Byron Donalds, who's running for governor, has drawn a unique cast of characters. The cast includes former members of Congress and pardon recipients from President Trump. And many of them have only recent ties to the district, which includes parts of Cape Coral, Naples and Fort Myers, and the state.
One of the candidates running for this southwest Florida U.S. House seat is John Strand, a former model and actor, and a convicted and pardoned Jan. 6 rioter, who grew up in Beverly Hills, Calif. But Strand is not the only candidate running for the strongly Republican 19th Congressional District without deep roots in Florida.
In this crowded GOP primary, where almost all 10 candidates are Trump loyalists, a tension has developed between candidates who claim deeper ties to the community and those who recently moved here — for work, warmer weather or to run in this race. Even the candidate who won Trump's endorsement last week, Catalina Lauf, moved to Florida recently and ran for Congress multiple times in Illinois, as recently as 2022. While some candidates are accusing each other of being carpetbaggers — someone who relocates to gain political power — voters, many of whom are themselves out-of-state transplants, say they care more about the representation of their conservative values than where someone's from.
Outside Seed to Table, a popular local grocery store, Jeanine Rutherford, a 67-year-old Naples resident, said one of her preferred candidates is Strand, because "he comes from a very conservative family and he wants to preserve conservative values," and that it didn't matter that he wasn't from Florida. Inside the venue, Strand said it was "rich and hypocritical" for some candidates to call others "carpetbaggers" because a lot of Florida residents are from somewhere else. He stressed that he moved to the district before the seat became open, adding, "A lot of people in Florida 19th … very clearly moved here it seems like five minutes ago to run for Byron's seat." Other candidates, such as Jim Schwartzel, a local media mogul and one of the few longtime Florida candidates, have campaigned by attacking those who don't have deep ties to the state.
"Many of the candidates running for Congress here aren't even from here," one ad for Schwartzel states. "Failed politicians from Chicago and New York couldn't get elected in their own state, so they moved here." The ad also takes aim at candidates who did get elected, like former Congressman Chris Collins, from New York. He served time in prison for insider trading and lying to the FBI before receiving a pardon from Trump in late 2020.
Collins declined to comment for this story. Schwartzel's ad also targets Jim Oberweis, a former Illinois state lawmaker who ran for multiple offices in that state. "I've owned a home in Florida longer than any of my opponents," said Oberweis, when asked how he reacts to the term "carpetbagger" being lobbed at him.
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