Republican Byron Donalds was met by about a dozen peaceful protesters outside a gubernatorial campaign stop in downtown Orlando Wednesday. It’s the MAGA gubernatorial hopeful’s latest stop in his statewide “Defending the Florida Dream” tour, launched last month in The Villages.
Protesters opposed to Donalds’ 2026 bid for governor gathered outside across the street from the campaign event — held at high-rise Eola View building across from the Orlando Public Library — to show Donalds he wasn’t welcome in the Democratic-leaning City Beautiful.
“He calls Trump ‘daddy’ — he’s his puppet,” said Theresa O’Mara, 67, a longtime Floridian originally from New York, not dissimilar to Brooklyn native Donalds.
“He’s for himself,” O’Mara argued. “And he’s no different than any other Republican.”
The protest of Donalds’ campaign event was organized by Orlando 50501, a grassroots anti-Trump group that operates as a local affiliate of a national movement formed in 2025 that stands in opposition to the Trump administration’s far-right policies.
“I saw in 50501 an umbrella under which so many other struggles could be grouped together in the recognition that these are truly all one struggle, and we will have a much greater chance of success if we fight them that way,” said Corey Hill, a longtime activist and organizer with Orlando 50501 who joined the protest outside Donalds’ campaign event Wednesday.
Donalds, a Trump-endorsed candidate and U.S. House Representative who’s currently considered the GOP frontrunner in the 2026 race, is vying to succeed Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, another far-right governor who’s term-limited from running for reelection this year.
In addition to “daddy’s” approval, Donalds has also received endorsements from the late Charlie Kirk, tech billionaire Elon Musk, former governor and U.S. Sen. Rick Scott, and powerful business lobbying groups like the Associated Industries of Florida — a group that lobbied to kill the adoption of extreme heat protections for Florida’s outdoor workers — and the Florida Restaurant and Lodging Association — a group that lobbied to roll back some of Florida’s child labor protections in 2024.
“From his time in the Florida Legislature to his service in Congress, Byron Donalds has proven time and again that he understands the unique challenges facing our industry and is willing to take decisive action to remove unnecessary regulations, support workforce growth and keep Florida a top tourist destination,” said Carol Dover, CEO and president of the FRLA, in a statement announcing the endorsement. “We are confident he will be a decisive leader and strong partner who will advance policies that keep our industry and Florida’s economy strong.”
Hill is less impressed. “They sometimes call the states the laboratories of democracy, and now they’re more like the laboratories of fascism, and Florida is one of those states where every horrible idea has been trotted out, and I see Donalds as really embracing and wanting to extend that trend,” he said.
Donalds, who has committed himself to implementing President Donald Trump’s agenda in Florida, is facing several challengers in the upcoming Republican primary, including former Florida House speaker Paul Renner, lieutenant governor Jay Collins, and “edgelord” investor James Fishback, who has repeatedly described Donalds — who is Black — as a “slave” to Israel.
“[Donalds] took $45 million from AIPAC, from corporate donors and from a hedge fund billionaire who was named 39 times in the Epstein files,” Fishback claimed in an interview with the Weekly in late March. “He is a slave, and if you want me to stop calling him that, he should give back the money to the billionaires who are trying to destroy our state, to the foreign interests who are passing an anti-semitism law that punishes Muslims, Christians and, yes, even Jews.”
The campaign contributions from AIPAC — a dominant pro-Israel lobbying force — also bother Hill.
“AIPAC, as an institution, is trying to reputation launder for an apartheid state tha’s engaged in genocide,” Hill told the Weekly, referencing the Israel-Hamas conflict in Gaza. “So when people spend a lot of money, they do so for a reason, and AIPAC in particular spends a lot of money to try and shape the conversation around the Israeli state and their actions and how that relates to U.S. domestic politics.”
Donalds has also faced criticism from the right for his support for building energy-hungry artificial intelligence data centers in Florida, including in rural communities. Donalds, notably, has received millions of dollars in funding for his campaign from Leading the Future, a pro-AI super PAC.
“I think if you’re talking about where they go, you want them to be only in industrial-zoned areas or if they’re in a rural area, you want it to be set back from other homes, other farms, stuff like that,” Donalds told 92.5 FM Fox News radio host Jason Jones in a February interview, as reported by Florida Politics. “You don’t want it to be built in somebody’s lap.”
Donalds’ broader campaign platform also hits on other issues closer to home. He has touted hardline positions on immigration (including support for a new federal immigrant detention center in Orlando), “keeping radical woke ideology out of schools,” supporting “school choice” — his wife Erika is “intimately involved” in the Trump Administration’s pro-privatization education policy, according to Politico — and fighting the “Left’s agenda.”
He’s also highlighted on his website issues of environmental protection, addressing Florida’s affordability crisis, and expanding “economic opportunity” in part through loosening regulation and lowering taxes.
Recent polling shows Donalds continues to lead among the Republican primary candidates with 54 percent from likely Florida GOP voters, according to a poll by Fabricio, Lee and Associates, followed by 9 percent support for Fishback and 7 percent for Collins. Twenty-eight percent of polled voters, however, said they still don’t know who they plan to vote for.
On the Democratic side, Donalds has competitors that include former GOP Congressman David Jolly (who switched his party affiliation to Democrat shortly before announcing his gubernatorial bid) and Orange County Mayor Jerry Demings. Florida hasn’t had a Democratic governor since 1999, and voters haven’t elected a Democrat to a statewide office since 2018.
O’Mara, of Orlando, said she would prefer to have a gubernatorial candidate who takes positions similar to those of U.S. Congressman Maxwell Frost — a progressive from Orlando — and someone who “fights for the people” and “gets involved in community affairs, fights every single day for us.”
Hill said he would, ideally, like to see a gubernatorial candidate willing to expand access to affordable healthcare, review the state government’s attacks on home rule, expand mass public transit, and terminate government agreements with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
Affordability, of course, is another issue top of mind. “Florida is between like 44th and 49th [in the U.S.] in terms of affordability, and that is not the result of natural forces like gravity. These are choices that were made, and they’re choices that can be unmade.”
The Wall Street Journal recently profiled the changing landscape for Florida massive influx of residents during the COVID-19 pandemic, reporting that the number of people moving to Florida from another U.S. state “has overall slowed to a trickle in the past few years,” while younger, working-class residents and families have moved out of state for a more affordable cost of living.
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