The Republican Party of Florida (RPOF) is facing intense backlash for a shocking July 7 statement that makes it clear that they intend to skip the primary and head right to the general election. Any debates among gubernatorial candidates, they explain, are “NOT sanctioned” before the primary. It is only after the primary that they will be committed to a debate with the coronated candidate, Byron Donalds.

The statement quoted RPOF Chairman Evan Power saying that the party will support a debate “after” the primary, ensuring that Donalds will be the GOP nominee.

“Floridians deserve to hear David Jolly and Alex Vindman defend their radical agenda on the debate stage against our Republican nominees after the August Primary. From supporting men in women’s sports and bathrooms to pushing open borders, their extreme positions will be on full display…”

At the time of this writing, the responses to the post were exclusively negative.

Here is a fraction of the many responses that echoed the following sentiment:

• “I remind you all that DeSantis debated to be the nominee when he ran for his first term when Scott was termed out. What has changed?”
• “We don’t need debates AFTER the primary! We already know the Democrats are pure unadulterated evil. We want a debate among the GOP candidates so we make sure we don’t get stuck with a New York Democrat running on our ticket.”
• “You are failing everyone in the state of florida. You are a disgusting group of people who only care about special interests. Your rigging will not work.”
• “You are so tone deaf. You are destroying the party from within…”
• “We all need to stop funding the Florida GOP let them hear our voices by no more $$ if they don’t want to give us debates so we can pick hear from our choices they don’t need our money either”
• “What a bunch of hogwash. Dictating the candidate to us is not giving Floridians a clear choice. What they’re saying is that they’ll give us a ‘clear choice’ after they’ve shoehorned Donalds in…”
• “WE the people would like to hear from all of the candidates before WE decide who to vote for. Clearly you have no confidence in your Manchurian candidate if you have to protect him from debating…”
• “How can you say you will NOT have debates among the nominees??? This is not the way it’s done in Florida and you will regret not giving Florida voters the chance to hear the top nominees including the current Lt. Gov! You are trying to steal the nomination and WE SEE YOU!”

As RAIR reported last month, it was clear that the RPOF was angling to avoid the primary by dodging debates that were originally scheduled for their “Sunshine State Showdown” event. Indeed, back in January, the party put out a statement that they intended to “officially coordinate the 2026 debate schedule for all statewide Republican candidates in the State of Florida”.

At the time, the RPOF did not mention “thresholds” that candidates had to meet, which many believe were arbitrary in order to, as Governor Ron DeSantis said, would “engineer an outcome“.

On discussing whether their should be a debate, the Florida governor said in response to a question about the efforts to stop the debate during a press conference:

“And so it’s counterproductive when you try to engineer an outcome because you need a coalition of voters to do well. And this may be a tough cycle for Republicans if you look at some of the indicators, the way things are trending. And so having an open process and having people be able to have their say is always better than to try to engineer an outcome.”

Clearly, the Republican Party of Florida has no intentions of listening to Ron DeSantis’s advice.

Watch a video scrolling some of the responses: