James Fishback Has Seized the Gen Z Right. Now He Thinks He Can Win Florida.

“We’ve broken into the mainstream,” Fishback said in a recent interview, citing “people who have told me, who are in their late 20s, early 30s, that I’m going to be the first person they ever vote for.”

Peter Schorsch, the publisher of local outlet Florida Politics, sees Fishback in a state tradition. “If you keep making a copy of a copy on a copy machine, eventually it becomes so blurred, you don’t even know what the original looked like,” he tells me. “And what Fishback is is the copy of the copy of the copy of the copy of Florida Man.”

Schorsch thinks that Fishback has succeeded, at least, in sucking up the oxygen in the campaign, if only in the manner of a car wreck. He attributes the candidate’s relative stature in part to the makeup of the Florida Republican primary electorate—“there is just a block of it, I’d say 20%, that is inherently racist”—but acknowledges that Fishback had demonstrated at least one real strength.

A former high school debater among a University of Tampa crowd.

Photographer Zack Wittman

“He sees where the puck is going,” Schorsch says.

Fishback tells Vanity Fair that his plan is to increase under-35 turnout by five times in the Republican primary, “because the denominator is so freaking low to begin with.” He is running on a platform of affordability and hardline immigration restriction, appealing to a broad sense of decline and degradation among young men in particular. He credits his breakthrough to meeting people where they were. Fuentes has offered Fishback’s more positive poll results as proof of the strength of his own following, the Groypers, while declining to endorse him in an effort to stanch the candidate’s toxicity. While Fishback rejects the label he’s received as the first Groyper candidate, he could see the advantages of the association. “A lot of the people who watch Nick Fuentes,” Fishback says, “that may be the only political personality they follow.”

Even by the rowdy standards of Florida politics, Fishback entered the race with an uncommon amount of baggage. After he dropped out of Georgetown University, he took a short-lived detour to Wall Street, which culminated in a dispute with his hedge fund employer. He ultimately admitted to sharing confidential information and was left with a $229,000-and-counting legal bill, and the repossession of his Tesla. A Florida school district cut ties with him after a woman who had been a student in a high-school debate program he was running accused him of initiating a romantic relationship with her when she was 17 and he was 27. (The woman filed for an order of protection last year and was denied. Fishback has denied any wrongdoing, saying, “I have never been arrested, charged, or convicted of any crime.”)