When Your Guy Doesn’t Win

It’s Friday morning. The coffee is on, the eight-year-old is learning a magic trick, and the five-year-old is talking about how cereal does not count as breakfast if you eat it out of a cup.

And I have spent three days now sitting with a ballot full of people I know.

Not know of. Know.

Rachel Rodriguez is my friend. She was my friend before any of this and she will be my friend after it. She finished with 27,605 votes. One and six-tenths of a percent.

Paul Renner is the most serious policy mind who ran for this office, and I say that having watched the man work up close for years. Fourth place.

Jay Collins left a leg in a war, came home, and kept right on serving. Second.

Bobby Williams is from my county. Fifth.

And Byron Donalds is the Republican nominee for governor of Florida.

I knew every one of those people before a single one of them filed for this race. That is not a brag. Around here that is just Tuesday.

Now, some of you are already typing the question, so let me save you the keystrokes. Who did I vote for?

I’ll never tell.

And if you did not just hear Brittany Murphy say that in your head, well. Here.

That scene has been rattling around my skull since 2001 and it is only fair that it moves into yours.

So let me tell you what nobody says plainly enough.

Primaries are wild. Not competitive. Not unpredictable. Wild. Wild wild west wild, where everything is loose at the same time and no two things weigh what you think they weigh.

Money is in there. Name recognition is in there, and it is not the same thing as money. Influence is in there. Endorsements. Whether one single person in your county has ever heard your name out loud.

And then there is running the actual campaign, which is the part nobody wants to talk about because it is unglamorous and it is decisive.

I will say here what I said out loud months ago. One of these campaigns burned through a staggering pile of money, and I have watched county commission and school board races run tighter operations than that. A great candidate can absolutely lose behind a bad campaign. It happens constantly. It happened Tuesday.

And I have stood on this side of a primary before.

In 2018 this state had a governor’s primary between Ron DeSantis and Adam Putnam, the Agriculture Commissioner, who was from my county, the same as Bobby Williams is now. I had already worked for Ron DeSantis back when he ran for Congress. I knew the man.

Who I voted for in that one is between me and the good Lord.

But DeSantis won, and he has been the governor for eight years, and I have spent those eight years moving bills through that building anyway. The work did not stop. Neither did I.

So yes, Wednesday morning was not my finest hour. I sat right here and felt every bit of it.

Then I did what I always do when I get like that. I went and read something.

And what I read is why I am writing this instead of sulking.

Because almost nothing that happened Tuesday night is going to walk through my front door. The thing that actually would have has been dead since March, and I would bet you real money nobody on your television said its name once all night.

Trump endorsed Byron Donalds on February 20, 2025. Donalds did not file his candidate paperwork until February 26. The endorsement showed up six days before the candidate did.

Donalds won with 810,675 votes and 47.79 percent. Jay Collins took 25.16. Fishback 10.47. Renner 8.55.

Now go over to Florida’s 7th, where Trump also had an endorsement out. Cory Mills, two-term incumbent, lost to Ryan Elijah by 8,795 votes. Elijah is a former television anchor. Mills is the subject of an ongoing House Ethics investigative subcommittee inquiry, two referrals deep, more than twenty subpoenas in, with no final finding and no sanction, and he denies wrongdoing.

Same president. Same state. Same night. Opposite outcomes.

And it happened again in Wyoming, which almost nobody down here noticed. Trump endorsed Harriet Hageman for Senate and she won with 63 percent. He also endorsed Megan Degenfelder for governor, and she lost to state Sen. Eric Barlow 45 to 30.

Two states. One president. Four races. Two wins and two losses.

So can we all agree to stop pretending an endorsement is a magic wand? It is not a cause. It is a multiplier. It makes a candidate voters already liked bigger, and it cannot rescue one they had already made up their minds about. Cory Mills had Trump’s name printed across the top of his yard signs, and folks read it and voted him out anyway.

“Put not your trust in princes, nor in the son of man, in whom there is no help.” (Psalm 146:3, KJV)

I am not going to explain that verse to you. You know exactly what it says.

