Yes, James Fishback will probably lose. Make sure it’s humiliating.
A close loss is a proof of concept. A blowout is a dead end. Tuesday decides which one this was.
Since I wrote about James Fishback a few days ago, the reply I keep getting is some version of relax, he can’t win.
I know. I said so in the piece. He is on my primary ballot Tuesday. He’s polling somewhere between four and twelve for governor of Florida, Byron Donalds is at forty-eight with the president behind him, and the whole thing has been filed under handled.
Nobody is a serious candidate until the morning after.
The left’s version of this took about a decade to get from fringe posting to winning primaries, and at every step the answer was that it wasn’t a real threat yet. Not a serious candidate. Not a real constituency. A few cranks online. Then it was a congresswoman. Then a caucus. Then, two weeks ago, a Senate nominee in Michigan.
Nobody in that chain thought they were watching the first step. Every one of them thought they were watching the last one.
The Margin Is the Message
So let’s take that as given for a minute. Say he can’t win.
I want the number to be humiliating.
Come in respectable and every donor, every consultant, and every twenty-six-year-old with a podcast learns the same lesson: there is a real market for this in Florida, it is cheap, and the only thing missing was somebody willing to pay for it. The next one runs the identical play with a budget.
Come in humiliated and they learn it’s a money pit.
Tuesday is either a footnote or a launch. What decides which isn’t who wins it. It’s how big his number is.
And that’s the argument even if you’re right that he can’t win.
The People Voting for Him Don’t Answer Their Phones
Which brings me to whether you should be so sure of that.
He didn’t build this with a ground game. He built it on a college tour and an algorithm. His base is incels and meme lords—the groyper and manosphere communities a top ADL official told Congress in 2022 are “explicitly white nationalist, anti-semitic and misogynistic spaces”—and whatever else you want to say about that demographic, they are the least likely people on this earth to pick up a call from an unknown number and give a stranger twelve minutes of their evening.
They will, however, absolutely coordinate a turnout push on some Discord server for the lolz.
Ten years ago the British research council that had just built a two-hundred-million-pound polar vessel asked the internet to name it. Boaty McBoatface took thirty-three percent. The name they actually used finished fifth, with less than a tenth of Boaty’s votes. Not one of those people cared about polar science. The poll was simply the nearest available lever, and pulling it was funny.
A closed primary in August is a lever. Turnout ran twenty-seven percent in 2018 and twenty-six in 2022. It does not take much.
The difference is that somebody was allowed to overrule that one. The ship sailed as the Sir David Attenborough. Nobody gets to do that with a primary.
He doesn’t need to beat Byron Donalds. He needs to post a number big enough to look like a constituency worth funding next cycle—and that bar gets lower every time somebody who is certain he has no chance decides it isn’t worth the trip.
While We’re All Being So Calm About This
A reminder of who we are being calm about.
This is the man who told a room that school cafeterias serve “goyslop,” and when a reporter asked him what he meant by it, said because it’s funny, get a life. Who wants Florida to dump every dollar it holds in Israel bonds. Who called the audience of Nick Fuentes—the white supremacist who says the Holocaust is “exaggerated”— “incredibly informed and insightful and very patriotic,” and when the objections came, posted a video saying he wanted to “clarify and apologize—for absolutely nothing.”
There is also this, which I had left alone until now. In a January 2025 petition for a stalking injunction, a former employee of his debate nonprofit alleged that he “initiated a romantic relationship” with her in the spring of 2022, when she was seventeen and he was twenty-seven, and directed her to keep it quiet; her filing called it “an isolation tactic commonly employed in grooming scenarios.” Broward County Public Schools ended his volunteer work that September after a parent complained. Fishback says the allegations are “completely false,” that the relationship began only after she turned eighteen, and that he has “never been arrested, charged, or convicted of any crime”—which is true. No charge was ever brought. A judge denied the petition in June 2025, but on the narrow question of whether he harassed her after the breakup. The court never reached the rest of it.
Asked about the allegations at a campaign stop in April by a Black man with a camera, he said the man should be lynched. Then he said it again.
That’s the résumé. On Tuesday somebody hands it a percentage.
Today, or Tuesday
I know exactly what I am asking for here, and it is not stirring. Give up an hour of a Sunday to change the size of a number in a race that is already over. I would skip it too, if it were about anything else.
If you are registered Republican in Miami-Dade, Broward, Palm Beach, Duval, Hillsborough, Leon, Manatee, Orange, Osceola, Pinellas, or Sarasota—today is the last day of early voting. Hours are not the same everywhere and some sites close as early as four, so check your supervisor of elections before you head out. Then it’s done.
Everywhere else in Florida, it’s Tuesday, seven in the morning to seven at night.
If there is a vote-by-mail ballot sitting on your kitchen counter, do not put it in a mailbox. Drive it to a drop box or your supervisor’s office. It has to be in hand by seven Tuesday night. Postmarks are worth nothing.
Vote for Donalds. Vote for Collins. Vote for Renner. Vote for whichever of them you can stand.
Nobody is a serious candidate until the morning after. His number Tuesday night decides which one he wakes up as.
Relax on Wednesday.
