Florida GOP governor candidate Byron Donalds courts skeptic Black voters

MIAMI — For most of his nine years in Congress, Republican Rep. Byron Donalds, of Florida, rarely made his race part of his political pitch. This past weekend, in a string of Black voter outreach events across the Miami area, he did — carefully, and on his own terms.

In an interview with CBS News, the Republican nominee for Florida governor said he’s now targeting “north of 20%” of the Black vote.

“I think there’s a lot of Black voters who are looking at my campaign because they’re just trying to figure out who’s going to be the best person to lead Florida into the future,” Donalds said. “I think the other thing with Black voters: they’re starting to not be as monolithically tied to the Democrat Party.”

For comparison, around 13% of Black voters backed Gov. Ron DeSantis’s reelection bid in 2022, according to CBS News exit polls. President Trump won around 15% of Black votes in Florida during his 2024 presidential bid.

In 2024, Donalds was one of Mr. Trump’s most visible surrogates to Black voters nationally, co-headlining a multi-city tour with Rep. Wesley Hunt of Texas billed as “Congress, Cigars & Cognac” — informal, sit-down conversations meant to make the case for Mr. Trump in rooms that weren’t always receptive. Now he’s running that same playbook for himself, as the principal rather than the surrogate.

A potential win for Donalds would put him in an exclusive club of Black state executives. Only three elected governors have been Black in U.S. history. Donalds is among three nominees this year who would be the first Black Republican governors ever elected.

Asked what it would mean to him to make history, Donalds paused, smiled to himself, and let his guard down for a moment. “It’s wild, honestly,” he told CBS News — a rare admission from a candidate who has spent his campaign avoiding identity-based appeals.

“I don’t talk about my race in this campaign,” Donalds told a crowd at the Black Professionals Summit’s Legacy Con on Saturday, one of several stops targeting the key voting bloc. “Florida is a meritocracy. Here in Florida, we have people who have come from so many different parts of the country. What they really care about now is: Can you get the job done?”

Legacy Con’s organizers told CBS News they also invited Democratic nominee David Jolly to address the summit, but he didn’t attend, citing a scheduling conflict.

With less than a month of campaigning left, Donalds also pushed back on criticism that his minority outreach was new or narrow. “We’re actually targeting every voter,” he said, pointing to his team’s door-knocking aimed at Black voters in North Miami and Broward County, Hispanic voters in Doral and Hialeah, and more.

But some voters he met during his South Florida swing say his loyalty to the president is clouding their opinion of him. At a retail stop at the Black-owned Lorna’s Caribbean Restaurant in Miami Gardens, Jermaine Woodside, 54, said he came in skeptical but left more open to the congressman after an hour-long dinner conversation, even as he said bluntly that Donalds should not associate himself with Mr. Trump. “That’s going to hurt him, and that’s the reason why I was reluctant to be a part of his campaign,” Woodside told CBS News.

Donalds told CBS News voters shouldn’t judge him solely on his history with Mr. Trump.

“Look at the issues I’m pushing forward. Look at the ideas that I talk about. Yes, the president’s endorsed me. Yes, a couple years ago I endorsed him to be president. But I’m running to be governor of Florida,” he said.

Not everyone was swayed. Miami resident Kalyn James came alone to a meet-and-greet Donalds hosted at an outdoor event space in the predominantly Black Overtown neighborhood. James quietly protested the event by holding a sign that read “Vote Blue” with Donalds’ name crossed out while he worked the room, talking to other attendees.

“I just don’t think that he has a buy-in that he thinks he has,” James told CBS News. “And honestly, [his win] would make history, but I think he’d be on the wrong side of history.”

Jasmine Burney-Clark, founder of the nonpartisan voting rights group Equal Ground, had sharper criticism. She noted Donalds declined to sign her organization’s candidate pledge, affirming an intent to sign into law a Democratic-backed state voting rights bill — which Jolly did sign — and argued his weekend events were not genuine.

“Byron Donalds has been Black at the start of this election, and he will be Black at the end of this election,” Burney-Clark told CBS News. “Black voters are not going to be fooled by his targeting and his manipulation tactics to pander to get their vote.”

The outreach comes as recent polling shows a surprisingly tight race for an office a Democrat hasn’t won since the 1990s. For Donalds, the math is clear even if the politics are complicated: close the gap with Black voters, and Democrats’ path back to the governor’s mansion gets much harder.