Florida Republicans have spoken and decided that antisemitism is not welcome in their party. James Fishback and Dan Bilzerian, respective candidates for governor and congress running on implicitly and explicitly antisemitic platforms, were trounced in their races. After months of a sustained social media presence and heavy press coverage, Fishback came in third for governor with 10.5% of the vote, which was perhaps slightly higher than most serious people were expecting. What came as a much bigger surprise was the performance of Dan Bilzerian, a much more psychotic figure who came in second place to Randy Fine with 19% of the vote in Florida’s 6th Congressional District.
While it’s shocking that so many people would vote for some manwhore running on a platform of Nazism, the most interesting thing to note is that not only did Bilzerian outperform Fishback, who appealed to the same crowd, but Fishback actually underperformed relative to his state-wide vote share in Fine’s district. In Putnam County, where Bilzerian received his highest vote share with nearly 21%, less than 9% of voters cast their ballots for Fishback. In fact, Fishback underperformed in every single county in Fine’s district, maxing out at 10.4% in Volusia County. This is despite the fact that ads attacking Bilzerian in the district explicitly tied him to Fishback, grouping them in with The Squad and accusing them of trying to shut normal people out of the GOP.
How is it that at least 8% of Fine’s district voted for a roided-up Hitler worshipper for Congress, then also voted for an establishment candidate over a moderately more respectable version of the same politics? As Nick Fuentes noted in a recent rant, Bilzerian didn’t even bother campaigning, only making two public appearances in Fine’s district, which is a four-hour flight from where he lives, throughout the entire race—one of which was at a Fishback campaign event that Bilzerian crashed and claimed as his own.
Except public events do not make a campaign, especially in an otherwise unremarkable congressional district where many, if not most voters don’t even know who their Congressman is and are certainly not attending campaign events. In a race like this, name recognition and money are going to make a huge difference. And while he may be washed up, Dan Bilzerian is, at the end of the day, a rich celebrity.
Active since 2012, Bilzerian has over 23 million followers on Instagram, putting him somewhere within the top 500 accounts on the platform. He may spend most of his time today trafficking in antisemitism, but most people who have heard of Dan Bilzerian will either know him for his previous work of living a frivolous influencer lifestyle, or not even know why they know his name. Even after this election cycle, I would suspect that more people in Florida know the name “Dan Bilzerian” than “Randy Fine” or “James Fishback.”
So imagine you’re a low-information voter living in FL-06. You walk into the ballot box because you think it’s your duty to vote in US elections, but all you really know is that Randy Fine is your congressman, he’s endorsed by Trump, and that he’s said some controversial things on X. Next to him on the ballot is Dan Bilzerian. You don’t know who this is, but you recognize his name from somewhere, so figure he must be someone important. You may think this is a stupid way to engage with politics, and it is, but under this lens it’s much easier to see why someone might vote for Dan Bilzerian then vote for Byron Donalds, someone they also recognize by name without having much other information about.
Name recognition aside, Bilzerian also appears to have spent a lot more than Fishback on his campaign, a reflection of the great deal of wealth he has to throw around, and ran actual ads for his campaign. In one ad attacking Randy Fine, Bilzerian accused him of illegally voting, evading a court subpoena, and associating with drag queens who read to children. In another ad, he attacked Randy Fine for siding with Democrats on a procedural vote related to the SAVE America Act while touting a promise to raise social security spending by cutting support for illegal immigrants and foreign aid. None of these ads call him a “fat Jew” or any of the other antisemitic insults we’d associate with Bilzerian’s online presence. Instead, these ads all focused on issues that ordinary Republican primary voters (i.e. old property owners) would care about.
Compare this to Fishback’s strategy. Fishback, as far as I know, did not run any television ads and focused his efforts mainly on digital and on-the-ground promotion. His most viral material was mostly vril edits of himself attacking Benjamin Netanyahu, talking with kids about “goyslop” in school cafeterias, glazing Nick Fuentes, and whining about data centers. He also got a lot of attention for making various crude and racist comments about Byron Donalds, such as repeatedly calling him a “slave,” imitating him in ebonics, and calling him By’rone while holding his gun sideways. If you’re not particularly online and you get most of your information through cable news or the newspaper, it’s very easy to see how you could come to the conclusion that Dan Bilzerian is a more normal Republican candidate than James Fishback. From your perspective, Bilzerian is a masculine celebrity with the message that “Randy Fine is a corrupt hypocrite and hates Muslims.” Fishback, meanwhile, is a cartoonishly unscrupulous character who, as one X commentator put it, has the charisma of a door-to-door solar panel salesman, delivering the message that “By’rone Donalds is a n***** and a slave to Jews.”
