AMERICA FIRST ACTIVISTS ARE TOLD: HOLD YOUR NOSE AND VOTE FOR THE REPUBLICAN SWAMP
Florida voters—especially Republican America First activists—are being offered a choice so bleak it feels less like democracy than a Tallahassee punchline.
They are being told to hold their noses and vote for Republican establishment candidates wearing MAGA hats, selected by the party machinery and sent out to pose as champions of America First ordinary people, while critics accuse them of serving “pay-to-play” developers and billionaire donors.
The Pat Neal/Carlos Beruff/Rex Jensen Gang of Six (James Buchanan/Joe Gruters/Jim Boyd/Bill Connerly/Fiona McFarland/ Will Robinson)
The message is clear just hold your nose and have no problem with Republican legislators in Manatee and Sarasota Counties pushing their developer donor’s agenda such as voting SB 180 overriding local County Commissioners from making any changes in their development codes that would better protect people from hurricane damage.
The the Goodman/Pedicini Gang of Five Manatee County Commission (George Kruse/Ballard/MikeRahn/Tal Saddequ/Tara Poulton
Hold your nose and vote Repubican as usual seeing a Republican Party establishment operating out the Tallahassee swamp that has no problem in political operatives Goodman and Pedicini candidates turning the Manatee County Commission ino a projected 5-2 Carlos Beruff/Pat Neal/ Rex Jensen/Randy Benderson Shit Show.
Republican Party swamp political operatives-Goodman and Pedicini
Those same folks pushing this hold your nose and vote Republican with $millions finance political operatives like Anthony Pedicini and Max Goodman. Those two are managing handpicked Republican Party swamp's establishment candidates that Florida’s promised paradise looks less like a dream than a luxury development built over the ruins of the brochures and phony voter guides put out by Pedicini and Goodman.
The voters are being told the alternative is a Florida Democratic Party that has its own graveyard of promises and failed candidates.
Ramba and Power
That is the narrative in a Tallahassee swamp where lobbyists like David Ramba and Evan Power write the script and politicians memorize their lines, the swamp does not even bother to hide. It simply prints campaign signs and calls itself public service.
The Tallahassee Republican establishment has a pitch for voters that requires a remarkable act of imagination: overlook its own record and failed establishment candidates, they say, and consider the alternative—a Florida Democratic Party with a graveyard full of broken promises and failed candidates.
Goodman's former Republican Party establishment political operative - Jolly at recent rally in Sarasota as a Democrat running for Governor
Same rally Jolly celebrated with Tom Edwards and other Democrat School Board members takeover of Sarasota County School Board
Jolly and Edwards
THE SARASOTA UNI-PARTY: GRUTERS/GOODMAN/JOLLY—THE SAME OLD CIRCUS
Republican establishment voices pushing their UNI Party narraitive tell voters to hold their noses and vote Republican. Curiously, the pitch skips an awkward bit of history: when David Jolly ran for the U.S. Senate as a Republican in 2016, Max Goodman was his political director and Jolly’s campaign manager.
In April 2016, Jolly, then representing Florida’s 13th District in the U.S. House, announced Goodman would manage his Senate campaign to replace Marco Rubio after serving eight months as Jolly’s political director.
Those resumes may complicate things for establishment Republicans who object to Jolly’s current politics, which includes running as a Democrat alongside the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) Angie Nixon. Meanwhile, Goodman is a political operative for numerous establishment Republican candidates—the same candidates’ voters are told to to hold their nose and vote for.
What a charming arrangement: yesterday’s allies become today’s inconvenient footnotes, while the same political machinery keeps running.
The party labels shuffle, the operatives circulate, and voters get another lecture about making the “practical” choice. Hold your nose, cast your
vote, and please—try not to notice who’s still backstage pulling the strings..
Apparently, the swamp doesn’t care which party’s label is on the bottle. It just wants you to drink without reading it.
HOLD YOUR NOSE, SARASOTA
Max Goodman is also Heidi Brandt’s political operative. Sarasota County Republican Party chairman Jack Brill is asking voters to put Brandt on the School Board—and, apparently, to hold their noses while doing it.
The record tells a curious Brandt résumé story: 12 years in New York City before moving to Sarasota, with only a documented work as managing director of a sex-texting firm; then, in Sarasota, PTO president of Southside Elementary School—where her major school involvement included managing bake sales.
Bake sales are a worthy cause. They are not a $1.6 billionSchool Board budget-management credential. But why let a little matter like relevant experience interrupt a party endorsement?
Gruters with Jack May of Manatee Patroits holding his nose voting for Gruters
Max Goodman is the same Max Goodman who is also a political operative for Republican establishment candidate, Sydney Gruters. So when voters are urged to hold their "noses and vote for the Republicans" swamp’s latest offering, they might want to ask who helped build the machinery.
Graham and Gillum
The Republican swamp creatures legitimate favorite exhibit to hold your nose, and vote Republican is the 2018 Democrat gubernatorial primary; a chapter critics say Florida Democrats would rather bury than explain. Bernie Sanders and the party’s progressive wing helped propel Andrew Gillum past Gwen Graham, daughter of the widely respected former governor and U.S. senator Bob Graham.
