Florida governor’s race: Trump-backed Byron Donalds and Democrat David Jolly win primaries
The Associated Press has called the primary results of Florida’s governor’s race: Byron Donalds has won the Republican nomination and David Jolly the Democratic nomination.
Donalds, 47, was endorsed by Donald Trump and would become Florida’s first Black governor if elected in November.
Jolly, 53, is a former Republican who joined the Democratic party last year. His win in the state’s primary marks the second time in a row that Florida Democrats have nominated a former Republican – following the party’s nomination of former Republican governor Charlie Crist in the state’s 2022 election.
Updated at 20.09 EDT
Key events
Nixon defeats Vindman: another progressive shock to an establishment-backed Democrat
Progressive Angie Nixon has won the Democratic nomination for Florida’s open Senate seat, defeating the heavily favored Alex Vindman, a retired army lieutenant colonel, and an impeachment witness against Trump during the president’s first term of office. If elected in November, Nixon would be the state’s first Black senator.
Nixon will compete against Republican Ashley Moody, a former state attorney general, in November. The two are vying to fill the Senate seat Marco Rubio won in 2022.
Updated at 20.18 EDT
Florida governor’s race: Trump-backed Byron Donalds and Democrat David Jolly win primaries
The Associated Press has called the primary results of Florida’s governor’s race: Byron Donalds has won the Republican nomination and David Jolly the Democratic nomination.
Donalds, 47, was endorsed by Donald Trump and would become Florida’s first Black governor if elected in November.
Jolly, 53, is a former Republican who joined the Democratic party last year. His win in the state’s primary marks the second time in a row that Florida Democrats have nominated a former Republican – following the party’s nomination of former Republican governor Charlie Crist in the state’s 2022 election.
Updated at 20.09 EDT
Polls have closed across all of Florida as the clock strikes 7pm in the state’s western panhandle region.
Pia Dandiya has won the Democratic nomination for Florida’s 22nd congressional district. Her race, like many others in Florida, was affected by the state’s efforts to gerrymander its districts earlier this year.
As my colleague Richard Luscombe reported from Florida this month:
Dandiya, a professional educator dipping her toe for the first time into the often tenebrous world of electoral politics, originally declared her candidacy for Florida’s 21st congressional district, where she was mounting a long-shot campaign to unseat the Republican congressman Brian Mast, an army veteran who bills himself as “Florida’s America first fighter”.
But then Ron DeSantis, the Republican governor of Florida and Donald Trump loyalist, intervened. In the consequent Democratic shuffle of candidates, she switched to Florida’s newly configured 22nd – an open seat that Democrats see as one of their best opportunities to reclaim the House majority in November.
“Redistricting, to me, represents what people just hate about politics, that it seems like a solution in search of a problem instead of actually solving the problems that are keeping people up at night,” Dandiya said during a meeting over coffee in south Florida last month. “I would argue that most families are not staying up at night worried about the congressional lines across the state, but they are staying up at night wondering how they’re going to make ends meet, about whether we are handing our children a country, that we are leaving them in good hands.”
Updated at 20.00 EDT
Debbie Wasserman Schultz has won the Democratic nomination in Florida’s 20th congressional district.
As my colleague David Smith reported:
Wasserman Schultz, 59, an 11-term congresswoman and former chair of the Democratic National Committee (DNC), has faced criticism from African American leaders over her decision to run as the sole white candidate in a majority-minority district where she is not a resident.
This followed the creation of gerrymandered congressional maps by Florida Republicans that broke Wasserman Schultz’s current seat into five shards. She decided against running in the 22nd district, where she lives, and chose instead to compete in the deep blue 20th, which has been represented by Black Democrats for more than 30 years.
Updated at 19.53 EDT
The Associated Press has begun calling results in Florida’s primary House races.
So far:
Debbie Wasserman Schultz has won the Democratic nomination and Brent Andersen has won the Republican nomination in the 20th congressional district.
Mike Beltran has won the Republican nomination for Florida’s 14th congressional district.
Leela Gray is the Democratic nominee in the 13th congressional district.
Rachel Grage won the Democratic nomination and John Rutherford won the Republican nomination in the fifth congressional district.
Pia Dandiya is the Democratic nominee in Florida’s 22nd congressional district.
