Approval below 30% as Republicans seek distance before midterms
Byron Donalds, the Republican nominee for Florida governor, launched an updated campaign website on Tuesday stripped of nearly every mention of Donald Trump, the Miami Herald reported. The changes, detected by the website tracking service Visualping, included the removal of at least eight Trump mentions from the site’s homepage and the deletion of a photograph of Donalds and his wife, Erika, posing with the president.
Until now, Donalds had publicly touted his close ties with the president. His Republican primary campaign was themed largely on Trump’s endorsement, and the site displayed a large banner advertising his support. Before Tuesday’s revisions, the site identified Donalds as a “Trump-endorsed proven conservative fighter.” Other since-removed banners featured a “chip in to support Trump-endorsed Byron Donalds” fundraiser and one of Trump’s “run, Byron, run” endorsement announcements from last year, according to the Herald.
A previous capture of the site’s issue list by the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine showed “Enact the Trump agenda” as Donalds’ number one priority. That item has since been replaced by “affordability.”
The only Trump reference that still appears on the updated site is his name in a rolling list of endorsements for Donalds that also includes Elon Musk, Rick Scott, Mike Johnson and the late Charlie Kirk, the Herald reported. The Donalds campaign did not respond to a request for comment.
Donalds clinched the Republican nomination for governor in August and will appear on the November 3 general election ballot to succeed Florida’s incumbent governor, Ron DeSantis. He has represented southwest Florida in Congress since 2021.
The website revision follows Florida Republican María Elvira Salazar’s public criticism of Trump’s immigration-enforcement policy targeting law-abiding undocumented immigrants, which came days earlier.
It also comes as Trump’s overall approval rating fell below 30 percent for the first time, dragged down by dissatisfaction over his handling of the US economy and the Iran war, the Herald reported. Republicans are bracing for heavy losses in November, including the possible loss of the party’s majorities in the US House of Representatives and Senate.
Politico reported Monday that multiple Republican candidates in numerous November races are publicly breaking with Trump, with mail-in ballots already sent out in some states and barely 40 days until 3 November.
“These candidates know how to read a poll,” a GOP strategist told Politico. “They know he is kryptonite.”