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Florida Congressional District 16 Credit: Florida House<\/p>\nFlorida Congressional District 16 Credit: Florida House<\/p>\n
As Donald Trump\u2019s poll numbers continue to erode, some Republicans, even in Florida, are slightly backing away<\/a> from being linked to the president.<\/p>\n Sydney Gruters is not one of them.<\/p>\n The 44-year-old Sarasota resident is running against Democrat Kelly Kirschner and NPA candidate Mark Davis to succeed longtime Republican incumbent Vern Buchanan in Florida\u2019s 16th Congressional District \u2014 dramatically reconfigured in the mid-decade redistricting earlier this year in Tallahassee.<\/p>\n Gruters is a former legislative and political aide to Buchanan whom Trump appointed in his first term as rural development state director for Florida and the U.S. Virgin Islands in the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Her most recent job was vice president and executive director of the New College Foundation, the Sarasota college transformed from a progressive, arts-focused campus to a conservative redoubt in a state-directed makeover led by Gov. Ron DeSantis.<\/p>\n She is best known in political circles as the spouse of Republican National Committee Chair Joe Gruters, a very Trump-friendly Sarasota state senator and former Republican Party of Florida chairman whose close alliance with the president paved the way for his election to lead the RNC a year ago.<\/p>\n \u201cI am proud to have his endorsement,\u201d Sydney Gruters said of Trump in a recent interview with\u00a0WFLA News Channel 8<\/a> in Tampa. \u201cHe has done a phenomenal job. He\u2019s been elected to be our leader overwhelmingly by the American people, and that is not something I\u2019m running away from. I\u2019m very proud to have his endorsement and I\u2019m very much looking forward to working with him when I get elected.\u201d<\/p>\n Kirschner, 51, is a former Sarasota mayor and city commissioner who has also served in higher education. He was vice president and dean in the division of executive and continuing education at Eckerd College in St. Petersburg for 13 years before stepping down from that position last year.<\/p>\n Wild card<\/p>\n Former veteran and businessman Mark Davis, 42, is the third person on the ballot, running as a progressive non-party-affiliated candidate.<\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019m just a regular dude in the middle of Florida who decided that \u2018enough is enough,\u2019 and I just got upset one day and during Trump 2.0 and I think that we\u2019re all tired of this Trump administration and decided to something about it,\u201d Davis said this week in a virtual candidate forum sponsored by the League of Women Voters (LWV).<\/p>\n \u201cI got loud and vocal online and made some pretty large scenes in the local community. I stood up to Ron DeSantis, and really it was the community that said, \u2018Hey Mark. We love your fire. We love your tenacity. We would like you to run,\u2019\u201d he said.<\/p>\n The district previously was primarily located in Manatee County but now sprawls across six counties after Florida Republicans rewrote its boundaries in a project designed to snag as many as four additional seats for the GOP \u2014 Manatee, southern Pinellas (including downtown St. Petersburg), eastern Sarasota, southern Polk, and the rural, agriculture economies of Hardee and DeSoto counties.<\/p>\n With Republicans the party in power as an unpopular war grinds on with attendant high gas prices, Democratic candidates up and down the state have published internal polls indicating surprising strength in GOP strongholds, like CD 16.<\/p>\n Kirschner recently released\u00a0an internal poll<\/a> showing him leading by a single point in the race, even though the district is a 13-point Republican-leaning district, with 27% NPA voters.<\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019m increasingly telling people that this won\u2019t be a razor thin or narrow margin of victory. It\u2019s going to be a healthy margin of victory on Nov. 3,\u201d he told a Phoenix reporter on WMNF 88.5<\/a>\u00a0radio in Tampa last week.<\/p>\n Gruters doesn\u2019t refute that Kirschner is doing better than expected.<\/p>\n \u201cIf you look at polling right now, it\u2019s not as great as we would all want it to be,\u201d she acknowledged while addressing the Pinellas County Republican Executive Committee in Clearwater earlier this month. \u201cThat doesn\u2019t mean we\u2019re not going to win. We\u2019re going to win, but we all have to work together. We all have to be united, because guess who is united? The Democrats.\u201d<\/p>\n She\u2019s running on affordability and ending corruption in Congress. She says she supports congressional term limits and a ban on stock trading for members of Congress.<\/p>\n Kirshner scoffs at her platform, saying her husband has presided over \u201cthe transactional politics\u201d of the past decade in Tallahassee, which he says Republicans, Democrats, and independents are \u201cfed up with.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cThey\u2019re fed up with the machine-style, Tammany Hall-style politics in the state of Florida, nowhere more evident in Sarasota-Manatee counties, where Joe has presided over the Sarasota County Republican Party,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n Gruters replies that Kirschner \u201cmay paint himself as a moderate, but he is anything but that,\u201d citing his stance on Medicare for all. Kirschner says he supports \u201clooking into\u201d the idea; Davis says that for his part he\u2019s an unapologetic supporter of universal healthcare.