James Fishback Is Probably About To Lose. His Politics Might Be Winning.

On a Saturday afternoon in early August, James Fishback paced across a sun-stained library parking lot in south Tampa. The steamy day marked the beginning of early voting in Florida’s closed primaries and Fishback, the hyperactive outsider vying to be the state’s next governor, was trying to avoid the wrath of an irritable poll worker. He had come to greet voters at this temporary polling site but had, apparently, veered too close to the building’s entrance, breaking electioneering rules. Now, he’d been banished off the property.

“Follow me guys,” he said to a small retinue of supporters trailing closely behind him, mostly 20-something men wearing Fishback hats and quarter zips. “We need to stay on the other side of the property line,” Fishback announced, “or they’re going to shoot me on sight, apparently.”

For much of the past year, the 31-year-old has zigzagged up and down Florida’s 830-mile central corridor like a kind of political pied piper, trailed by swarms of young people who appear to be enthralled by his anti-establishment views and knack for agitation. Most first came to learn of his candidacy in snippets, usually TikTok reels and Instagram clips, fed into their feeds. In these clips, they watched Fishback, who is white, describe Byron Donalds, a Trump-endorsed U.S. congressman representing nearby Fort Myers who, if elected, would be the state’s first Black governor a “DEI hire” and a “slave” to the Republican establishment. (When I asked a volunteer with the county GOP to summarize Fishback’s candidacy to me, she laughed out loud. “It’s complicated,” she said. “You should ask AI to tell you his story.”)

Despite the litany of small controversies nipping at Fishback, his supporters don’t seem thrown. They’re content watching him on their phones condemning the same things they had grown disgusted with. Things like the rising costs of purchasing a home, rampant overdevelopment, Flock surveillance cameras, new AI data centers, seemingly endless foreign wars and the unquestioning flow of American resources to foreign countries like Israel. They want him, as many would tell throughout the day, to take back Florida, to make it come first again.

Fishback’s impromptu meet-and-greet at the library was the first of three voting site visits he had planned for the day. The events were typical of his statewide campaign to date — a lean, guerilla effort, unrestrained by the whims of strategists and paid consultants. Or, for that matter, any form of support from the state GOP, which has stubbornly ignored his bid. The Donalds’ campaign and its aligned PACs are already looking towards the general election, having spent upwards of $28 million in ads attacking David Jolly, the presumed Democratic nominee. (The Donalds campaign declined to comment on Fishback and his tactics.) 

Over the next hour, Fishback posed for selfies and fielded questions and compliments from some two dozen supporters, all eager to share that they had just pulled the lever for him or planned to.

“But who are your parents voting for?” Fishback interjected during one interaction with a college-aged looking man wearing gold Nike Dunks. “I’m still working on them,” he replied, shaking his head.

Most, if not all, expressed similar straints of political disenchantment. Asked to describe their politics, they self-identified as everything from former Obama supporters and active progressives (recently registered as Republicans to support Fishback) to forlorn MAGA faithful disappointed in the president — in addition to a handful of uncategorizable independents and libertarians charmed to have found, at last, a candidate to represent their tastes. And should Fishback lose, a very possible outcome given that polling averages show Donalds with a steady cushion of over 30 percentage points, most refused to pledge their support to the likely GOP nominee.

One 23-year-old, a self-pronounced America Firster named Kendrick who declined to provide his last name, answered bluntly when posed with the question. “I’m voting Democrat. I’m supporting anybody but Byron Donalds,” he said. “It’s Fishback or bust for the Republican party. If there’s not an American First candidate like him in the party, then I guess I’m not a Republican.”

It’s unlikely Fishback’s head-turning mad dash through Florida’s political landscape will end in victory, yet it’s just as likely that should he lose, Fishback will go down as the most influential loser in recent political history — one whose electoral blitzkrieg has appeared to mold a new political coalition of the disaffected and uninitiated. There are glimpses of it taking shape. Take, for instance, the University of North Florida poll from February that revealed Fishback as the dominant preference for Florida voters under the age of 35.

