Florida, man
James Fishback's appeal is limited, but some of his fans have reasons to support an open white nationalist that aren't so easy to parse.
Welcome to the Flashpoint.
Some thoughts today on how to appeal to people who are leaning right, but for contradictory reasons.
This week, New York Times opinion writer Michelle Goldberg went to Florida to talk to supporters of Republican gubernatorial hopeful James Fishback.
Her conversations revealed a changing political landscape where the left has a unique opportunity—but the far right is taking advantage.
Fishback is a lunatic who is polling at about 5% in the GOP primary. He doesn’t have a shot. But Goldberg headed down anyway to see what kind of crowds the open white nationalist is drawing.
Some—not all—of the answers she received were revealing for what they said about American politics. Over and over again, young conservatives or conservative curious people in Fishback’s audience cited his emphasis on affordability and housing as motivators for their support.
After Fishback’s speech, I met Jeremiah Kimmell, a 22-year-old wearing one of the blue “America First” baseball caps common to Fuentes’s movement, and Charles Metcalf, 20. Kimmell runs a land-clearing business but sees little prospect of an independent adult life. “We live with our parents,” he told me. “We don’t see any end in sight, in that we’re not going to own a home. Something has to change.”
…
[Leicee] Guiou, a case worker for foster children, is a registered Democrat and a “big Zohran Mamdani fan.” But she said she’s considering changing her registration so she can vote for Fishback in the primary. She’s drawn to his promise not to take money from AIPAC and to his insistent emphasis on affordability. Guiou said she and her fiancé have to live with roommates because rent is so expensive and homeownership unachievable.
This isn’t something that a conservative Republican should be winning an argument on. And to be clear, some of the people Goldberg spoke to were clearly motivated by antisemitism and racism—or at best unbothered by it.
Nick Fuentes, an open neo-Nazi, is a big favorite of this crowd. But his appeal appears rooted at least in part in his willingness to acknowledge that there’s a problem.
She told me that she listens to Fuentes sometimes, and some of what he says makes sense to her. “I would say that there are some things that he speaks for that I agree with, especially about things not being affordable, about the elites purposefully keeping the general population under their control by pricing us out of things that should be considered basic needs,” said Guiou.
It’s a hard problem without a clean, easy answer. The full report from Goldberg is worth reading. How the people she spoke to describe their radicalization to people like Fuentes, Fishback, and Candace Owens reveals a more complicated picture than a right-wing politics based solely in bigotry.
There are winnable voters here if the left can learn to address these issues in ways that seem genuine and appealing, because conservatism has nothing of actual substance to offer them.