The crowd on the back patio of the sports pub milled about anxiously. Some 200 or so Floridians, many in their teens and early 20s, had been drawn to this nondescript Miami ale house, on a weeknight in February, by the algorithm.
From Instagram to X to TikTok, they had seen videos of a man named James Fishback, a pugnacious 31-year-old in Warby Parker glasses who is running in the Republican primary for Florida governor.
These platforms had fed them clips of Mr. Fishback making overt references to Mussolini; questioning ties to Israel in a sit-down with Tucker Carlson; and clutching an assault rifle and threatening to “shoot on sight” anyone wishing to do his campaign harm. Many had watched Mr. Fishback as he refused to denounce Nick Fuentes, an avowed antisemite who has endorsed him, and engaged in flame wars with an OnlyFans star after he proposed a “sin tax” on adult content creators.
“His ideas aren’t textbook MAGA,” said Hugo Ruan, a 17-year-old high school student from nearby Weston who had come to the campaign event straight from class.
The ideas in question are a mix of nativist America First stances and edgelord flair, reflecting the enthusiasms shared by young conservatives and far-right influencers on social media but not always by President Trump’s Republican Party. In Mr. Fishback, who has called for the public hanging of Jeffrey Epstein’s co-conspirators and the end of the H-1B visa program, they have found a candidate who has embraced their political fixations.
Mr. Fishback is mounting a long-shot campaign: The favorite in the statewide contest is Byron Donalds, a Trump-endorsed congressman with a $45 million war chest. By comparison, Mr. Fishback, a relative political newcomer, had just $6,000 on hand as of January, according to a quarterly finance report. Mr. Fishback claims the campaign is on track to hit $1 million in contributions by April.
He has also faced several controversies, including legal battles with his former employer, a prominent investment firm, and with a former fiancée, who has said that their relationship began while she was still a minor. There are questions, too, as to whether Mr. Fishback meets Florida’s residency requirements to qualify for the election. (In each instance, Mr. Fishback has downplayed or denied any wrongdoing.)
But Mr. Fishback is refining an emerging style of far-right politicking that has him toggling between trollish online posts and idealistic policy proposals. Fluent in the blunt provocation and ceaseless performance of the internet, Mr. Fishback and his campaign have become darlings of the algorithms, powered in part by “clipper” accounts — social media pages that post video snippets and spread them widely — generating attention among young, conservative voters.
Some of those young voters are participating in electoral politics for the first time, flocking to Waffle House restaurants and campus quads, often in large numbers, to see Mr. Fishback pitch a different kind of politics for a post-Trump era. One where casual racism is common (as evinced by numerous reports of young Republican group chats filled with slurs and epithets), where anti-Israel and anti-tech stances are default positions and where closed-border policies are presented as common-sense fixes.
“He’s appealing to kids that have grown up under this giant cloud of doom,” said Rick Wilson, a former Republican strategist in Florida and the founder of the Lincoln Project, an anti-Trump group. “They’ve gone through Covid to the 2008 financial crisis and the war on terror. They’re not waking up thinking about free-market conservatism or ways to increase shareholder value.”
“Fishback, in many ways,” he added, “seems to be in on the joke.”
‘Floridamaxxing’
At the sports bar, many said they were curious to know more about Mr. Fishback than what they had seen on their feeds.
Mr. Ruan, who will be 18 in time for the August primary, said he learned of the candidate in the fall after seeing his campaign announcement video on TikTok. He said he was “leaning toward” voting for Mr. Fishback because of his views on issues like Israel and his calls to protect the environment.
But before committing, he wanted to see Mr. Fishback operate in person: “I don’t want to hear a five-second clip on TikTok,” he said.
Across the room was Rodrigo Soberon, a 26-year-old print shop employee, who had brought along his girlfriend. He had seen Mr. Fishback’s videos on Instagram Reels and was drawn to his calls to divest Florida taxpayer dollars from Israeli bonds.
“That’s something that not a lot of people say out loud — not in Florida, at least,” said Mr. Soberon, who voted for Mr. Trump in 2024.
Pacing behind a narrow bar, a smudge of ash on his forehead for Lent, Mr. Fishback spent two hours on issues including cost of living, education, the environment and personal liberty. He vowed to eliminate tolls for Florida drivers and state property taxes (“You shouldn’t be paying the government to own your home”), all while promising to implement progressive-sounding initiatives, like paid maternity leave.
The most energetic responses of the evening came after his mentions of Israel. “Some on the new woke right, they would call us antisemitic for saying, ‘No, we’re not giving more money to Israel,’” he said at one point.
