The Sarasota Phoenix who knows the history of the area and who has shaped the history for years
AREA REPUBLICANS RALLY FOR KIRSCHNER AS GRUTERS BASE STARTS TO SHOW CRACKS
Last Tuesday (9/15/260 in Downtown Bradenton at Pier 22, Florida Congressional District 16 candidate Kelly Kirschner delivered what can only be described as a polite political death notice: if Sydney Gruters keeps barricading herself in a closet to avoid debates, she might discover that the real danger isn’t her opponent — it’s the over 30 past and present Republican leaders who’ve already crossed the aisle to endorse him.
When your own party’s bench starts defecting like it’s an evacuation drill, hiding from debates stops looking like strategy and starts looking like a liability.
Miller/Kruse/Kinnan past and present leaders endorsing Kirsschner
The parade of past and present Republican leaders backing Kirschner wasn’t led by some minor local figure — it was headed by the most politically seismic name in the room: former Congressman Dan Miller, t
he man who held the seat for a decade before Vern Buchanan ever showed up in Washington.
Miller didn’t just send a polite statement or offer a lukewarm nod from afar. He physically walked into the gathering and openly endorsed Kirschner, a move that lands like a thunderclap in a district where party loyalty is supposed to be carved in stone.
When a former ten‑year congressman steps out of the shadows to bless a Democrat, it’s not just an endorsement — it’s a signal flare. And everyone watching knows exactly what it means.
Part of Kirschner endorsers
The roster wasn’t exactly a lightweight gathering either. Former Manatee County Commissioner Betsy Benac, current Commissioner George Kruse, Holmes Beach Mayor Judy Titsworth, Longboat Key Town Commissioner B.J. Bishop, retired Manatee School District administrator Merrie Lynn Parker, former Manatee School Board member Mary Foreman and Republican Jim Brady — once the finance director for Georgia Governor Brian Kemp — all showed up.
Former Judge John Blue, who served on the Manatee County Circuit Court before joining Florida’s Second District Court of Appeal, where he served until retirement joined Xtavia Bailey the President of the Manatee Tiger Bay Club and Manatee County resident and Suncoast Waterkeeper Board member Rusty Chinn.
The Palmetto native — a legendary University of Miami football force and longtime pillar of the Palmetto community — stood shoulder‑to‑shoulder with another Manatee County institution: Joe Kinnan, the iconic Manatee High School coach whose influence in this county stretches far beyond the football field.
Two “old‑school” Manatee County giants, the kind who don’t need introductions and don’t waste words, showing up together. When figures with that kind of generational weight step into the frame, it’s not nostalgia — it’s a reminder of who built this county long before the current political circus rolled into town.
And they all didn’t arrive as isolated political tourists. Every one of them drags behind them a caravan of supporters who now have a reason to take a long, unblinking, uncomfortable look at who they want representing them in Washington. When figures like this start migrating, it’s never just their names on the endorsement list — it’s the ripple effect that follows them, the kind that makes campaigns suddenly realize the ground beneath them isn’t as solid as they thought.
It’s long past time for the local press — and frankly the state‑wide and national media — to stop sleepwalking through this race and take a hard, unflinching look at what the showdown between Kelly Kirschner and Sydney Gruters actually represents.
Gruters/Trump/Wiles
The major press needs to pull its head out of the scorching Florida sand and start reporting the reality they keep pretending doesn’t exist: the wife of the Chairman of the National Republican Party, the wife of President Donal Trump's Chief of Staff Susie Wiles' protege, a candidate endorsed by Trump, is locked in a neck‑and‑neck race with a young, articulate, deeply rooted Democrat whose ties to this congressional district run far deeper than any campaign brochure.
Kelly and Kerry Kirschner two former City of Sarasota mayors
Kirschner isn’t some political tourist. His family is woven into the fabric of the region: his father, a two term Sarasota City Commissioner and Mayor before being CEO of the Argus Foundation; a brother who serves as a United States General; a sister who built her career as a Boston Red Sox executive and later with the national tennis association; another brother who is a globally traveled business executive; and a mother who remains one of the county’s most respected community figures.
These aren’t superficial credentials. They’re generational roots — the kind the media would spotlight instantly if they belonged to anyone else.
But instead, the press keeps pretending this race is a foregone conclusion, ignoring the fact that a nationally backed Republican candidate is being matched stride‑for‑stride by a Democrat with a family legacy that reaches into every corner of the district.
The story is right in front of them.
They just refuse to look.
Kirschner isn’t some parachute Democrat who drifted in a few years ago, clutching a carpetbag full of “Here’s how we did it up north” clichés like so many political transplants who barely know the culture, history, or pulse of this region.
