There’s a Man on Your Ballot Tuesday Who Thinks School Lunch Is a Jewish Plot
Florida Republicans, you have until Tuesday to prove you won’t do what the other side just did.
I wish that headline were a bit. He’s on my ballot. I’m a Florida voter and, as of last month, a registered Republican—a sentence I never expected to type.
In February, at the University of Central Florida, a man running for governor said if you wanted our kids to fail, “you would feed them the absolute goyslop in our cafeterias.” The room laughed and applauded. Then he added: “And that is on gentile, OK?”
Goy means non-Jew. Slop means what you think it means. Put them together and you have 4chan’s word for the processed garbage Jews are supposedly feeding the rest of you to keep you fat, sick, and slow—“anything unhealthy supposedly created by Jews to weaken the world,” as the Forward defined it. It’s been on those boards since at least 2019. That’s not my reading of it. It has never meant anything else.
The walk-back came in three stages, which is two more than most people need. At the Florida State Fair, eating a fried Oreo: “I used a term recently this week that I got a lot of flak for, about referring to the food in our public cafeterias. I don’t know what that term was.” He had said it days earlier, into a microphone, to a room that applauded. Then a reporter asked why: “Because it’s funny. Get a life.” Then, five months later: “I would say get over it.”
His name is James Fishback. He is thirty-one. He has promised to divest the roughly $385 million he says Florida holds in Israel bonds on day one, and says he will not visit Israel under any circumstances. Axios reports he has pledged not to enforce Florida’s antisemitism law. He’d rather fly to Brazil for jobs, he told a college crowd, than visit countries “just to kiss a stupid wall.”
He also says he has “consistently condemned hatred against Jewish Americans.” Those are his words too. Pick whichever set you like.
Early voting is open right now. The primary is Tuesday.
I Have Seen More of This Man Than I Want to Admit
I am chronically online. This is not a brag. In six months my phone has handed me more James Fishback than anything I actually asked for—Reels, TikToks, ads, clips of the clips.
I have not been served a single post for any other candidate in this race. Not one.
That says more about my algorithm than about Florida—my For You page is a crime scene, I know. But there’s a whole category of voter who doesn’t watch cable news, doesn’t read the Herald, and gets a hundred percent of their politics off a phone. For them he isn’t one of eleven names on a ballot.
He’s the only one they’ve heard of.
Nobody Saw the Last Two Coming Either
The polls have him at four, or eight, or twelve, depending which one you pick up. Byron Donalds is at forty-eight. Everyone has filed this away as handled.
The most famous photograph in American politics is a grinning man holding up a newspaper that called it for the other guy.
Last week Abdul El-Sayed won the Michigan Democratic Senate primary despite a record $30.6 million spent trying to stop him. Last summer the final polls in New York had Andrew Cuomo up eight on Zohran Mamdani; Mamdani took the first round by eight and the final count by thirteen. A sixteen-point miss. The polling industry spent the rest of the summer explaining itself.
I’m not telling you he wins. I’m telling you the last two times the internet handed a primary to somebody the grown-ups had written off; they found out on election night. And the people Fishback does well with are the hardest voters in America to poll: young, online, checked out of an August primary until a Reel tells them it matters. One late-July poll had him running first among Republicans under forty-five—twenty-six percent under thirty, thirty-eight percent of those thirty to forty-four—while he sat at twelve percent overall.
Hating Israel is a whole personality now. It comes free with a TikTok account.
Your Turn
The Democrats keep getting handed this exact test. They keep failing it in public. Their extremists win primaries, the party clears its throat and finds a way to live with it, and a lot of us walked out over that.
Florida Republicans have a live one on the ballot and a chance to do what the other side wouldn’t. Not with a statement—those already happened. The state party rescinded his invitation to its own candidate forum over what it called his “antisemitic and racist attacks on members of our party.” Congressman Randy Fine, who co-wrote Florida’s antisemitism law as a state legislator, refused to show up: “If the RPOF wants to host a Neo-Nazi rally, they will do it without me.”
None of it stopped him. The only thing left that he can’t spin is a number.
So here’s how you make one. You can’t switch parties now; that shut July 20. This is for the nearly 5.6 million of you already registered Republican. Early voting runs through Saturday in all sixty-seven counties, longer in some. Tuesday, polls are open seven to seven. If there’s a mail ballot on your counter, don’t mail it—drive it over. It has to be in hand by seven. Postmarks don’t count.
There are eleven Republicans on that ballot. Three of them are real: Byron Donalds, the congressman with the president’s endorsement; Jay Collins, the lieutenant governor; and Paul Renner, who ran the state House. Vote for one of them. I don’t care which and neither should you.
I’m Not Picking a Team
Last month a rabbi in Boca Raton told his Orthodox congregation to register as Democrats so they could vote against a challenger backed by the Democratic Socialists of America in Jared Moskowitz’s primary. He has a thousand families. I have friends, family, and whoever is still reading—and I’m telling them the opposite, for the same reason. Neither of us is picking a team. We’re picking whichever primary has the person who wants us gone.
I didn’t change my registration until four days before that July 20 deadline, in a parking lot, on my phone, because it meant admitting two things out loud: the party I grew up in isn’t that party, and safety now outranks every other thing I care about.
And yes, I know how this reads. A woman who registered last month, telling a party what it owes her, about a candidate who will probably lose anyway. It’s worse than that, actually—the antisemitism that frightens me most this year is inside the tent I just walked into, and the other tent is worse is a true sentence that fixes nothing. I don’t have tidy answers for any of it. I’m asking anyway.
I voted for Trump in 2024. Me in 2016 would have been appalled. Me in 2020 would have been mortified. I have never said it publicly until this sentence—and nobody who decided I’m a MAGA extremist over the past three years needed the information. They got there because I spend my working life defending Israel out loud and saying the word antisemitism at a volume people find embarrassing. That comes with a file whether you’ve earned it or not. I stopped caring what’s in mine sometime after October 7, around when it got clear that most people don’t hold a position on anything if holding it costs them something.
Neither party has my loyalty, and neither is getting it back. But one of them has until Tuesday to show the rest of us it still has a floor.
His number Tuesday night is the only one that ever gets printed, and it will be quoted for four years by people who need it to be bigger.
Make it small.
