In 2020, then-Rep. Byron Donald won the 9-year-old Republican Congress primary with around 800 votes.
Less than five years later, Donald, the third-term US representative in the Naples region, won the governor’s support from President Donald Trump, one of the most coveted awards in Republican politics. (Gov. Ron Desantis is a limited period and cannot be run again in 2026.) Hopefully we’ll be making an announcement about what Donald posted in the coming days.
By any definition, Donald has seen a dizzying rise over the past six months. There are three things you need to know about the men who may lead our nation in 2027.
1. Fighter planes for school choice
Donald, a child of a single mother in Brooklyn, says he came from a rough neighborhood.
He historically secured entry to the Black Florida A&M, but as a young man he ran into legal trouble. In 1997 he was arrested for misdemeanor possession of marijuana. In 2000 he was charged with saying some news reports were bribery and other news was charged with saying they had bad checks. The attack’s record was subsequently deleted. Marijuana charging was removed after Donald entered the pretrial conversion program.
According to his Congressional Biography, Donald found a safer footing after moving to Florida State University and earning his 2002 financial and marketing degree.
Donald was caught up in the conservative Tea Party revolution of 2010, and for the first time he failed Congress two years later.
He and his wife, Erica, discovered their signature issue at charter school years later. They struggled to find a satisfying school for the three young boys, so they looked for a more conservative option. They helped launch and run Mason Classic Academy, a Collier County charter school. (They are no longer involved in the school.)
In 2014, Erica Donald won a seat on the local school board. Two years later, Byron Donald was elected to the State Capitol. So he defended conservative causes like school choice. He also supported criminal justice reform.
Erica Donald later founded the Optima Foundation, which aims to support charter schools with a curriculum created by the conservative Hillsdale University. She also won numerous prominent political appointments, including being stolen by DeSantis in 2022 to serve on the Florida Gulf University Board of Directors.
2. Magazine from an early stage
Byron Donald was an early supporter of the president and spoke at a Trump rally in September 2016. When he ran for Congress, he promoted Trump’s authenticity.
“The fake news media doesn’t want to cover black men who are strong supporters of @RealdonaldTrump. Please help me spread this message: I support Trump, love freedom, proven conservatives. “We’re running for the council,” he posted on X in 2020.
After the 2020 election, Donald voted against the accreditation of electoral colleges in major swing states. He told Vanity Fair in 2023 that Joe Biden did not consider him a “legal” president. (No evidence of widespread fraud in the presidential election that Trump lost has been found.)
In Congress, he was part of the ultra-conservative Tea Party Caucus. He was very much thought by his Republican colleagues, and in early 2023 he won several votes and became a speaker in the US House. Following Trump’s lead, Donald introduced a bill to end the tip’s tax in January.
Donald grew up close to DeSantis at one point and introduced the governor to DeSantis’ night of reelection. However, the two have been separated since Donald supported Trump via DeSantis in the 2024 Republican primary. They also became a short spat over statewide educational standards in 2023, teaching middle schoolers that 19th century American slaves learned useful skills. Donald opposed the standard. DeSantis’ online proxy was torn apart by him.
Throughout the 2024 campaign where Trump was trying to cut Democratic margins with black men, Donald was one of Trump’s most vocal messengers.
“Byron is a superstar,” said state Sen. Joe Gluters, former Republican chairman of Florida. “This guy was everywhere during the campaign to make sure the president was successful.”
3. Most Floridians don’t hear about Donald
A survey released earlier this week by the University of North Florida Public Opinion Research Lab found that two of the three registered Florida voters had not heard of Donald.
That contrasts with others rumored to be running for the governor, including former US Congressman Matt Gaetz and First Lady Casey DeSantis. Only one in three Florida said they had never heard of Gaetz and Desantis, respectively.
