Is the deadbeat crank who placed a distant third in Florida’s GOP gubernatorial primary the future of Republican politics?
James Fishback hosted a “victory night” party on Tuesday to celebrate his winning performance in the Florida GOP gubernatorial primary. Alas, things didn’t pan out as he expected.
Fishback lost, and it wasn’t particularly close. With nearly all of the votes counted, he trailed the winning candidate, Byron Donalds, by almost 23 percentage points. Wait, never mind. That’s how much he lost to the second-place finisher, Jay Collins. Fishback got just 10.5 percent of the vote; Donalds won with 47.8 percent.
In other words, a solid drubbing. A fitting result for a profoundly unserious candidate.
Politico, the D.C.-area newsblog located many, many floors beneath the Washington Free Beacon, had a slightly different view of Fishback’s candidacy and its implications for the future of the GOP. It seemed a little out there, so we decided to run it by our experienced squad of fact-checking analysts.
FACT CHECK
Claim: “It’s unlikely that James Fishback’s head-turning mad dash through Florida’s political landscape will end in victory,” Politico wrote on the eve of the primary. “Yet it’s just as likely that should he lose, he will go down as the most influential loser in recent political history.”
Who said it: Nathan Taylor Pemberton, which sounds like the name of a Hallmark movie villain who terrorizes a quaint New England village by threatening to turn the local Christmas tree farm into a hyperscale data center. He is actually a New York Times reporter who covers “the emerging style of politics being shaped by the internet.”
Context: Pemberton wrote a Times article on Fishback’s campaign launch back in March. The candidate, he wrote, was “refining an emerging style of far-right politicking that has him toggling between trollish online posts and idealistic policy proposals.” He interviewed Rick Wilson, the disgraced former GOP operative and Lincoln Project cofounder, who described Fishback as the future of Republican politics, naturally.
For Politico, Pemberton argued that being “terminally online” was a prerequisite for political success in the modern age. He cited Abdul El-Sayed’s narrow victory in Michigan’s Democratic Senate primary, noting the candidate’s embrace of “influencer Hasan Piker, the firebrand advocate for democratic socialism.” (Sure, that’s one way to describe him.)
More context: Pemberton conceded that Fishback’s campaign had been mildly encumbered by the “litany of small controversies nipping” at his credibility. Again, sure. In addition to the blatant antisemitism and performative racist trolling, the former high school debate coach was accused of using “grooming” tactics when he was 27 years old to initiate an inappropriate relationship with a student. He also had his Tesla repossessed to comply with a judge’s ruling that he pay $1.3 million to his former employer, a hedge fund that accused him of stealing confidential data.
But that shouldn’t distract from everything Fishback managed to accomplish. For example, he is the first known candidate in history to utter the word “goyslop,” an antisemitic term for junk food, on the campaign trail. He hung out with “manosphere influencers such as Clavicular and Sneako” and “earned the admiration” of Tucker Carlson, Nick Fuentes, and other antisemitic cranks the mainstream media insist on calling the “dominant voices” on the political right.
Despite his alleged influence, Carlson’s preferred candidates have been consistently routed in GOP primaries this cycle. Meanwhile, left-wing cranks have enjoyed considerable success in Democratic primaries. Florida is no exception. Angie Nixon, an Israel-obsessed state lawmaker aligned with the Democratic Socialists of America, upset the establishment-backed Alexander Vindman in the Democratic Senate primary.
Fishback got 10.5 percent of the vote. To put that number into proper context, “Deez Nutz,” a satirical presidential candidate created by a 15-year-old Iowa resident, received about 9 percent of the vote in hypothetical general election polling back in August 2015.
Analysis: It goes without saying that Fishback is a loser. Just look at him. That said, Politico ventured beyond the realm of established fact and into considerably shakier territory by asserting that Fishback “will go down as the most influential loser in recent political history.” It is nothing more than the baseless prognostication of an internet-addicted politics junkie based in New York City and deserves to be taken as seriously as Fishback’s clown-car candidacy.
Verdict: We rate this claim Two Flaming Clintons, or Half True.
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