<\/p>\n Those stances baffle Gruters.<\/p>\n \u201cWhat is the government doing that is so amazing that you\u2019re going to entrust them to managing this?\u201d she said during the LWV forum.<\/p>\n She cited her time working with the USDA on rural development, and said she\u2019s seen the hospitals and health community centers providing access to care for people in places like Wauchula and Arcadia. \u201cThe federal government is supporting that growth and that economic development \u2026 for these communities to make sure that every resident has access to affordable, safe, quality healthcare.\u201d<\/p>\n Kirschner says the first thing he\u2019d push for if elected is to have Congress restore the enhanced Affordable Care Act subsidies added by the Biden administration during the pandemic that were allowed to expire at the end of last year, removing around 440,000 Floridians from that coverage, according to the Associated Press.<\/a><\/p>\n Big differences on immigration<\/p>\n When it comes to immigration, Gruters takes a hardline perspective. Joe Gruters sponsored Florida\u2019s 2019 law banning sanctuary cities, legislation that has been the vehicle for Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier\u00a0to threaten elected officials with removal from office<\/a> when they expressed concerns about or opposition to working with ICE.<\/p>\n \u201cUnder the last administration, we had over 15 million undocumented immigrants come into this country,\u201d she says, adding that all six sheriffs in the district support her campaign.<\/p>\n \u201cBecause they know that we have to start with safe communities, and when you\u2019re letting people who come in here, who are violent criminals, murderers, it affects all of us. And so I think we have to be more outraged for the victims of illegal immigration and those who are coming in here unlawfully.\u201d<\/p>\n The Pew Research Center\u00a0reported<\/a> in August 2025 that the unauthorized immigrant population reached a high of 14 million in 2023, with 3.5 million entering the U.S. from 2021-2023, the first two years of the Biden administration.<\/p>\n \u201cAbolish ICE,\u201d says Davis.<\/p>\n Republicans for Kirschner<\/p>\n Kirschner, a Bradenton native, recently held a press conference to announce that a handful of Republicans were endorsing him for the seat, including Dan Miller, who represented Sarasota in Congress from 1992 to 2002. \u201cAll my life, I\u2019ve voted Republican. This year, I\u2019m voting for the person, not the party label,\u201d Miller said.<\/p>\n Gruters was not impressed. She told\u00a0WFLA TV<\/a>, \u201cIf I were him, I\u2019d be more focused on my base,\u201d adding, \u201c57% of the Democrats voted against him in the primary.\u201d While it\u2019s true Kirshner received a plurality (43%) and not a majority in his primary race, he was running against four other Democrats and beat the second-place finisher by more than 23 points.<\/p>\n During this campaign, Kirshner has taken plenty of verbal shots at Gruters\u2019 husband Joe, but he also has assailed Republican leadership overall, alleging a lack of fiscal conservatism at New College of Florida; Sydney Gruters served as executive director of the New College Foundation the past two years.<\/p>\n \u201cPrior to the takeover of New College, a New College degree cost all of us as taxpayers less than $60,000 to pay for that degree,\u201d he said this week.<\/p>\n \u201cToday, we are spending nearly half-a-million dollars for a degree from New College. The vast majority of those students are now athletes; it\u2019s no longer an honors college. It is the height of Tallahassee grift \u2026 .\u201d<\/p>\n According to a\u00a0report<\/a> by Florida\u2019s Department of Government Efficiency last November, it now costs $494,715 to produce a degree at New College, far surpassing any other state institution.<\/p>\n A note about Davis: \u00a0He was arrested<\/a> in July on a misdemeanor charge of obstructing a police officer when Manatee County sheriff deputies were serving a court order at his home while conducting a court-ordered welfare check on his children. Davis has said<\/a>\u00a0child services were called to his house because of \u201cmy political beliefs.\u201d He told\u00a0WTSP 10 News<\/a> that he raised more than $5,000 after the arrest became public.<\/p>\n Inside Elections, a nonpartisan analysis website, noted some movement in the race, but not too much. The organization last week shifted the race\u00a0to \u201cLikely Republican.\u201d<\/p>\n Meanwhile, the campaign could get rougher if Kirschner continues to hang around. Observers believe the Gruters\u2019 ties to the White House will bring additional financial resources to their campaign if needed next month.<\/p>\n \u201cSydney Gruters is the fighter families need to lower costs, cut taxes, keep communities safe, secure our border, and put Florida first,\u201d says RNC spokeswoman Emma Hall. \u201cDemocrat Kelly Kirschner doesn\u2019t stand a chance with socialist hack Angie Nixon and far-left lunatic David Jolly at the top of the Democrat ticket.\u201d<\/p>\n Florida Phoenix<\/a> is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Florida Phoenix maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Michael Moline for questions: [email\u00a0protected]<\/a>.<\/p>\n