LaShonda Holloway won the Democratic nomination in the fourth congressional district.
Maria Elvira Salazar won the Republican nomination in the 27th district.
James Pericola is the Democratic nominee for the 11th district.
Updated at 19.53 EDT
The US Department of Justice has issued subpoenas as federal prosecutors in Alaska investigate whether Dan J Sullivan entered a Senate race there to take votes from the incumbent, also named Dan Sullivan, NBC News reports.
My colleague Chris Stein has more on the tale of the two Dan Sullivans running against each other in Alaska’s primary today:
Updated at 19.38 EDT
Polls begin to close in Florida primary elections
Polls in Florida have begun to close as we await results in three primary elections tonight. Polls in Wyoming will remain open until 7pm local time (9pm ET), and polls in Alaska will remain open until 8pm local time.
We’ll bring you the results in Florida’s governor and Senate races as the Associated Press calls them.
Updated at 19.12 EDT
A federal judge in Texas has ruled that Biden-era restrictions on “ghost guns” are unconstitutional – after guns rights groups asked the court to reconsider the case on different grounds after the US supreme court upheld the restrictions last year.
The US district judge Reed O’Connor, who was appointed by George W Bush, said the 2022 rule infringes on a person’s right to make or repair personal firearms. “Self-manufacture of firearms in America was common and indeed foundational to establishing our nation,” O’Connor wrote.
The Biden-era regulation requires manufacturers of firearm parts, including “ghost guns”, to mark products with a serial number and conduct background checks on purchasers. Ghost gun products are typically bought online and may be quickly assembled at home, without the serial numbers ordinarily used to trace guns or background checks on purchasers required for other firearms.
Here’s more of our coverage from last year, when the conservative-majority supreme court upheld the Biden administration’s regulation on ghost guns:
Updated at 19.13 EDT
An Illinois man allegedly impersonated doctors – and evidently referred to himself online as “$hotboy1” – is facing criminal charges that he secured unauthorized prescriptions for Ozempic and Mounjaro pharmaceutical drugs that facilitate weight loss and are taken by some for cosmetic rather than legitimate medical reasons.
Rodney Greer purportedly launched the allege scheme in early 2023, according to court filings from federal prosecutors and a US justice department news release issued on Monday.
In exchange for obtaining the illicit prescriptions for what are known as GLP-1 medications, customers of Greer would pay him money, federal prosecutors in Manhattan contended.
Greer, who allegedly also went by the name Christian Marchand, pleaded not guilty to the four-count indictment that accused him of wire fraud, healthcare fraud and aggravated identity theft. Greer’s attorney did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Here’s Victoria Bekiempis with our full report:
In a social media post, Donald Trump claimed Census Bureau records of non-citizen voting prove he won the 2020 election, despite evidence that non-citizen voting is extremely rare. Trump has repeatedly and falsely claimed that he won the 2020 election and blamed practices such as mail-in voting, which he participates in, for his loss.
“The Census Bureau has begun checking the Voter Records from 2020 against their Citizenship Records. On the first 128,000,000 Voters, the Census Bureau proves that over 24,000 Noncitizens voted illegally! The Census Bureau is going to analyze the next 32,000,000 Voters, and this number will explode. I WON THE ELECTION! We must pass THE SAVE AMERICA ACT,” Trump wrote on his social media platform today.
The Guardian could not independently verify the Census Bureau page Trump cited, which claimed to be “a beginning analysis by the U.S. Census Bureau”. However, 24,000 non-citizen votes represents just 0.01875% of the 128 million votes the bureau has counted so far. Joe Biden won the popular vote in the 2020 election by more than 7 million votes.
“There is no evidence that noncitizen voting has ever been significant enough to impact an election’s outcome,” according to the Bipartisan Policy Center, which published an explainer on non-citizen voting this summer, after Trump said thousands of non-citizens are registered to vote in the United States.
In an article published this summer, Reuters found that “federal prosecutors have charged just 129 people under a federal ‘voting by aliens’ statute created by Congress in 1996.” More than two-thirds of those prosecutions were filed during Trump’s terms in office. “In none of the cases did prosecutors allege a coordinated effort to influence an election. And no defendant was accused of being paid to vote. Instead, many appear to stem from voter confusion, miscommunication with election officials or administrative errors,” Reuters reported.