Kirschner’s rooted here. He’s shaped by this place. And that makes this race a lot more complicated — and a lot more revealing — than the lazy narratives being pushed by anyone pretending this is just another generic congressional contest.
Kirschner and Gruters longtime political rivals
THE KIRSCHNER/GRUTERS RIVARLY.
This race isn’t really Kelly Kirschner versus Sydney Gruters — it’s Kelly Kirschner versus Florida State Senator and RNC Chairman Joe Gruters, with Sydney functioning as the placeholder on the ballot while he looms behind the curtain.
For years, Joe Gruters has circled this congressional seat like a long‑delayed prize. His ambition didn’t start when he served as an aide to Congressman Vern Buchanan — it started earlier, when he was Buchanan’s political operative while Buchanan ran Sarasota Ford, already eyeing a future where he’d trade dealership politics for a seat in Washington.
He once described this congressional district as “a chocolate cake with a cherry on top,” the perfect capstone to his political career. And now, instead of stepping into the race himself, he’s trying to claim the cherry by proxy.
Kirschner and his opponent’s husband — Florida State Senator and RNC Chairman Joe Gruters — didn’t just grow up in the same county; they walked the same hallways at St. Martha’s School and Cardinal Mooney High School. They went to the same St. Martha Church. Their history isn’t some vague footnote —they were taught and tutored by the same nuns, priests, teachers and coaches. It’s a long, tangled thread that deserves to be dragged back into the light.
Vern Buchanan
Kirschner went on to Georgetown University after high school. Gruters went to Florida State University. After college, Kirschner joined the Peace Corps. Gruters returned to Sarasota, plugged himself into the Young Republicans, and hitched his political future to Vern Buchanan — who, at the time, was a Bush/Cheney loyalist running Sarasota Ford and building his own political ambitions.
Kirschner came back from his Peace Corps tour in Guatemala and threw himself into neighborhood activism, the kind of ground‑level work that eventually pushed him into running for the Sarasota City Commission.
Gruters, meanwhile, had become chairman of the local Republican Party and decided the “nonpartisan” city race didn’t need to be nonpartisan anymore. He slapped a partisan label on Kirschner, branded him a liberal Democrat, and turned the race into a proxy war.
Gruters ran the campaign for the Republican candidate. Despite being outspent roughly 3‑to‑1, Kirschner crushed the race — somewhere around 70% to 30%.
Kirschner finished his four‑year term with one year as Mayor of Sarasota with the kind of reputation that usually sends politicians sprinting toward higher office — a rising star in state politics, even whispered about on the national stage. But instead of cashing in on the momentum, he did something that didn’t fit the usual script.
With a wife and two young children, he walked away from the political spotlight. And when Eckerd College dangled an offer to become Vice President, the kind of academic post most politicians would treat as a polite résumé ornament, Kirschner didn’t hesitate. The offer was too solid, too meaningful, too real to decline.
So he stepped off the political escalator and spent eleven years at the college — not chasing headlines, not angling for the next rung, but choosing a path that didn’t require applause or campaign donors.
In a county where ambition usually burns hot enough to melt steel, Kirschner did the unthinkable: he chose substance over spotlight.
Gruters' and Buchanan's at Selby Gardens Gala
Gruters, during the very same stretch when Kirschner stepped out of the political spotlight, was busy climbing every rung of the Republican ladder he could get his hands on. He dumped the Buchana/Bush/Cheeney label and joined the Trump MAGA train. (that move deserves an entire chapter)
Gruters moved from Sarasota County GOP Chairman to Florida Republican Party Chairman and now sits at the top of the national pyramid as Chairman of the RNC.
And he didn’t do it quietly. Along the way he collected titles like political souvenirs — Florida State Representative, Florida State Senator — stacking them one on top of another as if the accumulation itself proved inevitability.
While Kirschner chose a decade of academic leadership, Gruters chose acceleration, consolidation, and raw political ascent.
Two men, same schools, same county, same origin story — but their trajectories split like a fault line. One walked away from the machine; the other welded himself to it. And now those diverged paths slam back into each other with a kind of grim inevitability.
Kirschner, downsized from his Eckerd role and refusing to fade quietly into the background, has stepped back into the arena — this time aiming for Congress. He’s not just running against Sydney Gruters; he’s running against the shadow behind her. Because everyone in Sarasota politics knows who’s really standing in the wings: Florida State Senator and RNC Chairman Joe Gruters, the man who’s been angling toward this seat for years.