The governor’s operation sat this one out.

Casey DeSantis never filed. Back in February 2025 she was still leaving the door cracked, answering a 2026 question with Yogi Berra’s line about coming to a fork in the road and taking it. She took the other one.

Her husband did not endorse anybody. What he did do, twelve days before the election, was stand up in Lehigh Acres and say Paul Renner “would be really good” at the job while insisting that was not an endorsement.

Renner’s political committee had raised $6.2 million. His candidate account had raised about $490,000 on top of that. He got 144,989 votes.

Do that division and it comes out to roughly $46 a vote.

Here is what the field paid, using what each campaign and its committee reported raising in the last days before Tuesday:

Byron Donalds. Roughly $100 million. 810,675 votes. About $123 a vote.

Jay Collins. Roughly $10.6 million. 426,787 votes. About $25 a vote.

James Fishback. Roughly $1.9 million. 177,674 votes. About $11 a vote.

Paul Renner. Roughly $6.7 million. 144,989 votes. About $46 a vote.

Bobby Williams. $80,930. 69,058 votes. About $1.17 a vote.

Rachel Rodriguez. Fifteen thousand four hundred twenty-six dollars. 27,605 votes. Fifty-six cents a vote.

I want you to sit in that list a minute, because it does not say what you think it says.

Line those six up by what they paid per vote and you get Donalds, Renner, Collins, Fishback, Williams, Rodriguez. Line them up by where they actually finished and you get Donalds, Collins, Fishback, Renner, Williams, Rodriguez.

Renner is the only one out of place, and he is out of place by two. Six and a half million dollars and a public compliment from the governor of Florida, and he still got passed by a man spending a fifth as much and another one spending a hundredth.

Renner raised roughly four hundred and thirty times what Rachel raised. He got about five times the votes.

Donalds raised something on the order of six thousand times what she raised. He got twenty-nine times the votes.

It even holds at the very bottom. Bobby Williams raised about five times what Rachel did and finished with two and a half times her votes.

And Donalds, who won going away, paid more per vote than anybody in the field. The money did not make him cheap. It made him inevitable, and inevitable ran about a hundred and twenty-three dollars a head.

Now hear me clearly, because I am not making the argument you might expect. Rachel finished sixth. Forty-eight percent of Republican voters picked Byron Donalds, that is a real result, and I am not going to pretend otherwise. Fifty-six cents a vote is not a victory. It is arithmetic.

But here is the arithmetic I could not stop running Wednesday night.

Renner raised about $6.7 million. Suppose Rachel had that money instead. And suppose she got worse at turning it into votes. Not a little worse. Twenty times worse.

Twenty times worse than 56 cents is about $11 a vote, which happens to be almost exactly what James Fishback actually paid in this very race. So we are not making anything up here. We are using a price somebody in this field really paid.

Twenty times worse, with Renner’s money, and she finishes somewhere near 600,000 votes.

Second place. About 170,000 ahead of Jay Collins.

Now let me be square with you, because I could sell you that number and I am not going to. Votes do not scale in a straight line. The cheapest votes a campaign ever gets are the first ones, the folks already out looking for you. Every vote after that costs more than the one before it, and I do not know where Rachel’s ceiling was.

Neither does anybody else. Nobody ever paid to find out.

That is the actual complaint. Not that she should have won. That nobody ever bought the test.

Two honest notes before I let this go.

Those are dollars raised and not dollars spent, the reporting cutoffs are not identical across campaigns, and the Donalds figure is his political committee all by itself. Add his campaign account and his public matching money and he clears $130 a vote. So treat that list as the shape of the thing and not the decimal.

And that word, committee, is the whole ballgame.

Florida caps what any one person can give a candidate for statewide office at $3,000. It does not cap what a political committee can take in. So Rachel’s $15,426 came in three thousand dollars at a time at the absolute most, and most of it came in a whole lot smaller than that. Friends of Byron Donalds could cash a single seven-figure check and go to lunch.

