andrew Gillum, who won the Democratic nomination that year instead.
Republicans have a commanding voter registration advantage in Florida and Donalds has far more money than Jolly to campaign for November. But midterm elections typically have a backlash to the party in power, setting up the possibility for Democrats to gain back ground they have lost in Florida. National Democratic fundraising groups have also committed to invest in Florida for the first time since 2020.
Inside the ballroom on Saturday — past hallways of life-size Donald Trump cardboard cutouts, and lined with booths selling MAGA-branded coffee, American flag blazers and American 250 swag — Republicans insisted they won’t let that happen.
While Power didn’t directly address intra party conflict in his comments to the crowd, he said, “What’s important now is we must defend the victories because the Democrats want nothing less than to get a foothold in Florida again.”
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