Regardless of these signals that Fishback is doing something new, he’s been shut out by the state’s political establishment. Earlier this June, they revoked his invite to debate Donalds at a party conference in Tampa. Evan Powers, who heads up the Florida GOP, cited what they say are Fishback’s “antisemitic and racist attacks” on party members. Another GOP candidate in the race, Lt. governor Jay Collins, also attempted to kick Fishback off the ballot, citing residency issues. Earlier this month, a state judge shut down that effort and ruled that Fishback could remain on the ballot. Fishback, in response, compared himself to Trump, noting that the president had to endure similar attacks from establishment figures. “And how’d that work out for him?” he asked rhetorically.

With his meager resources to run a traditional media blitz, Fishback and his tiny team of digital natives have focused on a different tactic: fighting for the attention of voters like Kendrick who feel politically homeless.

To earn their attention, Fishback has waged what many national observers have now taken to calling a very online campaign. He’s posted dog-whistle race bait and live-streamed with manosphere influencers such as Clavicular and Sneako, who each boast millions of followers. He’s also earned the admiration of far-right streamers such as Tucker Carlson and Nick Fuentes, both dominant voices of the budding America First movement. But he’s also become a political force on his own strength. Videos from his hundreds of spontaneous campaign stops across the state, occurring at off-the-beaten path venues including Taco Bells and Waffle Houses, college quads and all-night diners, routinely show swarms of hyped-up supporters who look thrilled just to be in his presence. One of his pop-up events at a gas station parking lot in central Florida was attended by hundreds of young supporters. Fishback operates like a savvy digital strategist on the stump, quick to talk up his campaign’s engagement numbers and disciplined enough to ask supporters to repost, share and like the content he’s creating with them.

It’s a campaign strategy that raises an increasingly important question as the worlds of mainstream politics and online culture converge: Can viral moments and novel gimmicks — like public confrontations or forays into new media spaces, where streamers and podcasters earn more views than network news hits — actually be enough to win elections? Are such tactics the future of electoral politics, or is the battle to win the attention economy a doomed journey toward a shimmering mirage?

It’s quickly become axiomatic that to run a successful campaign in this current political environment, a candidate must be terminally online. The winning lessons of Trump’s 2024 trek through the manosphere and Zohran Mamdani’s charming online offensive a year after that have become ingrained for this current crop of mid-cycle candidates. For outsider candidates waging costly battles against establishment-backed candidates, the added exposure (or clout) provided by an alliance with an online political influencer — or by maintaining a highly-active online presence — is proving, in many races, to tip the scales. It’s already looking like Michigan senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed’s shoestring victory in that state’s very online Democratic primary came about, in part, because of his willingness to welcome the internet into his operation, particularly the political influencer Hasan Piker, the firebrand advocate for democratic socialism.

Fishback, for his part, has been vocal about taking inspiration from Mamdani. They are ideological opposites, to be sure, but the campaign creativity seems to be analogous. Fishback is pushing the limits of this strategy. But rather than run a campaign in two discrete realms — one in the internet’s attention economy and the other on the ground in Florida — he appears to be proposing a more extreme approach. Fishback has turned himself into a populist conduit for the extreme political views amplified by the internet, blurring any boundary between the two realms. As more and more Americans relocate every aspect of their lives online — including the emotional, the social and the political — Fishback has emerged as a futuristic political figure who understands that if a politician can occupy a place in someone’s phone, they effectively occupy a place in their head.

“This is new age America,” a Fishback supporter named Cody Boggs told me. “The old politics is out.” A 26-year-old RV auto mechanic, Boggs told me that his last statewide vote was for Governor Ron Desantis in 2018. He also went on to say that he was only interested in “new blood” candidates capable of resetting political establishments on both sides of the spectrum. For Boggs, who went on to share that his largest frustration was the spread of Flock cameras into the stretches of wilderness where he hunts, Fishback is a vessel for this new blood. In part, Boggs thinks, because he’s the kind of candidate rugged enough for the strenuous dialogues of a hyper-informed political generation, who demand an instant accountability (and authenticity) from their leaders.

“So many politicians are leaving our questions unanswered,” Boggs noted. “But Fishback isn’t shying away from anything.”