This rhetorical contrast compounds when paired with the fact that Byron Donalds is by most accounts a relatively normal and ordinary Republican politician, while Randy Fine—and I say this with love—is a bit of a right-wing nutjob. Here are just a few examples:
“I don’t personally feel bad when human shields are killed” - Randy Fine on dead Palestinian civilians
“‘Palestinian’ is just another word for demon” - Randy Fine on alive Palestinian civilians
“Throw rocks, get shot. One less #MuslimTerrorist. #FireAway“ - Randy Fine on the IDF killing an American citizen
“There are demons that live on Earth. They deserve no state. They only deserve death.” - Randy Fine on what he described as “innocent Palestinian civilians,” although in his defence, he was being sarcastic
“We nuked the Japanese twice in order to get unconditional surrender. That needs to be the same here.“ - Randy Fine on the Gaza War
“Starve away” - Randy Fine on the Gaza “famine”
“It is time for a Muslim travel ban, radical deportations of all mainstream Muslim legal and illegal immigrants, and citizenship revocations wherever possible“ - Randy Fine on Muslim Americans
“If they force us to choose, the choice between dogs and Muslims is not a difficult one” - Randy Fine on Muslim Americans again
Now I won’t rag on Randy Fine for being Ozma Yehudit’s representative for FL-06. That being said, it’s easy to see why a more moderate Republican voter in Fine’s district would be concerned by this kind of rhetoric which, by the way, does not just extend to Palestinians and Muslims. Fine has introduced a bill to support Donald Trump’s proposal to annex Greenland, hyperbolically threatened to burn down his former synagogue when it hired a gay staff members, and celebrated the killing of Alex Pretti by ICE.
There are more examples of things like this, but you get the point, which is that there are plenty of non-antisemitic reasons why someone who isn’t a based and redpilled LEZM follower would dislike Randy Fine, who is easily one of the most right-wing members of the House of Representatives. Even if you’re a normal voter who’s aware of Bilzerian’s neo-Nazi rhetoric, you may not see this as being particularly more extreme than Randy Fine’s. Bilzerian saying he wants to declare war on Israel isn’t that much crazier than calling to nuke Gaza, nor is calling Randy Fine a “fat Jew” much different than calling Palestinians “demons” in the eyes of these voters. You don’t need to like it if you think voting for it is a worthy tradeoff if it allows you to send a message to Randy Fine, Donald Trump, MAGA, or something else. It is also possible—and this is pure speculation—that there were some Democrats in Fine’s district who thought that voting for Bilzerian in the primaries would be an easy way to shave off a safe GOP district to the Democrats for one term. Not an unheard of strategy in politics, but again, I must stress that I have nothing to back it up.
Bilzerian’s supporters would probably say this is all cope for the fact that 19% of Fine’s Republican constituents voted for a loud-and-proud antisemite (assuming they believe the vote tally, which at one point was subject to a tabulation error that has since sparked a stolen election conspiracy theory promoted by Bilzerian himself). That may be true to some degree, but it doesn’t get Fishback’s fans off the hook for explaining why he underperformed Bilzerian by nearly 8% in FL-06. I suspect they’d probably agree that some mixture of Bilzerian’s celebrity status and the fact that he was running against an obese racist slob like Randy Fine instead of a more normal Republican probably played a major role. Whether they would agree with my assessment of Fishback’s campaign strategy is another story.
One last thing to note is that it is not unheard of for fringe candidates to not only do modestly well in lower-profile Republican races, but occasionally actually win them. Lauren Witzke, who is now best known for promoting antisemitic conspiracy theories on X, actually won the Republican nomination for senate in Delaware in 2020 with the endorsement of Nick Fuentes before going on to get 38% of the vote in the general election. A couple years earlier, open neo-Nazi Arthur J. Jones won the Republican primary for IL-03 after running unopposed. And, quite infamously, former Klansman David Duke became the Republican candidate for governor in Louisiana in 1991, being defeated in a 2-1 landslide after President Bush endorsed the comically corrupt Democratic candidate.
So by all measures, candidates with these types of views are only becoming less successful as time goes on. Fishback and Bilzerian could only dream of getting the margins that a Klansman could get in a different Southern state in 1991. Incumbent representatives who’ve embraced this type of politics have been driven out of office, including Thomas Massie who lost by a 10% margin despite representing his district for 14 years and being one of the most recognizable members of Congress, and Marjorie Taylor Greene who surrendered her district without a fight.
Fishback’s supporters are claiming they won the youth, a claim which I would say is possible despite the fact that the statistics they’re putting out on the matter are dubiously based on tiny sample sizes of university precincts which in some cases had as few as half a dozen Republican primary voters. Data suggests that he won as much as 31% of the youth vote, but was still behind Byron Donalds at 33%. Is that something to panic about? Fishback had a powerful social media strategy, received extraordinary amounts of free advertising through mainstream and alternative media, held multiple campaign events daily, displayed an almost unparalleled propensity for attention-grabbing stunts, flooded the news cycle with fake polls showing himself near or in the lead, and was primarily appealing to a segment of the electorate that is infamously low-propensity under most circumstances and where particularly inspiring candidates can produce enormous swings. Despite all these advantages, he still couldn’t even beat out Byron Donalds with voters under 35.
The degree to which young Republicans are inspired by groyperism is a concern mainly on Capitol Hill for representatives trying to avoid staffing their offices with retards, but the idea that this therefore represents the “future” of what Republican voters believe is a bit of a misapprehension. Most young people are not particularly interested in politics and get more involved as they get older and feel the need to respond politically to their tax rates, property value, school curriculum, and other things that more directly impact their lives. These people, as has always been the case, will be the future of the Republican Party.
Beau Chasse
Randy Fine sounds super based and FL republicans are based for electing him their representative