MIAMI — In a bright yellow room, filled with art from the Dominican Republic alongside traditional African masks, Rep. Byron Donalds held court with about two dozen South Florida local politicians, business and community leaders — mostly men, nearly all Black — many of whom identified as Democrats.
Donalds entered the closed-door event where a warm but weary room of people were ready to listen to the Republican lawmaker’s political pitch as he runs for governor. Those who advocated on his behalf said it was finally their chance, as Black people, to have a seat at the table of power in Florida. The skeptical attendees grilled the three-term congressman about his support for President Donald Trump ending temporary protected status for Haitian immigrants, diversity policies and the rising cost of health care.
The lawmaker was kind but unapologetic in his responses. “What you will get from me is candor,” he told the room. “What I ask from you is the same.”
He secured at least a half-dozen endorsements at that event. The new supporters would now back one of the nation’s most prominent conservatives … who just happens to be Black.
Trending
But during multiple interviews with The Washington Sun, Donalds was reluctant to discuss his own Blackness.
“The vast majority of the time, I go out of my way to change the subject,” Donalds said, wearing his signature black suit with a blue tie. “Because I think [the election] has to be about ideas. I think it has to be about vision.”
It’s a quandary Black politicians on both sides of the aisle have faced for years: Does centering their race alienate voters outside of it? And is that amplified for Donalds, who is a Black man in a Republican Party that has decimated diversity policies across the country to appeal to its largely white base who say they are overlooked and forgotten?
The son of a Panamanian American and Jamaican American must confront those reservations as he scales up his effort to court Black Floridians. But the national Republican Party doesn’t appear to share that desire. Nearly a dozen GOP operatives, lawmakers and local elected officials told The Sun they see a contraction in Republican coalition efforts nationwide to maintain the number of Black voters who defected from the Democratic Party in 2024 to vote for Trump.
“You know how you buy some stuff, put it in the garage and forget that it’s there? That’s where the effort is at,” a Black GOP strategist told The Sun, describing the Republican Party’s efforts to win the support of Black voters. The operative, like others in this story, spoke on the condition of anonymity to speak freely without fear of the party’s retribution.
The Frederick Douglass Freedom Alliance pitched the National Republican Senatorial Committee (NRSC) and the National Republican Congressional Committee (NRCC) in early spring on a canvassing and messaging plan to target Black voters for nearly a half-dozen races in the midterm elections, according to three people familiar with the events. The NRSC and NRCC both rejected the pitch. Individual GOP campaigns also rejected or didn’t respond to similar pitches from other Black grassroots groups, the sources said.
“President Trump’s 2024 strategy proved intentional, relationship driven engagement in black and brown communities works. Now, the Republican Party needs to trust that model, invest in it, and stick with it,” Troy Rolling, the president and CEO of the Frederick Douglass Freedom Alliance, said in a statement to The Sun.
But the lack of action was disappointing but not inherently surprising, according to a second Black GOP operative with knowledge of the pitch, given the challenges the Republican Party is facing less than four weeks before Election Day.
“I don’t think the expectation is that we’re gonna have a large amount of Black folks coming out to support us because we can’t even get the white folks to support us,” the operative said.
The NRCC said the GOP has been working to “earn the trust of Black voters,” and put the onus back on Democrats.
“House Democrats have taken too many voters for granted, and families across the country want nothing to do with their radical socialist policies that will make life harder,” NRCC spokesperson Mike Marinella said in a statement.
When asked whether the GOP was doing enough nationwide to target Black voters, Donalds demurred: “I think a lot of the party doesn’t know how, and I don’t think it’s that they don’t want to. I just think they don’t know how.”
The congressman has launched a targeted push to win the support of the Black community, which makes up around 12% of Florida’s more than 13 million voters. The state has voted three times to elect Trump — in 2024, he won the state by 13 percentage points. Donalds, if elected, would be the first Black Republican governor of that state, and the first Black governor elected nationwide in decades.
The campaign has spent upwards of seven figures targeting Black voters in Florida, according to a source familiar with the operations, including at least $1 million on ads focused on the community, the source said. One of those ads, which has not yet debuted, will feature Donalds’ mother talking about how the lawmaker was raised. The Donalds campaign rolled out its first ad targeted at Black voters last week.
Facing off against Democrat David Jolly in a race that has become tighter than expected, Donalds wants to pick up votes from more Democrats, and his goal is to get more Black votes than any previous Republican gubernatorial nominee in Florida.
