What James Fishback reveals about the new populist right

“I regret nothing,” James Fishback tells me. The Republican Party’s only prominent right-populist insurgent is polling at around 10 percent, well behind Rep. Byron Donalds, the Trump-endorsed, state-party anointee who, though refusing to debate his opponents, appears poised to become Florida’s next governor. Still, Fishback warns against counting him out: “There’s a secret sauce. I’m not gonna spill the beans on how we’re doing it.” He’s preparing for an “absolute landslide.” Without providing polling, he claims that both his campaign and Donalds’s have found the race “neck-in-neck.”

Since launching his campaign last November, Fishback has become a lightning rod for the discourse and a darling of Gen Z right-wingers in Florida and nationwide. The half-Colombian, half-fourth-generation Floridian campaigns against “data centers, Flock cameras, the H-1B scam, [and] foreign nationals from India and China flooding public colleges,” — and revels in bombast. He calls his Black opponent a “slave” to AIPAC and turns his contempt for pornography into viral clickbait — see his weeks of sparring with the OnlyFans top-model Sophie Rain. Most conspicuous are his overtures to Groypers, adherents of white nationalist streamer Nick Fuentes. Fishback adopts the subculture’s vocabulary, decrying public-school cafeteria food as “goyslop.”

Fishback’s candidacy has always faced steep odds against the state’s Republican establishment, which has boxed him out of key events. He is now the target of AI-generated ads depicting him alongside Candace Owens, the ex-Daily Wire conspiracy theorist, and Dan Bilzerian, the brazenly antisemitic challenger to Rep. Randy Fine (R-Fla.). The intended audience is low-information, high-propensity older voters who hardly constitute Fishback’s base. “It’s becoming clearer that there isn’t........

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