Sydney may be the name on the ballot, but Joe Gruters is the presence behind the curtain — the architect, the ambition, the long‑running hunger for the district he once described as the perfect capstone to his political climb.
Watching behind the curtain, Gruters sees a district that does include a part of Pinellas County, but the the rest of Florida’s Congressional District 16 is hard‑line Republican voters — the kind of territory where party loyalty is supposed to be ironclad. So when prominent Republicans step out publicly against a Donald Trump‑endorsed candidate, it doesn’t just raise eyebrows — it detonates like a warning flare over the entire race.
In a place this red, breaking ranks isn’t a whisper. It’s a siren. And it speaks volumes about the fractures running under the surface of a district that was supposed to be politically unshakeable.
The MAGA flag isn’t flying the way it used to — not in Manatee County, not after what happened recently. Republican America First activists watched their takeover of the Manatee County Republican Executive Committee get shut down by RPOF Chairman Evan Power, and then watched more than 150 MAGA activists purged from the MREC in one sweep.
Not fringe members. Not newcomers. The purge included the elected State Committeeman and Committeewoman — the very people chosen by the grassroots to represent them.
The message couldn’t have been clearer: The establishment didn’t just push back.
It erased them.
The America First movement in Manatee wasn’t defeated in a vote — it was dismantled from above, stripped out of the party machinery, and left staring at the empty space where their influence used to be.
The shutdown and purge rolled through Manatee County like a controlled demolition — over 150 America First activists wiped out, the elected State Committeeman and Committeewoman tossed aside, the grassroots silenced. And through all of it, Joe and Sydney Gruters didn’t utter a single word. Not about Manatee. Not about Sarasota. Not about any county in Florida where the same pattern was unfolding.
Silence can be accidental. This wasn’t.
Lara Trump
And now the question hangs in the air for Trump‑aligned MAGA supporters: how long do you keep pretending you weren’t disrespected? Because while the purge was happening, Trump’s daughter‑in‑law Lara Trump was headlining a meeting of the Tallahassee‑installed Manatee County Republican Committee — a committee rebuilt with handpicked members chosen by RPOF leadership after the elected ones were removed.
The grassroots were locked out. The establishment was ushered in. And MAGA was expected to clap on command.
There’s a quiet tremor running through the Florida Republican Party — the kind major media outlets pretend not to feel. More than 35,000 registered Republicans have already walked off the reservation and signed up with the Florida America First Party.
Schorsch
Yet the state’s biggest newsrooms keep their heads buried in the hot Florida sand, insisting everything is fine because Florida’s notorious pay‑to‑play journalist narrator, Peter Schorsch and his 20 hired guns, keeps telling them the MAGA universe is perfectly stable.
But the unrest is real. And it’s spreading.
Kirschner spelled it out to his Republican supporters: gas prices blasting past four dollars a gallon, diesel $6.50 a gallon, grocery bills spiraling out of control, electric costs climbing with no ceiling in sight, and a Middle East conflict stretching from days to weeks to months — with years looming on the horizon.
People feel it. They live it. And they’re done pretending everything is normal because a handful of media gatekeepers insist the party is unified and the base is calm.
Goodman
And now the same machine led by by her operative Max Goodman thinks it can waltz Sydney Gruters into Congress — hide her in a consultant’s broom closet, pour $4–5 million in dark money through the pipes, and hope voters never notice the parachute straps still hanging off her shoulders. Goodman’s strategy is simple: bury the truth, buy the stage lighting, and let the establishment script the performance.
But run that fantasy past the 30 deeply rooted Manatee County figures who stood shoulder‑to‑shoulder at Pier 22 in Downtown Bradenton to endorse Kirschner. These aren’t transient operatives or imported influencers — they’re the backbone of the county, people who actually live with the consequences of the political games Gruters political operative Goodman and his patrons play. They know exactly what parachuted candidates look like, and they’re not fooled by consultant smoke and dark‑money mirrors.
Sydney Gruters wasn’t “launched” — she was air‑dropped into the district like another pre‑fabricated asset of the Republican establishment, shepherded by Goodman, a man whose connections run straight through the same pay‑to‑play circuitry that just delivered his own wife a judgeship courtesy of a multi‑million‑dollar developer Pat Neal who has turned the 12th Judicial District into a privatized fiefdom. (that naritive needs at least two chapters).
Jon Susce
The Sarasota Phoenix team is the last media guardian in the Sarasota/Manatee area and beyond laying bare for all to see how the Sarasota/ Manatee area and beyond is controlled by a UNI Party financed by millionaires and billionaires turning Florida into Paradise Lost.
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Jon Susce