Those are not the same activity at two different sizes. They are two entirely different activities, and my little table up there is not really measuring who was better at raising money.

It is measuring who had a committee.

Which is the same story as a bill dying in a message queue on a Friday afternoon. Something built into the structure, running where you cannot see it and cannot touch it, settling the question before you ever got handed a ballot.

Bless his heart, Paul Renner deserved to find all this out some other way.

And now here is the part I actually want you to write down.

SB 1756. The Medical Freedom Act. It would have created a conscience exemption from K-12 school vaccine requirements on top of Florida’s existing religious and medical exemptions. It required practitioners to hand parents the actual risk-and-benefit materials and get a signature before sticking a child. It let parents ask to space doses out over multiple visits. It made Florida’s ban on mRNA vaccination-status discrimination permanent.

It cleared Health Policy 6 to 4. Appropriations 10 to 7. Rules 14 to 8. It passed the full Senate 23 to 15 on March 9.

It went across to the House that same afternoon.

It died there on March 13. Four days.

Not voted down. Never voted on at all. The House simply did not take it up, session ended, and it died sitting in the message queue with nobody’s fingerprints on it.

That was a Republican House. In March. With a governor still at full strength and not yet a lame duck.

So tell me again how much your ballot for governor was going to fix.

Whatever version of that bill comes back in 2027, and it is coming back, it lands in front of 120 House members, and whether it lives depends on whether anybody is watching the calendar in week eight of session. That is the machine. Not the man at the top.

Angie Nixon beat Alex Vindman 705,192 to 552,774 for the Democratic Senate nomination. Twelve points. She faces Ashley Moody in November, and Moody won her own primary with 79.57 percent.

Sit with the money a second, since we are already counting. Vindman raised about $16.3 million. Nixon raised about $975,000. He out-raised her roughly sixteen to one and got beat by twelve points.

Same rule as the Republican side of the ballot, on the other side of the ballot.

Now, about the word. News organizations report Nixon is a member of the Democratic Socialists of America. I could not find her saying those words about herself and I could not find a formal DSA endorsement, and I am telling you that because over the next eleven weeks you are going to watch three different claims get mashed into one and hollered at you from both directions.

I am not going to spend a section explaining that socialism has a body count. You have read that column. Six people already sent it to you this week.

Watch the word instead. One side is about to use it to mean she wants to take your business. The other side is about to use it to mean she wants your kid to have lunch. Neither one is going to describe what is actually in the bills she has filed, which are public, which almost nobody hollering about her will read, and which I will read for you before this is over.

Here is the marker I am setting so I can come back to it in October. What has ever decided whether a country stays free was not the size of its government. It was courts that rule against the government sometimes, property you get to keep, a press that can print what the governor hates, and a loser who concedes. I wasn’t born yesterday and I wasn’t raised soft, and I can tell the difference between a tax rate and a tyranny.

One neutral observation and I will move on. David Jolly won the Democratic nomination for governor with 60.96 percent and Gwen Graham as his running mate. He served in Congress as a Republican from 2014 to 2017, left the party in 2018, and registered Democrat in 2025.

So Florida Democrats go into November with a recent Republican at the top and a DSA member one line down. That is not a taunt. It is a party that has not settled on a theory of itself.

And since we are counting money, Jolly has drawn about $1.66 million from Florida’s public matching program. Donalds, whose committee reportedly raised close to $100 million, drew about $823,000. The one with the hundred million took half as much of your tax money as the one without.

Well, isn’t that precious.

While everybody watched the top of the ticket, the map moved real seats under it.

DeSantis called a special session on redistricting January 7. His office sent over a plan April 27. HB 1-D passed the House 83 to 28 and the Senate 21 to 17 on April 29, and he signed it May 4. On June 10 the Florida Supreme Court declined 6 to 1 to block it while the litigation continues, which is not a ruling that the challenges failed. It is a ruling that these were the lines on Tuesday.