Eight years later, the old primary still serves as a political warning label—conveniently dusted off whenever the Republican establishment needs voters to fear the other side more than question its own.
The Democrat Progressive wing called it a triumph of the future; Graham’s defeat suggested that even a distinguished family legacy could be swept aside when the political winds changed.
Gillum went on to lose to Ron DeSantis by a slim margin of 32,463 votes, winning 4,076,186 to Gillum’s 4,043,723. Every political observer would acknowledge Graham would have defeated DeSantis.
Gillum
On 3/14/25 this former Florida Democratic Progressive candidate for Governor, Andrew Gillum was named in a police report saying he was “inebriated" and initially unresponsive in a Miami Beach hotel room where authorities found baggies of suspected crystal methamphetamine. Gillum denied using the drugs.
The police report identified Travis Dyson that night as a “male escort” and “companion” of Gillum’s. In 2021 interviews with GQ and People, Dyson said he and Gillum had connected on Grindr a week or two earlier and had met multiple times for paid sexual encounters.
Dyson claimed that on the night of the incident and on prior occasions, both men had used “G” (gamma-hydroxybutyrate), a drug he described as commonly used to enhance sex drives. He said Gillum had provided the drugs and had passed out after combining them with alcohol.
Dyson acknowledged taking photos and videos of Gillum that night, saying he wanted to show Gillum what had happened, but he denied leaking the images.
For a party that had cast Gillum as its rising star, the headlines were a brutal sequel: the future arrived, briefly, in a police report. Andrew Gillum Hotel Incident: No Arrest, Rehab, and Fallout/// CourtDocketEvidence released in Andrew Gillum hotel room incident// Andrew Gillum Caught "Drunk" With The "Boys" & Meth in Miami! Evidence released in Andrew Gillum hotel room incident
Charlie Crist another establishment Republican who ran as a Democrat Governor
Today the same Florida Democrat party operating out of the same swamp in Tallahssee that Florida Republican Party operates has former Republican State Senator and a Charlie Crist longtime supporter Jolly running for Governor.
Eight years after the Gillum debacle, Florida’s so-called Democratic Party has decided the best way once again to challenge the Republican establishment is to rummage through its old parts bin.
From the same Tallahassee swamp where Republican insiders conduct their business, Democrats have now hauled out Jolly—a former Republican Party establishment state senator who had Goodman as his political operative—and presented him as the fresh Democrat alternative.
This is not the Democrat party’s first expedition into the Republican archives. Four years ago, it picked Crist, a former Republican governor and Republican establishment fixture, to run for governor against Ron DeSantis.
At this rate, Florida Democrats may soon be less a party than a political recycling center: take yesterday’s Republican establishment politician, add a new label, and hope voters mistake the rebranding for a new idea.
Donalds
Jolly’s opponent for the Florida governorship is Byron Donalds who has ridden President Donald Trumps endorsement to raise more than $134 million across his campaign and its associated political committee by early October 2026.
It is without a doubt that without Trump’s endorsement Donalds would be running for re-election for the U. S Congress and would not be raising over $134 million to be Governor of Florda.
Donalds’s congressional record is hardly the stuff of legislative legend. His clearest bill to become law was the bipartisan FISHES Act, which sets deadlines for reviewing spending plans for fishery disaster assistance. Not exactly the sweeping transformation of Washington voters were promised.
Then, in February 2025, Governor DeSantis dismissed Donalds’s role in Florida Republicans’ victories: “A guy like Byron, he just hasn’t been a part of any of the victories that we’ve had here over the left over these last years.”
DeSantis recently endorsed him. Politics: where yesterday’s supposedly absent ally becomes today’s indispensable successor. Who else was DeSantis going to endorse—Jolly?
Donalds early chronology seems to have been assembled after the calendar left the room. Donalds’s life story reads like a campaign biography assembled in a room where the dates were left unattended.
Born and raised in Brooklyn, Donalds attended Florida A&M from 1996 to 1999 and graduated from Florida State in 2002. Donalds first marriage ended in divorce that same year; in 2003, he married Erika Lees. He says his religious conversion came in a Tallahassee Cracker Barrell parking lot in 2001—apparently the most consequential meeting he ever had in a restaurant parking lot.
His legal record also requires more than a campaign slogan’s worth of precision: a marijuana case was dismissed, while a separate felony case involving a bad check ended in a no-contest plea. Call both convictions, or casually label the second “fraud,” and the facts get distorted. The real story is tangled enough without anyone helping it along.
Ziegler and Erica Donalds
In Florida’s 16th Congressional District, America First activists aren’t exactly swooning over Byron Donalds. So the campaign has rolled out reinforcements: his wife, Erica Donalds, alongside Bridget Ziegler—a departing school board member and Moms for Liberty co-founder with Erica Donalds.
