J.D. Vance visits Florida to rally the Republican base. Skeptics remain
Vice President J.D. Vance told a room full of Republican voters in Lakeland Thursday that Florida “is facing one of the easiest choices I have ever seen in politics in my entire life,” while mocking Democratic Senate candidate Angie Nixon and gubernatorial candidate David Jolly.
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Byron Donalds, the Republican running for governor, asked voters to remember that while gas prices are high now, previously Democrats were “destroying the country.”
And Republican Senate candidate Ashley Moody told the crowd the progressive democratic socialist movement is a “cancer on this nation” that needs to be defeated.
But despite their rallying cries against Democrats at an event intended to energize the party’s base, “lifelong Republican” Thomas Ridgdill walked out of the event unconvinced.
“There wasn’t a message besides, ‘We’re not Democrats,’” Ridgdill, 27, said. “I’m sorry to say it. [Vance] has flown past his priorities and he’s gone to ‘We’re not them.’ I don’t want ‘not them,’ I want fiscal responsibility.”
He’s among the loyal Republican base that the state party — and recently, the White House — are making a concerted effort to turn out to vote in November in the face of waning approval ratings for Donald Trump and an increasingly favorable electoral landscape for Democrats.
While Republicans have a massive voter-registration advantage in Florida, if their voters don’t turn out, Democrats are hopeful they can claw back ground this year after almost three decades of Republican control of the state.
Plenty of attendees told the Herald they were all-in on every Republican up and down the ballot. Longtime Donalds supporter Betty Lou Mazuca said there’s “not a chance” Jolly, a former Republican, will pull voters away from Donalds in November.
But even in a crowd of MAGA-hat-toting Republican voters who took a day off school and work to attend a political rally, there was some lingering skepticism about Donalds at the top of the ticket.
Ridgdill said he’s considering leaving that section of his November ballot blank after supporting the hard-right upstart candidate James Fishback in the Republican primary.
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“As much as I wish the best for him and doing a good job on our behalf, we cannot trust what he says,” he said of Donalds.
Ramon Hernandez, 31, is an independent voter who said he leans conservative, and drove about 30 minutes to attend the rally. He said he likes that Donalds is endorsed by “people that we definitely align with,” but “is a little iffy about the data centers.”
Campaign funding from companies backing data centers was one of the main issues Donalds’ opponents attacked him on during the primary cycle.
High schooler Gus Walsh, 15, drove from Bradenton with family to attend the rally and said he liked both Lt. Gov. Jay Collins and Donalds in the primary. He’s rooting for a Donalds win in November even though he’s too young to vote. But, he said he thinks the bruising primary against Donalds is still fresh in other young conservatives’ minds.
“Especially younger people, they may go to David Jolly just out of spite for Byron Donalds because of the whole Fishback thing,” Walsh said. “Fishback really prompted a negative image of Byron Donalds.”
While Donalds won Polk County, where Thursday’s rally was held, neighboring Hardee County was the only Central or South Florida county he lost in the Republican gubernatorial primary. He did the worst in August in some of the state’s whitest and most rural counties, primary data show.
Donalds’ speech ran the gamut of Republican campaign points, from slamming COVID lockdowns to border crossings.
But he ended with a message that dominated many of the attendees’ speeches: Don’t let Florida become like Democratic states. The question ahead of November is whether that pitch will be enough.
“They are never going to bring their crazy from California. They can have [Mayor Zohran] Mamdani in New York. They can keep the taxes in Massachusetts,” Donalds said. “We want the free state of Florida.”
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