Trump-backed Byron Donalds wins Republican primary in race to succeed Florida governor DeSantis

Primary voters in Florida backed a Republican endorsed by Donald Trump to stand as the party’s candidate in the race to succeed Ron DeSantis as the state’s governor.

Byron Donalds, a congressman representing south-west Florida since 2021, won the nomination by trouncing three reasonably prominent Republican rivals, including Jay Collins, DeSantis’s handpicked lieutenant governor.

If he wins the November election, as he is expected to do in the conservative stronghold, Donalds would become the first Black governor in any southern US state.

So confident was Donalds of victory that his television advertisements in the weeks leading to the primary ignored his Republican challengers and focused on David Jolly, who secured the Democratic party’s nomination on Tuesday.

Florida, arguably the heart of Trump’s Make America Great Again movement, and home to his Mar-a-Lago Palm Beach estate, will choose a successor to DeSantis – Trump’s one-time rival for the Republican presidential nomination – in November’s US midterm elections.

DeSantis did not make an endorsement in the race, but Trump did, backing Donalds and his conservative credentials, with support that could prove decisive in November. DeSantis was largely considered dead in the water in his own campaign to become governor in 2018, before Trump’s endorsement turned things around.

Republican voters roundly rejected the credentials of Collins, an army special forces veteran who called Donalds a Washington elite; Paul Renner, the former Florida house speaker; and extremist James Fishback.

Instead, they favored Donalds, who at times polled close to 50% and is, according to his campaign website, “committed to implementing President Trump’s agenda to Make America Great Again”.

A vocal Trump ally who was reportedly considered for the 2024 vice-president pick that ultimately went to JD Vance, Donalds made affordability and reducing property taxes and insurance costs a central plank of his campaign, which some have seen as a dig at DeSantis’s obsession with culture war issues during his eight-year tenure.

Jolly, a former Republican congressman and lawyer, became an independent, then switched parties last year.

He ran a much more moderate campaign than the ones that worked well for progressive Democrats in other states’ primaries this summer, although that did not stop Donalds assailing him as “a radical liberal” who he claimed was an advocate for gender-reassignment surgery who supports transgender males in girls’ and women’s sports.

Jolly shrugged off the attacks, criticizing Donalds for focusing on nonexistent issues instead of trying to help everyday Floridians with their problems.

Jolly easily fended off a challenge from five other Democrats, including state representative Dotie Joseph and Dayna Marie Foster, a former high school educator who was endorsed by the Florida Democratic Progressive caucus.

Jolly faces an uphill battle in November, however. No Democrat has won a Florida governor’s election since Lawton Chiles in 1994; and no Democrat has won a statewide election in Florida since Nikki Fried, the current chair of the Florida Democratic party, was elected agriculture commissioner in 2018.