‘Florida is Full’: James Fishback’s running pitch for governor

Donalds, a third-term congressman from southwest Florida, entered the race for governor in February with an endorsement from Trump but not DeSantis. He’d broken with DeSantis by endorsing Trump for president over his governor. Did DeSantis’ wife Casey want to run for the job? Too late, Donalds was already running.

“He just hasn’t been a part of any of the victories that we’ve had here over the left,” DeSantis said when Donalds got into the race.

Fishback’s pitch is that he played a fairly large part in MAGA’s second wind, for a private citizen, and has thought more than Donalds about how to fix Florida. He has staked out a contrarian position in Florida’s most nationally resonant issue — whether to pitch itself as a welcoming home for moneyed New Yorkers — by saying that “Florida is full” and that hedge funders worried about Mamdani’s win should find somewhere else to go.

His resume includes fighting for Trump’s right to replace Fed governors, founding an anti-woke debate program, and glomming onto the right’s attacks on corporate boardrooms it sees as hijacked by left-wing scolds. (He crafted, but never sent, a letter to Pepsi’s board urging it to bring back Aunt Jemima, the cartoon pitchwoman retired during corporate America’s progressive pivot.)

Until launching his gubernatorial campaign, Fishback, who prefers American-flag reaction emojis in place of Apple’s default thumbs-up, was best known for a bizarre and short-lived career on Wall Street. He dropped out of Georgetown University to start investing, eventually managing $15 million, he said, and making bets on the direction of the global economy. He says he messaged Greenlight Capital’s David Einhorn via Bloomberg terminal in 2019 with a trade idea — a bet that the Federal Reserve would cut interest rates, as it did that — then parlayed that moneymaker into a job at the hedge fund despite lacking a college degree.

A subsequent spat over his title and contributions escalated into dueling lawsuits and online trolling that bemused Wall Street and vaulted Fishback into the public eye. Greenlight did not return a request for comment.

Fishback then founded his investment firm, Azoria, and raised $25 million late last year from Bedrock Ventures and Justin Caldbeck, a venture investor who left his firm in 2017 after accusations of sexual harassment, people familiar with the matter said. (Fishback previously declined to name Azoria’s financial backers, telling Semafor that they included “two prominent conservative-minded California venture capitalists” and several family offices.) Bedrock and Caldbeck did not respond to requests for comment.

Most of Azoria’s managed assets are in a “meritocracy” fund that mirrors the S&P 500 but excludes about three dozen companies, including Nike and Airbnb, whose diversity policies Fishback dislikes. Their exclusion is more politically relevant than financially: None of the Magnificent 7 stocks are excluded, so the Azoria Meritocracy ETF has slightly lagged the index after accounting for the higher fees it charges.

Fishback floated himself as a candidate for the Federal Reserve job eventually filled by Stephen Miran. “You just call and pitch yourself,” he said, capturing the art of succeeding — or at least failing up — in Trump’s Washington. “I’m blessed that I’m able to call the president and make my case. He picked someone who’s great.”

Donalds has supported Trump from a larger platform. Fishback believes that he can create his own, and that Republican activists will realize which candidate has serious ideas.

“All he talks about is Trump this, Trump that,” Fishback said of Donalds. “But you go to his website, and his official platform is around 120 words. The No. 1 thing is ‘enact the Trump agenda.’ That’s it?”

The speech Fishback gave on Tuesday, to a GOP group at a Jacksonville country club, repeated what he’d been saying on X and on his frequent TV news hits. Florida needed to develop slower and smarter. Anyone with happy talk about AI data centers or endless growth was going to destroy the state.

“We don’t need a 15th dollar store in the same ZIP Code,” he said. “To the people in New York who elected that communist named Zohran Mamdani: I’m sorry for your loss. That’s your problem. It’s got nothing to do with us. Don’t you come down here from New York ... and think that you’re going to run away from your problems.”

This was thrilling for Pam King, one of the local activists who lined up to talk with Fishback after his speech. She ticked off the places that had become more crowded, and less beautiful, because of the development that no politician wanted to stop.

“On Atlantic Boulevard, turning to St. Johns Bluff, it used to be wooded when we moved here,” she said. “Now, it’s all car dealerships.” Her husband had an idea: a lottery for entry into Florida, with only the winners allowed to move in and build.

Fishback hasn’t gone that far. But he is confident that he could talk his way into the race, and that Donalds is a weak frontrunner, polling in the high 40s, “behind that MAGA rising star, Undecided.” Donalds has raised more than $31 million, and Fishback figures he would need just $5 million to beat him.

“When people tell me you need $100 million to run, I ask them: What would I spend it on?” he said. He was traveling the state with the 23-year-old chief strategist at Azoria, now his campaign chief of staff. He filmed his launch video in Marianna, a small panhandle city with a Civil War history he liked; it was filmed by a 19-year-old sports reporter from Troy University, who he found “scrolling through Instagram.”

Everybody knows that DeSantis wanted to back a winner against Donalds. Fishback’s goal is to become the sort of candidate that “Ron DeSantis would vote for.” He feels he has already been doing better on that count than Lt. Gov. Jay Collins, who DeSantis had appointed to the job, and who is considered a likely candidate.

On Thursday, as Fishback was cutting together his campaign video, a reporter for the conservative Floridian Press replied to Collins on X, urging him to say something about Donalds.

“H-1Byron,” wrote Collins.

Trump’s success at capturing attention, then votes, has convinced people like Fishback that they can ride the same rocket. Before running for governor, he offered himself up as a candidate for Marco Rubio’s Senate seat, and he got Elon Musk and Republicans talking about a “DOGE dividend,” a check drawn from potential cost-cutting savings, by posting about it.