“I want all the Black vote because I want everybody’s vote,” Donalds told The Sun during a car ride from one event to the next. Outgoing Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis secured 15% of the Black vote in his 2015 gubernatorial race but failed to meet that threshold when he was reelected in 2023. Now Donalds says he wants to beat it. “I think if I was just gonna just throw it on the table, I think north of 20 [percent].”
Donalds is barnstorming Black businesses, barbershops and churches. He’s meeting with key stakeholders from the large diaspora of Black people in Florida, including those of Caribbean descent like his parents.
“To do some of this, we’ve had to build new muscle that typically is not built in Republican campaigns,” Donalds said.
The larger GOP’s lack of infrastructure and intentionality nationwide to appeal to Black voters represents a missed opportunity to some who hoped that the party could capitalize on the gains from the last presidential election and crystallize a generational shift of key voters away from the Democratic Party. Trump received 15% of the Black vote nationally, according to Pew Research, in a race against Vice President Kamala Harris, who was running to become the first Black female president. The numbers were largely fueled by Black men, with 21% of the voting bloc supporting Trump.
The 2024 Trump campaign, along with allied super PACs, spent millions to win the support of Black men. Trump visited barbershops. He appeared with prominent (if not older) members of the Black community. And his campaign placed ads where it believed Black men were watching. From a national standpoint, operatives told The Sun, that isn’t happening during this election cycle.
“Black men gave Republicans an opportunity mostly because of the economic concerns that were very valid and legitimate, and yet we didn’t do anything to shore up those concerns,” a prominent Black Republican strategist told The Sun, blaming the White House for the absence of any policy that addressed Black voters’ concerns.
The Black unemployment rate jumped a full percentage point to 7% since last year, nearly double the unemployment rate for white people. And the administration’s anti-DEI policies forced hundreds of thousands of Black women out of their jobs, MS NOW reported.
The Education Department announced a one-time injection of nearly $175 million to strengthen Historically Black Colleges and Universities in September. While the announcement appeared on the agency’s website, no official acknowledgement came from the White House. There was no Oval Office event or even a mention of it in any of Trump’s many Truth Social posts. The White House circulated a paper statement celebrating HBCUs generally a day before the Education Department’s announcement. Multiple people suggested to The Sun that the White House lacks a communicator who values that type of news, nor does it want to appear to be pushing DEI policies close to the midterms.
“So Black men are looking at us, and they’re saying, ‘Nothing really changed for me. There’s not a damn thing I can point to as tangible to say my life has gotten better,’” the strategist said.
When asked why it didn’t formally announce the HBCU money or if Trump plans to propose specific policy geared toward Black Americans, the White House said, “President Trump has done more for Black Americans than any other President in recent history.”
“From investing more than $80 billion into low-income census tract Opportunity Zones, driving violent crime to the lowest level in nearly a century, passing the largest middle-class tax cuts in American history, putting American children on a path toward generational wealth through Trump Accounts, advancing criminal justice reform, and increasing his historic HBCU funding by an additional $174 million dollars in September 2026, President Trump will never stop fighting to make everyday life better and more affordable for Americans,” White House spokesperson Allison Schuster said in a statement.
Strategists credit Rep. John James, another Black Republican who’s running for governor in Michigan, for his campaign focused in part on turning out the Black vote for the party. He recently appeared with the popular Detroit rapper 42 Dugg. The duo discussed James’ vision, and the congressman joined the rapper onstage at a concert wearing fresh white Air Force One Nike sneakers. Dugg took down the video after facing backlash, according to two sources familiar with his thinking, and privately complained that appearing with James hurt his reputation. The video is still up on James’ Facebook.
Many operatives question how much effort Republican Senate candidates like Georgia’s Mike Collins, who is caught up in another Ku Klux Klan-associated scandal, and Michigan’s Mike Rogers are putting into corralling Black voters.
Linda Lee Tarver, a Republican activist in Michigan, has been one of several surrogates accompanying Rogers to meetings with Black stakeholders in the state, including pastors, small business owners and advocates focused on education and housing issues. Tarver said she isn’t seeing a contraction in GOP efforts nationwide to reach Black voters but suggested the party’s messaging could be missing the mark.
“I would push back and say we have great policies. We may not be able to, in some states, communicate them effectively, but our policies are criminal justice reform, reentry, jobs and education and technical trade, all of those are very important. I believe that we’re on the right side of the policy. Are our communicators the best? I don’t know,” she said.
The Republican National Committee has launched specific programs focused on Black voters in only a handful of states, which all voted for Trump in 2024: Florida, Michigan, North Carolina and Georgia, according to a GOP official. But it’s unclear if that strategy is working.