He mostly avoided referencing the provocative themes usually seen in his social media posts. In person, he also toned down his attacks against his opponent Mr. Donalds. The Donalds campaign declined to comment for this article, but in a post last month, Mr. Donalds dismissed Mr. Fishback’s campaign as “performative slop.”
Those who had come hoping to catch the more incendiary side of Mr. Fishback captured in TikTok edits may have been disappointed.
On immigration, a centerpiece of his early online talking points, Mr. Fishback — whose mother immigrated from Colombia — straddled the hard-nosed position of America First while avoiding its derisive rhetoric on immigrants. One could detect confusion in the hesitant applause that followed.
“I’m not going to say the reason there’s an affordability crisis is because the guy who cuts your neighbor’s grass came here 30 years ago,” Mr. Fishback said. “There will always be a place for generosity and compassion in America. But we’ve been generous and compassionate enough.”
Online terminology and some extremist politics did, occasionally, burst into full view. Mr. Fishback, with a wink, inserted “looksmaxxing” lingo into his stump speech, promising at one point that he would “mog” Mr. Donalds, meaning, roughly, to dominate. His campaign, he added, would be all about “Floridamaxxing.”
Marlo Mayo, a 19-year-old who studies at Florida International University, said she thought Mr. Fishback’s online strategy was “smart” for catching the attention of Gen Z voters. But she was concerned about the rising influence of streamers like Clavicular, a 20-year-old “looksmaxxer” who espouses a nihilistic and narcissistic vision of masculinity. Mr. Fishback streamed with the influencer in January.
Still, most of this young set seemed to grasp, intuitively, that controversy equals attention in today’s political economy.
Brooklynne Tjetje, a freshman at Florida Atlantic University, didn’t fault Mr. Fishback for his antagonistic online persona. “I wouldn’t say it bothers me at all,” she said. “I think he’s just trying to get his name out there.”
The Makings of a Very Online Campaign
After his speech, Mr. Fishback posed for pictures with a line of followers snaking across the patio. He asked them to tag him and repost the images and any content they had made that evening.
With limited resources, he travels with just a small team of staff members, who have little or no experience working on statewide races. Mr. Fishback said he employed only eight full-time campaign employees. Among them is 18-year-old Kingston Booke, the campaign’s digital director who, before joining the campaign, ran a popular Fishback fan account on X.
“I liked his thoughts on immigration,” Mr. Booke said.
At every campaign event, Mr. Booke streams Mr. Fishback’s appearances for the candidate’s official social media pages. Then, over a group chat on Signal, he coordinates with the campaign’s clippers, young volunteers who chop up footage of Mr. Fishback’s comments and circulate it across the internet.
“Impressions are what matter to us,” Mr. Fishback said later that evening in an interview with The New York Times. He was walking the streets of the Brickell neighborhood of Miami, dodging clusters of heeled nightclubbers, en route to a taping of “Fresh and Fit,” a podcast hosted by Myron Gaines and Walter Weekes that is associated with the manosphere.
In conversation, Mr. Fishback was candid, and at times coy, about his scorched-earth style of campaigning. A former national debate champion and founder of a small investment firm, he’s a rapid-fire talker who frequently uses financial jargon in conversation. (He likes to say that voters should “hire” him, and he speaks of his time selling complex financial products.) Above all, he tends to present his thinking in a blunt, technocratic logic accompanied by a knowing grin.
“If you’re a candidate polling at 2 percent, you have to edge-lord a little bit, let’s be honest,” Mr. Fishback said. Asked about his attacks — denounced by many Republicans as racist — against Mr. Donalds, who is Black, he added, “I actually don’t think the personal attacks against Byron do anything for us.”
Mr. Fishback said he had closely studied Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s campaign, which used social media to help propel to victory the New York assemblyman who once polled at 1 percent. A recent headline in The Spectator, a political magazine in Britain, wondered if Mr. Fishback might be “the right’s answer to Zohran Mamdani.”
Mr. Wilson, the Florida political strategist, said Mr. Fishback might be a harbinger of conservative politics to come, comparing him to Howard Dean, the former Democratic presidential candidate.
“Dean didn’t win the job, but his campaign transformed how candidates approach online activism and fund-raising,” Mr. Wilson said. “We can laugh at Fishback’s absurdities, but I don’t want to undercount the future that he represents.”
After that evening, Mr. Fishback was back online in full effect. Recently, he posted a video of himself shooting an assault rifle at a gun range in Florida’s panhandle. “Pull up, Byron Donalds. Let’s see if you’re really black,” the sinister-sounding caption read. The post, on X, which was viewed upward of three million times, was widely condemned by observers across the political spectrum.
Asked what exactly he meant by it, Mr. Fishback responded in a text message: “We do a little trolling.”
Nathan Taylor Pemberton is a reporter covering politics and culture for The New York Times.
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