In the redrawn 20th, Debbie Wasserman Schultz won with 30,480 votes and 45.32 percent. Dale Holness took 23.11. Elijah Manley 13.93. Sheila Cherfilus-McCormick, who resigned the seat in April under federal indictment and denies wrongdoing, still pulled 6,187. It became a real fight over Black representation in a South Florida seat that has historically elected Black members, and it happened because the 25th got drawn toward Republicans and she had to go somewhere.

Total ballots cast in that primary: 67,260.

Sixty-seven thousand people just picked a member of Congress for the next decade.

In the 24th, Oliver Gilbert beat Shevrin Jones by 1,412 votes.

Fourteen hundred and twelve.

Up in Wyoming, Chuck Gray won a nine-way House primary with 25 percent of the vote. Out in Alaska, Mary Peltola advanced against Dan Sullivan in a race that could decide control of the whole Senate.

None of those were decided by a hundred million dollars or a post on Truth Social. They were decided by whoever bothered.

Here is something nobody bothers to explain and everybody ought to know.

The primary is the round where you get options. Eleven Republicans on Tuesday’s ballot. Six Democrats. That is the one time in the whole cycle you get to look down a list and pick the person who actually sounds like you. Not the closest thing available. The closest, period. Your conscience, right down to the decimal point.

That is why you could have voted for somebody who finished with 1.63 percent and owe nobody an apology for it this morning. That was the round for it. That is what the round is for.

That round is over now. November has two names on it.

And I already know what some of you are thinking, because the messages started rolling in Wednesday. Neither one of them is mine, so I’ll just sit this one out.

Honey, that dog won’t hunt.

Not voting is not staying neutral. It is not a protest and it does not get recorded as one. Nobody in Tallahassee opens a spreadsheet in December and counts up how many principled people stayed home over it. It only makes the pile smaller, and then the people who did show up decide for you, and for me, and for my boys.

Sixty-seven thousand people picked a member of Congress on Tuesday. Fourteen hundred and twelve votes separated two grown men in the 24th.

And the governor is not even the important part of that ballot. Every one of those legislative seats is printed on the same piece of paper. Those are the 120 people who decide whether a bill gets a vote in week eight or dies in the message queue on a Friday afternoon in March.

Sitting out the top of the ticket means sitting out all of it. There is no way to skip the part you’re mad about and keep the part that matters.

Staying home is not a stand. It is a turn away.

You go back to work. That is the whole answer.

Here is what I am watching, and I am giving you watch-fors and not to-do’s on purpose, because you do not need one more person telling you what to do this week.

Whether Donalds runs as Trump’s candidate or Florida’s. Those are two different campaigns and they carry two different mandates into a legislative session.

Who he picks for lieutenant governor. He has not named anyone. Jolly named Gwen Graham back in June. Jay Collins, the sitting lieutenant governor, just lost the primary. The second most powerful office in this state is an open question right now and I have not seen one reporter ask him about it. Meg Weinberger’s name is floating, and floating is all it is doing.

Whether either of them says one specific thing about the 2027 session. I went looking for a Byron Donalds statement on SB 1756. Not a policy page, not a quote, not a press release. I looked for a David Jolly statement on it and came up empty too. Both men have talked plenty about the vaccine fight in the abstract. Neither has said what he does when that bill lands on his desk.

I lost Tuesday. So did a lot of you.

But the bill I actually care about did not lose Tuesday. It lost in March, in a Republican House, without a single recorded vote, while everybody was busy arguing about who was going to be governor.

The candidates we pick now are the policy we live under later. That is the whole mechanism, and it never once ran through the top of the ticket.

So no, I am not done. Not even a little.

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Peace in the chaos. Grounded in Christ and way too much coffee. ☕ Rebekah, Winter Haven, Florida. At the kitchen table. Obviously.

P.S. Tuesday’s Capitol Cappuccino is the full SB 1756 breakdown. Bill number, plain English, the actual statutory language with citations, every recorded vote with names attached, what got stripped in committee, and exactly how a bill dies in four days without anybody voting against it. That one is for paid subscribers, and it is the piece that tells you how this actually works.