In Florida’s Circus Primary, the Real Contest Is Over Whose Power Is Borrowed

Outside a grocery store in Naples, a woman explains why she likes one candidate: he comes from a conservative family, he wants to preserve conservative values, and she does not care that he is not from Florida. Around her swirls a crowded Republican primary in the 19th District, thick with out‑of‑state aspirants who “moved here it seems like five minutes ago to run for Byron’s seat.” Even the one who wins Trump’s endorsement, praised as having the courage and wisdom to deliver strong results, is a recent arrival with failed campaigns in another state. This is not disorder. This is a market, suddenly opened, and every ambitious trader rushing in with whatever coin he has.

When I wrote The Prince, I warned that princes who rely on mercenary or auxiliary arms stand “dangerous to those who call them in,” as W. K. Marriott translates me, because power rented is power owed. In this Florida race, the mercenaries are not Swiss pikemen but national endorsements and super PACs. In California’s 14th District, a super PAC backed by AIPAC spends $1.2 million for one Democrat and against another, while an allied group adds $1.7 million more. In Florida, a governor calls one candidate the “Chuck Norris of Florida politics” yet withholds a formal endorsement, keeping his sword sheathed. Everywhere I look, great lords lend their names and treasuries as if they were condottieri for hire. The bill will come due.

Some candidates try another path: arms of their own. In Iowa, a man styled as a farm‑country hope refuses Big Ag money that his rivals accept and instead lends his campaign roughly $2.5 million, while his MAHA organization builds its own political machine. In Wyoming, one contender for governor’s office loans himself $3 million and joins others who pour large sums into their races from their own coffers. These men understand the rule I set down: whoever wants to found new modes and orders, or present himself as a new prince within the old ones, must have weapons that obey him alone. A donor can walk away; a dollar from your own purse cannot desert you.

Yet even these self‑armed candidates are not free from fortuna. Trump’s blessing in Florida, like his “patriot” endorsement in the Iowa race, falls where it pleases, sometimes on those whose interests his past policies have injured, such as farmers burdened by tariffs and fertilizer prices as the war in Iran drags on. In Alaska, a Senate candidate shares the same name as the incumbent and, almost by accident, is the only Senate hopeful reported to have raised any money. Here is fortune in her purest form: a name, a coincidence, an opening in a crowded field. As I compared her to a raging river in The Prince, she floods where the dykes are not raised; the prudent man prepares his channels before the rain.

The institutions themselves shape how virtù can work. In Alaska, a ranked‑choice system forces candidates to think in coalitions and second preferences, not merely first passions. In California’s special election, the top‑two primary guarantees that, with two Democrats advancing, the seat stays in that party’s hands and narrows what is called a fragile Republican majority. In Wyoming, a new law stops voters from switching party registration at the polling place, stiffening party lines that had once been fluid. These are the “good laws” that, as I argued in the Discourses on Livy in Ninian Hill Thomson’s translation, must be built on the assumption that men will do whatever they can when the field is open. The rules of the game are the first player.

What interests me in the Florida primary is not the spectacle of carpetbaggers and local notables, but the clash between appearance and substance. Local candidates attack newcomers as opportunists; newcomers boast of military service, media empires, or past campaigns elsewhere. Voters hear that one is a patriot, another is a warrior, a third a lifelong Floridian. Most citizens, busy with their lives, must judge by such signals; they cannot audit war records or balance sheets. This is why I say appearances are a hard currency of power. The wise candidate spends them like gold, but keeps real reserves in cash, volunteers, and organization. The fool spends reputation he does not own and wakes up bankrupt the moment his patron withdraws a smile.

In all these contests, the middle course is the surest route to defeat. A candidate who half‑condemns national money while taking it, who hints at independence but leans entirely on a governor’s blessing or a distant PAC, buys the costs of both paths and the benefits of neither. Far better to stand openly as the champion of a faction, with the arms and treasure that implies, or openly as a man of his own purse and machine. The crowded primary is merely the modern form of an old Florentine truth: in a storm of ambitions, the one who survives is not the purest, nor the loudest, but the one whose power rests least on others and most on foundations he can defend when the wind shifts.