Inside James Fishback’s Outrage-Driven Run for Governor

Editor’s Note: This profile is part of New Times’ People to Watch issue, spotlighting figures we expect to make a big impact in Miami in 2026.

To call James Fishback a polarizing political figure would be a massive understatement. The Florida gubernatorial hopeful has used racial slurs against opponent and GOP frontrunner Byron Donalds, embarked on a right-wing podcast tour, and suggested a fifty percent “hoe tax” on OnlyFans creators. For 31-year-old Fishback, the founder and CEO of investment firm Azoria Capital, the rage bait might actually be the point.

Fishback, who seems keen on courting Gen Z to the polls in November, currently has 205,000 followers on X (formerly Twitter), 209,000 on Instagram, and 59,000 on TikTok, and counting. His message doesn’t neatly fall on either side of the political spectrum: remove undocumented children from Florida public schools, eliminate property taxes for primary residences (echoing one of Gov. Ron DeSantis’ causes de jour), remove financial ties to Israel, offer paid maternity leave to new moms, eliminate H-1B visas for foreign professionals in specialty occupations, and reduce the cost of living, partially by cracking down on online homestay marketplaces like Airbnb.

The self-proclaimed fourth-generation Floridian (and Georgetown University dropout) vascillates between edgelord and conservative good boy, often referencing his Catholic faith to defend his views while pointing out that young women in the United States could use Saudi Arabia as a proper moral example.

“Say what you want about Saudi Arabia,” he quipped during a podcast interview with right-wing influencers Sneako and Clavicular. “There are no women hoeing out on the internet in Saudi Arabia.”

Fishback’s advice to young women comes amid a controversial history. A Florida school district severed ties with him over sexual misconduct allegations involving a 17-year-old student from a debate club he ran; he was 27 at the time of the alleged relationship. After she turned 18, the two lived together and were briefly engaged in 2024, according to Florida Politics. The relationship ended with an unsuccessful petition for protection against Fishback. A judge denied the request but described Fishback as “perhaps a little obsessive-compulsive” and of an “odd nature.”

During a phone call with New Times, Fishback vehemently denied having any romantic relationship with the young woman, either while she was a minor or after she turned 18, pointing to the judge’s denial of the order of protection.

“I’m not saying trust me, bro. I’m saying trust the court, and I think your readers deserve to have that context,” Fishback says.

“I never dated an 18-year-old, ever. And I never lived with an 18-year-old. And I never, definitely never, dated a 17-year-old. So what you’re saying is, like, these are allegations. Anybody can make allegations,” he continued.

Whatever the court made of Fishback’s behavior in his personal life, echoes of what the judge called his “odd nature” appear throughout his campaign, from his Tucker Carlson podcast appearance to his racist remarks against Black opponent Donalds (who Fishback refers to as “By’rone” and a “slave”), to ending a speech at the University of Central Florida by proclaiming the cringe-inducing, “And that is on Gentile (a term for non-Jews often associated with paganism in the Bible), ok?”

Fishback repeatedly referred to Donalds as “By’rone” in his interview with New Times, claiming it was Donalds’ real name and demanding to see his birth certificate — a move echoing Trump’s false claims about former President Barack Obama’s birthplace.

“If he releases his birth certificate and shows that his name is actually Byron at birth, I’m happy to revert to that, but I don’t think it’s appropriate for him to adopt nicknames and then be offended if I call him by his birth name,” Fishback says.

He also didn’t shy away from the racial slurs.

“The Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines ‘slave’ as someone who is controlled by someone else. Why else would he get $45 million? He has 45 million reasons to betray the people of Florida, from the corporate donors and AIPAC, who are funding his campaign,” Fishback says of Donalds. “If he wants me to stop calling him a slave, he can give the money back to his corporate donors, to his hedge fund billionaires, and to AIPAC, and he won’t be a slave anymore.”

When pressed on the inherent racism of the word, given that Donalds is a Black man, Fishback responded that he’s “not Black,” instead describing his opponent as Haitian and Panamanian, and with “no direct descendant of slavery in his family.”

Fishback is a smooth talker, with well-honed messaging and a quick, convincing pace, even when uttering the most offensive or outlandish statements. But whether his ploys for notoriety are of any substance whatsoever, or just methods with which to maintain a constant IV drip of attention, is yet unclear. He has until the Republican primary on August 18 to build a case for himself as the next ultimate Florida Man.

Money Talks

Despite his bold ideas and attention-grabbing social media stunts, including a recent attempt to “meet young female voters where they are” by joining Tinder, only to be banned after matching with over 4,000 women, he says, Fishback has little to show for his campaign.

A recent Florida Department of State Division of Elections inquiry showed just $22,096 in contributions to Fishback’s campaign, comprised primarily of individual donations less than $1,000 each. Florida Election Commission finance data shows $19,866 in contributions through Fishback’s Florida First Political Action Committee (PAC). That’s a whopping $41,962 in campaign funds. Trump-endorsed Donalds, by contrast, had raised $45 million in 2025.

And Fishback’s financial woes don’t exactly end there. A federal court filing alleges that Fishback, while working at billionaire investor David Einhorn’s Greenlight Capital between 2021 and 2023, emailed fund strategies to his personal account, traded similar financial assets personally, and repeatedly shared the fund’s full portfolio with others. In mid-January, a judge ordered him to turn over his Azoria stock and “luxury personal property” to help satisfy a $229,000 judgment to his previous employer.