Zieglers and Donalds on their eventual way to the Governors mansion in Tallahassee
Brill and his inept SREC leasdership team not invited to Donalds event
Bridget Ziegler arranged a event for Erica Donalds at a restaurant managed by former Sarasota County Commissioner Paul Carguilo in Lakewood Ranch. The guest list was reserved for America First activists, while local Republican establishment figures associated with Sarasota County Republican Chair Jack Brill were left outside the circle. The Brill leadership team that saw the Sarasota County School Board turn Democrat dark blue with a Rainbow flag held high.
Nothing says a candidate has the grassroots firmly in hand like sending his wife out to rally the base—with a political ally in tow and when the grassroots aren’t applauding loudly enough, apparently the answer is to bring in more familiar faces and hope the crowd mistakes the choreography for momentum.
In politics, even “grassroots” gathering seems to come with a carefully assembled cast and a conveniently connected venue.
The uninvited Brill is the same SREC chairman who removed more than 130 Republican America First members from the SREC and had local police stationed at an SREC meeting to keep them out. Brill party’s welcoming mat has apparently been replaced by a velvet rope—and a badge at the door.
Ziegler introducing Erica Donalds to the Lakewood Ranch gathering
Erica Donalds was well received—and, a week later, welcomed just as warmly at a gathering on Sarasota’s New College campus. One round of applause wasn’t enough; the campaign needed a sequel to prove the first had landed.
Edwards led Democrat Sarasota County Board members celebrating their victory over the Brill led local SREC
Reportedly, Erica Donlds has given assurances that School Board member Tom Edwards who will be the apparent Chairman of the newly elected majority Democrat Progressive takeover of the Sarasota County School Board will be closely monitored and removed by Governor Byron Donalds’ if he enacts any legislation, as he once supported any involvement in Sarasota County by the U.S Homeland Security Agency.
Edwards and elected Democrat School Board members at Jolly rally
Local America First Republicans may hold their noses and vote for Donalds—not out of affection, but because they see the alternative as former Republican Jolly, now appearing alongside Edwards and his cast of recently elected Democrat Progressive School Board members and other progressive Democrats at a Sarasota venue.
Moricz and Edwards
Critics point to Edwards’ partnership with Zander Moricz, a Harvard dropout with a $2 million appropriation from a prominent LGBTQ supporter recruiting middle and high schools to advance what they call Edwards’ “woke agenda.” Those are serious claims, and they should be judged on the evidence—not campaign theater. EDWARDS AND MORTICZ CONTINUE TO DIVIDE THE COMMUNITY
Still, what choice voters are being handed: one side asking for reluctant support, the other surrounded by associations its critics find alarming. The ballot offers two names; the campaign rhetoric supplies the nightmare.
So here is the choice: a Republican establishment that denounces the swamp while dining comfortably in it, or a Democratic Party still wondering where its old principles went. Florida voters are invited to choose between the two—and, naturally, to pretend the menu is inspiring.
Gruters and Kirschner
ANOTHER HOLD YOUR NOSE DILEMMA
Locally, in Florida’s 16th Congressional District—as in the governor’s race—the Republican Party was supposed to be cruising toward landslide margins. Instead, the polls reportedly show Donalds and Jolly running neck and neck, while the Republican congressional candidate Sydney Gruters clings to a slim lead over Democrat Kelly Kirschner.
So much for the triumphant march. The party arrived expecting a coronation and got a nail-biter—with the usual campaign slogans trying to pass for an explanation.
Republican America First support for Sydney Gruters in the race for Congress appears about as warm as its support for Byron Donalds: lukewarm, reluctant, and hardly the stuff of a triumphant conservative wave. It’s difficult to square a reportedly close Gruters–Kirschner contest with a district so often described as a Republican stronghold. Even the reddest map can produce a rather awkward shade of purple.
Steube
Had Congressman Greg Steube ran in District 16 instead of District 17, he could have won by more than 30 points. In that version of events, there would have been no bruising Republican primary—and Kelly Kirschner might never have had a serious race to run. Instead, the party gets a contest it expected to be a coronation, now forced to explain why the crown is wobbling.
Ramba and Power
The whole Florida Republican Party establishment operation in support of Donalds and Gruters seems to orbit the RPOF’s Tallahassee swamp, with its center of gravity conveniently located in lobbyist David Ramba’s office—where RPOF Chairman Evan Power is employed.
In this little theater of political coincidence, the swamp doesn’t need to hide its wiring; it just calls the wiring “business as usual.”
This is the same Tallahassee establishment that keeps sending legislators who wear the costume while operating inside the very swamp voters thought they were voting to drain.
A TRUMP ENDORSEMENT AND $MILLIONS IN DONATIONS ARE NOT BRINGING OUT THE VOTE
And Byron Donalds and Sydney Gruters? To many America First Republicans, they remain deeply questionable choices—not candidates who inspired a groundswell of trust, but names critics say were elevated by President Trump’s endorsement and millions in billionaire-backed spending.
Apparently, that’s what passes for grassroots momentum now: a famous endorsement, a mountain of money, and a voter expected to call the whole thing a movement.
So some voters are looking toward Democratic progressives—or considering staying home. Not because they’ve fallen in love with the alternative, but because the Republican establishment has made “hold your nose and vote” sound less like a slogan than an admission of failure.
Jon Susce