I cover Florida politics, and I can already feel the whole state settling into one lazy story: The Governor’s race is basically over, so why pay attention to anything else?
That is the exact trap Pennsylvania fell into, and it is worth learning from before we walk into it too.
Cliff Maloney, who runs Citizens Alliance and wrote the book Run Right, just laid this out in a piece about his home state. His argument is simple. Our side keeps pouring every dollar and every volunteer hour into the one big race at the top of the ballot, then acts shocked when the seats that actually write the laws slip away.
His example is Josh Shapiro, a Governor who sold himself as a practical moderate and then governed like something very different once the cameras moved on.
Says one thing. Does another.
Florida is lining up to make the identical mistake, and the name at the center of it is Byron Donalds.
Look at the money, and you will understand why the whole state is ready to call it early. Donalds has raised more than $90 million. About $10 million of that sits in his campaign account, and better than $80 million more sits in his political committee from more than 37,000 donors. Nobody else is in the same area code.
Lt. Gov. Jay Collins is somewhere around $7 million, and even that number leans on a single $5 million check. James Fishback, another Republican in the field, reported a total of $950 through the end of last year and has been limping along on less than $28,000 in the bank. On the Democratic side, front-runner David Jolly has brought in a little more than $5 million since entering the race last Summer.
Put the entire rest of the field together, and Donalds has still raised several times more than all of them combined.
So, on paper, it looks finished.
Here is why it is not.
Money like that buys the one race everybody is already watching, the race with no Primary debates and a winner half the state has already penciled in. It does not buy a single vote in the races that actually set your insurance rates and your power bill. And the man everyone is ready to crown is not even what he sells himself as.
Start with that power bill.
Donalds runs ads about affordability and swears his approach to AI data centers will keep utility costs down for regular families. Sounds great.
Now look at who is funding him.
A super PAC backed by AI titans pledged $5 million to put him in the Governor’s Mansion. When the people building the data centers are the same people buying the campaign, you should probably ask for whom that new power grid is really being built.
Pennsylvania families already found out what happens when the people setting energy policy answer to somebody other than the voters.
Then there is insurance, the issue keeping half this state awake at night.
Donalds wants you to trust him to finally fix the property insurance mess.
Here is the part he leaves out of the ads.
He chaired the Insurance Subcommittee in the Florida House while that crisis was quietly building. The man who held the gavel while it got worse now wants a medal for rolling out a scorecard.
That is not a fresh outsider fixing a broken system.
That is a career politician asking for credit on a problem he had years to address.
And when he talks history, the record does not cooperate.
PolitiFact rated his explanation of the Voting Rights Act false. It rated his claim about property taxes Barely True.
One more time: He says one thing, the record says another.
None of this means the sky is falling.
It means the fix was never going to come from a savior at the top of the ticket.
It comes from the ground up.
That is where Maloney’s model matters for us.
In Pennsylvania, Citizens Alliance proved that knocking doors, showing up early and chasing down every legal vote in the races nobody is watching is how you actually change outcomes.
Not slogans.
Not cable hits.
Doors.
As his people like to say, doors win wars.
Florida has a Primary on Aug. 18 and a stack of local races beneath it that will get a fraction of the attention Donalds receives.
School Boards.
County Commissions.
Legislative seats.
Those are the rooms where your insurance rates, your power bills and your children’s schools actually get decided.
So watch the races everyone is ignoring.
Those are the ones that govern your life.
By the time the next Governor is holding a news conference about a problem, the people who could have stopped it were already chosen in an election you skipped.
The views expressed are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of Florida Politics.
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Nate Jurewicz is an independent citizen journalist covering Florida politics and government accountability. He operates GanjaLeaks.com, which covers Florida’s cannabis and hemp industries, and ShortSalesRiches.com, which helps real estate agents, investors and homeowners navigate short sales and avoid foreclosure.