Fishback, who claims he doesn’t have the means to pay the judgment, spent $37,000 on a previously undisclosed debit card between March 2024 and July 2025, according to the order. But what he lacks in funds, he apparently makes up for in taste, as the suit lists items purchased from retailers like Nordstrom, Burberry, Brunello Cucinelli, Tom Ford, and Swiss luxury watch retailer Bucherer.

“I am not paying my billionaire boss a penny,” Fishback says of the judgment. “He owes me millions of dollars in compensation, and I am not going to pay him a penny just because some Democrat judge in New York who has sided against President Trump time and again says that I owe him his attorney’s fees.”

“I recognize that billionaires will always wage lawsuits, frivolous lawsuits, against working class folks, folks under the guise of noncompete agreements to hurt and to hold down working class people all over my state,” he says, claiming that the suit amounted to Einhorn being upset that Fishback left Greenlight to start his own firm, Azoria Capital.

Fishback’s references to the working class reflect his fixation on affordability. When New Times noted parallels with New York Governor Zohran Mamdani — both in message and in his outreach to Gen Z supporters — Fishback quickly moved to distance himself from the democratic socialist.

“Perhaps the only thing that Zohran and I agree on is that the number one issue affecting Americans today is affordability,” he says. “Now he and I are going to take different routes to that destination, but I think if he’s successful in New York, and if I’m successful in Florida, we will have proven that affordability is the number one concern.”

Political Playbook

Buckle in, because this gets a little insider. Christina Pushaw, DeSantis’ press secretary, advised Fishback “for two months,” according to a lengthy post on X. In mid-January, Pushaw wrote that she offered Fishback advice on his campaign, unbeknownst to DeSantis, but was “never working for him” and “never received any form of compensation.”

But their professional relationship quickly soured, she says, as she “disagreed with his campaign rhetoric increasingly over time as it became more extreme” and learned “that he had behaved inappropriately with minors in his Incubate Debate league.”

“I was recently informed of allegations involving additional minors,” she wrote. Things devolved further after that, with Pushaw describing Fishback as “becoming paranoid and delusional,” saying that he erroneously claimed the two were romantically involved, and that she “told him that he would be more likely to go to prison than the governor’s mansion if he kept up his pattern of deception and fraud.”

Pushaw also apologized to DeSantis and the first lady of Florida, Casey DeSantis, for her communication with the candidate.

“I am afraid of James Fishback. I believe he is a vindictive, dishonest, and fundamentally selfish actor who is using this gubernatorial campaign to distract from his significant financial and legal problems. I am terrified that he will weaponize his platform against me to destroy me for my ‘crime’ of getting angry at him and cutting off contact,” she wrote.

Politicos accused Pushaw of working with Fishback to split the vote against Donalds, a candidate DeSantis is reportedly not fond of.

Fishback, for his part, told reporters in Tallahassee on January 22 that “I can affirmatively, definitely and unequivocally tell you that Christina Pushaw never held me at gunpoint and told me to run for governor.”

He was a bit more forthcoming about his relationship with Pushaw during his talk with New Times. “Christina Pushaw was someone that I spoke to a couple times a week. She gave me advice. Half of it was good, half of it was horrible, and then she decided to crash out after I wouldn’t drop out and endorse Jay Collins,” he says. “That is the beginning, the middle, and the end of the story. I wish her all the best.”

Then, there are the polling numbers. A January 13 Mason-Dixon poll found that, if the Florida Republican primary were held today, 37 percent of voters would go for Donalds, while just 3 percent would vote for Fishback (Jay Collins pulled in seven percent of the hypothetical votes, while Paul Renner got four percent). But Fishback’s camp begs to differ. He recently posted a poll on X from Patriot Polling predicting Donalds with 37 percent of the vote at the August primary and himself with 23 percent.

It’s unclear why its results differ so sharply from those of other polls, but worth noting that the “nonpartisan organization” is run by college students and was founded while its principals were still in high school. Its CEO, Lucca Ruggieri, appears to be a freshman at Columbia University and has previously worked as a campaign manager for a Republican congressional campaign.

(For the most serious wagerers, Polymarket, as of this reporting, has Fishback at a solid 18 percent to win the Republican primary, trailing far behind Donalds’ 78 percent.)

His frenzied campaign has drawn praise from white nationalist streamer Nick Fuentes (though Fishback said he didn’t want his endorsement, since Fuentes is not a Florida resident) and from Tucker Carlson, who did not dispute Fishback’s false assertion that Florida college students could be expelled for criticizing Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. “Well, you’ve got my vote,” Carlson said on his podcast, The Tucker Carlson Show.

Fishback seems determined to defy easy classification. Whether his antics and growing profile can actually win him the governor’s seat is anyone’s guess.

“I have plenty of criticisms for the Democrat party, but I’ve also got plenty for the Republican Party,” he says. “The Republican Party has sold out working class voters time and again, and I’m running as a Republican not because I agree with the Republican Party, but because I believe the Republican Party can, once again, be a coalition of working class folks that fight for the dignity of every worker, every family, and every senior in our state.”