Trump backs Illinois transplant Catalina Lauf for Florida 19th seat
Republicans in Florida’s 19th Congressional District head to the polls Tuesday to choose a nominee for the southwest Florida seat being vacated by Rep. Byron Donalds, who is running for governor. The crowded, 10-candidate race for the strongly Republican district has turned on how many of the candidates can claim genuine roots in the community.
Former members of Congress and recipients of presidential pardons are among the field, and many of them have only recent ties to the district and the state. A tension has developed between candidates who claim deeper ties to the community and those who moved here recently — for work, for warmer weather or to run in this race. Some candidates accuse rivals of being “carpetbaggers,” the term for someone who relocates to gain political power.
One candidate is John Strand, a former model and actor and a convicted and pardoned Jan. 6 rioter who grew up in Beverly Hills, Calif. Strand said it was “rich and hypocritical” for some candidates to call others carpetbaggers because many Florida residents come from somewhere else. He said he moved to the district before the seat opened, adding: “A lot of people in Florida 19th … very clearly moved here it seems like five minutes ago to run for Byron’s seat.”
Trump’s endorsement went to Catalina Lauf, who moved to Florida recently and ran for Congress in Illinois multiple times, most recently in 2022. In a Thursday evening endorsement, Trump said Lauf “has proven she has the Courage and Wisdom to deliver strong results,” pointing to her tenure at the U.S. Department of Commerce during his first administration. Campaigning in early August with veterans in Naples, Lauf said her belief in “faith, family and freedom” sets her apart from candidates she accused of not embodying those values, some of whom she described as liberals.
“I can’t control where I was born, but I can control where I want to build a life,” Lauf said. “And this is where my husband and I wanted to raise our future family with like-minded values, in the free state of Florida.”
Some longtime Florida candidates have made the roots question the centerpiece of their campaigns. Jim Schwartzel, a local media mogul and one of the few longtime Florida candidates in the field, has run ads declaring that many of the candidates “aren’t even from here.” One ad states: “Failed politicians from Chicago and New York couldn’t get elected in their own state, so they moved here.” The ad also takes aim at candidates who did get elected elsewhere, including former New York Rep. Chris Collins, who served time in prison for insider trading and lying to the FBI before receiving a pardon from Trump in late 2020. Collins declined to comment for this story.
Jim Oberweis, a former Illinois state lawmaker who ran for multiple offices in that state, faces similar attacks. Asked how he reacts to being called a carpetbagger, Oberweis said: “I’ve owned a home in Florida longer than any of my opponents. And we’ve had a home in Bonita Springs for 16 years.”
Many voters, themselves transplants, said the distinction carries little weight. Jeanine Rutherford, a 67-year-old Naples resident, said one of her preferred candidates is Strand because “he comes from a very conservative family and he wants to preserve conservative values,” and that his origins outside Florida did not matter. Therese Wilkinson, a 26-year-old stay-at-home mom in Fort Myers, said she does not care that candidates are from other states, pointing out that many residents of the 19th District are transplants.
Jim Dean, an operations manager who splits his time between Florida and Pennsylvania, also said candidates’ origins do not matter to him, adding: “It’s about the foundation.” Dean said he is voting for Mike Pedersen, a retired Marine and former boxing and wrestling coach who has lived in Cape Coral for 26 years, because Pedersen is “not an anchor baby” and because Dean appreciates his “old school American values.” Despite his long ties to Florida, Pedersen has barely made a dent in local polls.
Mercedes Price-Harry, a local county Republican Party official, said the array of out-of-state candidates is only part of a wider wave: other hopefuls with no local connection called asking whether they should move to the district and run, she said. She warned them against assuming an easy win. “People see southwest Florida and they think we’re ruby red and they think … it’s the sleepy little community in the corner way down in the middle of nowhere,” said Price-Harry, describing the assumption that an out-of-state candidate could arrive and “talk about my conservative bona fides” and have voters “eating out of my hand.” She added that people do not realize how particular and protective southwest Floridians are about their community. “What they don’t realize is when they get here, we’re savages,” said Price-Harry.
Because Florida does not hold primary runoffs, Tuesday’s winner could capture the nomination with a relatively small share of the vote, and the nominee is likely to win November’s general election in the safe red seat. Among the other candidates is Madison Cawthorn, ousted from his North Carolina congressional seat in 2022 after multiple scandals; Linda Sawyer, campaigning on her health care plan, who has run for Congress from Michigan before and lives there part time; Ola Hawatmeh, who previously ran for Congress in New York and said she would rather be named “a carpetbagger that’s making a difference than someone that was born and raised here and has millions that hasn’t done anything for the district”; and Greg Bukowski, who goes by the nickname “Tex” because he recently moved to Florida from Texas. Cawthorn declined to comment for this story.
Tuesday’s 19th District primary is one contest on a statewide Florida ballot that also includes Republican gubernatorial and U.S. Senate primaries, as MSI previously reported.