This will have to be brief, because the hour is late and pretty much nobody here was prepared to write much of anything about Florida’s sleepy primaries this year. Once the most hotly contested electoral prize in the nation, Florida is now felt to be so safely red on a statewide level (even in 2026) that Byron Donalds is considered a shoo-in for the governor’s mansion in November — though his inability to win more than 48 percent of the vote in the GOP primary, despite Trump’s emphatic endorsement, is a clear indication of misgivings among the base about his ability to successfully follow in the footsteps of Ron DeSantis.
Elsewhere in Florida, in the hilarious clown-car smash-up of Florida’s 19th district — where two ex-congressmen and two former serial candidates from Illinois ran for Donalds’s open (safe) seat — the district’s voters emphatically rejected Trump’s endorsement of carpetbagger (and two-time Illinois loser) Catalina Lauf, who instead tanked tonight against relative unknown Jim Schwartzel and was flushed by a decisive 29 to 21 percent. Schwartzel’s primary qualification: He is a local, not a carpetbagger, like the other candidates.
But by far the most amusing outcome hails from the Democratic primary to fill the remainder of Marco Rubio’s Senate term (the seat is currently occupied by appointee Ashley Moody). The leading Democratic candidate in the race was supposedly Alexander Vindman, the retired U.S. Army colonel whose involvement with the Ukrainian fiasco during Trump’s first term led directly to the president’s first impeachment and became a defining moment in the so-called “Resistance” narrative.
Vindman raised over $16.5 million to run statewide for the seat, a vast sum that actually totaled more than the incumbent Moody’s. And . . . he got squashed like a bug tonight in the primary for all his troubles. That $16.5 million war chest will now go to waste, as the primary has been won by no-hoper Democratic Socialist state legislator Angie Nixon — and by a commanding margin of 56-44. Money is no substitute for base enthusiasm in a primary, and at least one message is clear tonight: Democratic base voters are no longer moved by tales of a “Resistance” that only brought Trump back to the presidency four years later.