By admin 
Normally, when a primary candidate finishes with 10.5 percent of the vote, it is a clear signal of their irrelevance.
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James Fishback finished third in Tuesday’s Florida Republican gubernatorial primary, and at no point in the race did it seem like he ever had a chance. In fact, at no point in his broader career has the 31-year-old, who is known for his racist slurs and unabashed bigotry, achieved anything of note. The high-school-debate nonprofit he founded was hit with allegations that he had sexually groomed a 17-year-old employee. A hedge fund where he’d once worked said that it had planned on firing him before he resigned, and accused him of claiming a job title that had never existed at the firm. He founded his own investment firm but left after the board decided to shut down the funds he managed. Fishback told me that he had left the firm to run for governor. He claims to have been an adviser to DOGE—but former senior DOGE officials have denied it.
However, Fishback is defiantly proud of his showing, despite losing the primary to Representative Byron Donalds and also finishing well behind Lieutenant Governor Jay Collins. “I would much rather have gotten 10 percent and done all of this and really moved the needle in political discourse,” he told me today, “than have gotten 24 percent like Jay Collins did and have nothing to show for it.”
Despite his penchant for spectacular, serial failure, Fishback matters because he managed to figure out at least one thing: how to capture attention from the youthful right. Heading into Election Night, this was the one area where Fishback appeared to excel. A February poll from the University of North Florida found Fishback to be the leading candidate among GOP primary voters under 35, with 31 percent supporting him. By July, that number was up to 51 percent, according to a Change Research poll paid for by the conservative nonprofit Freedom Project USA. His candidacy was, in some respects, a test run for what might work with the next generation of Republican voters. What seems to be working is unrepentant bigotry.
Fishback’s appeal to younger voters can be explained by a few other things: He is relatively young. He ran a ragebait campaign that met young people where they are, maintaining a heavy digital presence with posts and appearances on the livestreams of prominent influencers. He spoke with sympathy of the economic concerns of downwardly mobile youth. He did all of this while regularly tossing off casual racism and anti-Semitism.
During the campaign, he referred to Bryon Donalds, who is Black, as By’rone and called him a “slave” to donor and corporate interests. When a Black man questioned Fishback about the grooming allegations against him, the Florida politician said that the man should be “lynched.” When I reached out to him earlier today, he doubled down: “I think anyone should be executed” for making those kinds of “false allegations,” he said. When I pressed him on why he’d specifically said “lynched” instead of “executed,” he trailed off before claiming that he might have actually gained votes for saying this. He has made not-so-subtle overtures to Groypers—slang for fans of the white-supremacist internet personality Nick Fuentes—by reportedly claiming that he rebuffed a PAC that offered him $500,000 under the condition that he rebuke Fuentes. “I hung up the phone, because I will never disavow patriotic Americans,” he told a crowd. He has used the term goyslop, anti-Semitic internet slang suggesting that there’s a Jewish conspiracy to harm the Gentile masses by feeding them junk food.
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Fishback contests the “anti-Semitic” label. “I’ve condemned anti-Semitism repeatedly. It has no place in our society. Neither does the hatred of Christians,” he said when I questioned him about his use of goyslop and his praise of Groypers as “insightful” and “patriotic.” Fishback also pushed back against most of the ways he’s been described in the media. He said that he has “never claimed to be a DOGE adviser” even though he posted on X last year that he has “advised DOGE.” Fishback has maintained that the sexual-misconduct allegations are “completely false,” and he reiterated this to me, saying that no court ever found him guilty.
If you’re not prone to anti-Semitism and don’t enjoy far-right politics, it’s tempting to see Fishback as an aberration. When poll-tracking websites observed that Fishback seemed to be dominating campus precincts in Florida on Tuesday, several pundits were quick to point out that, in many cases, winning meant accruing only dozens of votes, because few students had returned to campuses from summer break. “FSU has 46,184 students. Twenty-eight people voted in this precinct. Fishback got 25,” wrote the conservative communications strategist Erica Knight. “He didn’t capture the youth vote. He captured a group chat.”
But the signs of a shift to the hard right among young Republican voters have been well documented. The New York Young Republicans Club’s Nazi tendencies are well known. A Yale poll from this past spring found that younger voters are more anti-Semitic than older generations. And a Manhattan Institute poll from December found that 25 percent of Republicans under the age of 50 openly express anti-Semitic views. “I do see the youth right turning the dial up on misogyny, anti-Semitism, and racism—even as the youth right is racially and ethnically diverse,” Lauren Lassabe Shepherd, a historian who has written about American campus conservatism, told me when I asked her about Fishback. She suspects that the “online populism and anti-establishment politics” that Fishback espouses are here to stay.
In my own coverage of the right, I’ve observed a steady uptick in the far-right drift of young conservatives. At large right-wing events, young conservatives have consistently espoused a deeply nativist strain of politics, and expressed their fandom of Fuentes and his politics. Even young right-wingers who don’t like Fuentes have told me that they’ve witnessed the growing influence of his politics or that they agree with his views and simply see him as an imperfect vessel. Young Republican staffers on Capitol Hill are increasingly open to his far-right, Groyper style of politics.
Fishback was able to show that the energy Fuentes and other young far-right figures online have tapped into isn’t just an internet or a conservative-staffer phenomenon. It’s an ideology that someone savvier and more skilled than Fishback might well leverage to achieve greater real-world success at some point in the near future.
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