Rising Florida living costs shape Donalds’s closing economic pitch
Florida Rep. Byron Donalds is closing his campaign for governor against Democrat David Jolly by positioning himself between President Trump’s endorsement and voter frustration with the cost of living in a state where Republicans hold structural and financial advantages. The 47-year-old Brooklyn native, raised in Crown Heights, has moderated his embrace of Trump for the general election while preserving the president’s backing — a balance that surfaced as friction when Donalds’s campaign scrubbed prominent Trump references from its website last month.
Donalds’s path to the Republican nomination was largely cleared by Trump, who endorsed him roughly 18 months before the primary and effectively sidelined other potential contenders. During the primary, Donalds promoted buttons reading “2 Donalds are better than 1.” For the fall campaign, he has created modest space from the president — the man he assigned a custom ring tone so he would never miss his call — though Trump, whose residence is in Donalds’s backyard at Mar-a-Lago, remains both ally and source of political risk.
The fragility of that arrangement surfaced last month when Trump learned that Donalds’s campaign had scrubbed prominent references to him from its website. In order to calm Trump down, aides showed the president a tweet in which Donalds minimized the change and appeared beaming alongside Trump inside the Oval Office, according to people familiar with the events.
The tightening race had Donalds’s top donors nervous when they gathered at a private retreat at the oceanfront Fontainebleau hotel in Miami Beach last month. Donalds, once expected to win comfortably, told donors over a steak dinner that the contest was a battle, according to several attendees. His pollster, Tony Fabrizio, later told the group not to expect a blowout. “Trump was a double-edged sword for Republicans,” Fabrizio said, “in that he was the biggest motivator of turnout on both sides.” Attendees left feeling assured Donalds would prevail.
Donalds cannot put so much distance between himself and the president that he alienates the man in his backyard — which is why he plans rallies with Trump in Florida in the coming weeks. He continues to back Trump on major issues, including immigration enforcement and the war in Iran. “I don’t want to pay high gas prices,” Donalds said in an interview. “But a nuclear Iran is a direct threat, not just to us but to the entire planet.”
Donalds was raised in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, by a single mother, Meredith Brown, who said she kept her son off the streets and secured scholarships so he could attend private schools. In an interview, she recalled once bringing her children to John F. Kennedy International Airport and telling them that while she did not have money for vacations, “if you study and you work hard enough, you’ll be able to fly anywhere you want.” Donalds took a Greyhound bus to Florida to attend college but soon got into trouble with the law, arrested on marijuana and bank-related charges. Opponents have used the stumbles to question his character.
Donalds said he got back on track with the help of his now-wife, Erika Donalds, whom he met at Florida State University, and by giving his life to Jesus in the parking lot of a Cracker Barrel where he worked waiting tables as a young man. His first wife has cast doubt on that account.
Once a Democrat, Donalds shifted toward the Republican Party after the 2008 financial crisis, which he watched unfold in Naples, Florida, where he saw residents overextending themselves with easy lending. The experience drew him into the tea party movement and, later, to Congress.
The economic backdrop of his campaign has changed dramatically since that conversion. Florida, once a beacon of cheap living, has become out of reach for many residents after a 1.67 million-person population surge since the pandemic helped drive inflation above the national average in some parts of the state. Donalds is testing a playbook that leans on empathy and personal biography — recounting on the campaign trail how he and his wife had to ask a landlord to roll their security deposit into monthly rent payments.
He has vowed to cut property taxes and insurance rates, and to streamline state building regulations, arguing the changes would translate into lower costs. “People in our state are frustrated, and I totally understand that,” Donalds said. “But the way through that is you can’t build a wall.”
The Florida contest is being watched nationally as a test of whether a rising MAGA-aligned Republican can thread the needle between Trump’s endorsement and the president’s drag on GOP candidates. The outcome may shape how the Republican Party calibrates its relationship with Trump ahead of the midterms.