A September survey from YouGov/Economist found that just 6% of Black voters said they totally approved of Trump’s job in office, while 6% said they strongly approved or somewhat approved.
Florida, By Way of Brooklyn
Donalds, a Brooklyn native who took a bus to Florida for college and then never left, comes off differently in real life than the mudslinger most people see on TV. In front of crowds, he recites facts about the state’s permitting process, a source of pain for the Floridians looking to build or renovate homes, and riffs on access to capital for small businesses, insurance cost reductions and the state’s education system — a purposeful effort to show he can lead.
“I probably would say a Black Republican is a minority in political life. It’s not just in the party; it’s across all politics,” Donalds said. “Number one, you definitely have to command the issues because everybody wants to have an opinion about your political views, especially on the other side of the aisle. Number two, you really have to be able to weather … every storm. Because people talk about you. They try to talk about your family. They try to talk about your upbringing. A lot of people who don’t know you just cast aspersions.”
His solutions are rooted in pragmatism and cutting red tape, he said. Attendees who spoke with The Sun after his appearances earlier this month said he was approachable and even charming.
“He was totally different talking to us than some of the things I saw in the past,” said Carlos Rolle, an engineer and business owner from Miami Gardens who met Donalds at a Caribbean restaurant for an intimate group conversation. Rolle, a Bahamian American, went into the conversation undecided. But Donalds has won his vote.
“What I like about him, he’s at least trying to do the work. He’s not sending a surrogate to do things,” Rolle said. “He knows that a lot of people are gonna shut him out. They won’t want to talk to him, they won’t want to be shown with him in the media. But he’s trying. I believe in effort.”
Part of their discussion centered on whether Donalds was prepared to be his own man and do what’s in the best interest of Florida — even if that runs counter to what any president might want. Rolle said Donalds told them he was. Donalds’ support for Trump undergirded those conversations.
In 2023, the congressman made a risky bet: He endorsed Trump over DeSantis for the presidential nomination, solidifying him as a MAGA firebrand. Donalds became a face for Trump’s outreach to Black voters during the 2024 election, leading his own series of barbershop events. And since Trump returned to the White House, Donalds has sided with the president on most of his most controversial actions — including immigration enforcement, dismantling DEI initiatives and the Iran war. Donalds is close to Susie Wiles, the White House chief of staff, and many of her close allies serve as consultants for Donalds’ campaign.
Donalds has been confronted on the campaign trail about his loyalty to the president.
“There’s a skepticism. There’s no doubt about that,” Donalds said.
Asked if his support of Trump has hurt his efforts to flip Black voters, the congressman was careful: “Yeah, maybe.”
“But again, I was a surrogate for the president,” Donalds added. “I was glad to do it.”
Donalds denied that scrubbing his website of any mention of Trump was meant to put distance between him and a president with a sinking approval rating. His campaign noted that the website shows visitors a pop-up of the president’s endorsement.
But it’s an uphill climb for Donalds. A Mason-Dixon survey released this week showed Donalds with a large lead over Jolly but only netting 10% of the Black vote, with 14% still undecided. A poll released this week by YouGov had Donalds at 9% with Black voters.
That tension was evident in some conversations on the trail. Donalds was confronted repeatedly about Trump’s policies that he has either adopted or championed at campaign events.
At a private event in Miami’s Design District, Eric Knowles, the president and CEO of the Miami-Dade Chamber of Commerce, told Donalds: “We know in our community woke meant being aware of what’s going on, and it seems like it’s been stolen by the left or right or whatever. And again, it’s about being awake, and it’s like it’s taking on this connotation of ‘we are bad because we’re woke.’”
Jeffery Daub, a firefighter who attended the event with his wife, left unconvinced.
“He is who he is, and I take him for who he is,” said Daub, who researched Donalds’ positions during his car ride home after the event. “I don’t expect him to do anything other than what I see anyone who was associated with Trump doing.”
And while waiting to enter the annual Caribbean Carnival in Tarmac City, Florida, Olivia H. told The Sun she won’t vote for Donalds because he’s a Republican, despite his race.
“I’m poor. I’m Black. I’m a woman. I’m [pro-choice]. I am a daughter of immigrants, so I’m not gonna vote for a party that doesn’t reflect the needs of that community,” she said.
As Donalds courts Black votes, it remains an open question whether he can win over white voters in the northern and central parts of Florida who may be reluctant to elect a Black governor.
“It’s about how them white boys in Central Florida feel,” said a worker at the House of Wings, a food truck that catered one of Donalds’ events and who asked not to be named. “That’s the key. It ain’t about us.”
Author