Throughout the day on Saturday, Fishback’s maximalist tactics were on full display. At the last of his pollsite stops that afternoon, he recited his latest ploy: handing out his personal campaign email to anyone who asks. “Look at my inbox,” he said, swiping through what looked like a flood of incoming messages. “I will personally respond to anyone who emails me. This isn’t a joke.” He intended to directly call 500 undecided voters in the coming days, and allow another 10 undecided voters to personally interview him on camera.

“The great thing about all of it is that it’s content,” he told me that evening at a cocktail hour hosted by a group associated with the National Federation of College Republicans, which had held their biannual conference that same day in Tampa. “I’ll call 500 people and I won’t only just reach 500 people. I’ll probably reach two million by creating all these videos,” Fishback said.

To many critics, his over-reliance on gimmicks like these signals the campaign’s stalled prospects and an overall lack of seriousness — that he’s merely a provocateur chasing attention. His consistently distant standing in polling on the race hasn’t helped either. A recent report in Axios described the governor’s race as “sleepy” and “uncontested.”

Fishback, unsurprisingly, views his approach in radically opposite terms. “It’s about leaving no man behind, and I think that’s why so many voters have been so receptive to me. We have shown up at places we’re not supposed to show up at,” he said to me. “Those things matter.”

As if to emphasize things, in the middle of Fishback’s response, we were suddenly interrupted by a squad of, once again, college-aged men who appeared to be in full-tilt bachelor-party mode. “You’re James Fishback,” one of them yelled, as if spotting an SEC quarterback in the wild. Before they could get close enough for a selfie, Fishback’s security man intervened. Afterward, when I asked if they planned to vote for Fishback, they sheepishly informed me that they were from Maryland. But to a man, they told me that they love his content.

Unruffled, Fishback continued: “My view has always been, how do you actually connect with voters in a way that makes them feel represented? I always look for very cheap asymmetric bets. And the cheapest asymmetric bet is always going to be to do the thing that no one’s ever done before. That’s going to be our special sauce in this race. And we’re going to absolutely kill it over the next week.”

Even more audaciously, Fishback suggested not only that his victory was imminent but that Donalds would drop to third. The claim, like so many of the sensational takes he’s doled out to the media and blasted out to audiences across the country, sounded ludicrous and irrational. But, for the briefest of moments, it also seized my attention.

Later that evening, as party boats drifted into the harbor behind us, I sat down with Wes Renaud, the president of the University of South Florida College Republicans. Renaud was the person responsible for inviting Fishback to the evening’s event, and I asked him what he thought of Fishback’s chances.

He told me that when his chapter conducted a straw poll on the race back in February, the split was 80 percent to 20 percent for Donalds. “By the end of the semester,” Renaud continued, “the poll had flipped 80 percent to 20 percent for Fishback.”

Renaud, 25, went on to share what he viewed as a party-wide effort to suppress any support for non-GOP approved candidates, suggesting that a full picture of his support was impossible to measure. “I get told all the time that Fishback is radioactive, that we’ll lose donor support for having him speak. So many Republicans fear retribution for supporting Fishback, but I will tell you that there is a large, silent faction that is going to show out for Fishback this coming week.”

When it comes to Fishback, the biggest question looming over Tuesday’s results appears to be less about his winning or losing, but whether his candidacy will serve as a signal flare heralding the post-MAGA era. Will his kamikaze run mark the inception of a radical style of politicking that operates at the high-speeds of our networked lives and that runs on the populist wavelengths of our platformed communities? It seems all but certain that this dark energy will continue to surge, but who will direct the flows?

Fishback might abandon his pursuit for power should he lose in the primary. He could, like so many internet phenomena, rapidly disappear into the collective memory hole like some incomprehensible viral trend. But will his supporters, particularly the ones who have, at long last, found a designated leader to unburden them of their political dissatisfactions, accept such an outcome?

“I don’t think he’ll stop,” said Logan West, who was one of two dozen Fishback supporters to whom I posed the question. Until Fishback, the 21-year-old told me he had never cared much for politics and never had voted. He had never felt like he was a part of a movement, until now. “If James doesn’t win this time, he’ll win eventually,” West said.

“Wherever James goes,” he told me, “I’ll follow.”