Most of my critics aren’t very good, but I recently saw one that I think hit upon something. The streamer Patrick Casey has a theory as to why I seem to enjoy the antics of people like Fuentes and Fishback.
According to Casey, I’ve been documenting the Groyperization and human capital decline of the conservative movement and predicting that it will accelerate. The worse things get, the more I can feel like a genius.
There is certainly something there. I do like feeling smart and being right about things. I’ve been disgusted with the right, and constantly harp on how a movement this divorced from good epistemological practices and knowledge-producing institutions is on the road to hell. Facebook rumors and social media algorithms are powerful on both sides, but on the left, this is at least balanced by a substantial number of people in the coalition who are educated, informed, and read serious newspapers and magazines, meaning that they know something about current events and are exposed to the views of smart people who have thought carefully about issues.
Conservatives don’t read real news, and neither do young people. So young conservatives represent a place on the Venn diagram where you will find some of the most poorly-informed voters out there. They are the perfect demographic to be taken in by grifters. A recent New York Times profile of Fishback supporters provides insights on this. One of them is a 20-year-old who had his political awakening when Kanye West published a list “of names of Jewish people who are in control of banking systems and stuff like that.” This kid feels helpless when researching Epstein conspiracy theories online, and says he can’t distinguish what is real from what is AI, but is glad to have Fishback as someone who can serve as a guide to understanding how the world works.
All of this is to say that if I were designing a candidate in a lab to test my theory that the right is in deep trouble, I couldn’t come up with anything better than James Fishback. I first saw him pop up as a social media troll who would defend obvious nonsense like Trump’s tariffs or advocate for DOGE dividend checks. It turned out he had been sued by the financial firm he was employed by for making up a fake position for himself to attract outside clients and stealing their confidential information before reinventing himself as a MAGA influencer. His former firm won a judgment of $229,000 against him for unpaid loans, and he separately settled the other suit by admitting to the theft and agreeing to cover their legal fees.
After a short stint praising Bari Weiss, writing for the Free Press, defending Israel, and trying to be a more mainstream Republican, he’s basically run as a Groyper candidate, complaining about H1B visas and “goyslop” being served in college cafeterias. Fishback refers to his black opponent, Byron Donalds, as “By’rone,” calls him a DEI candidate, and mocks him in Ebonics. While all populists complain about foreigners, Fishback takes things a step further, denouncing the idea of Americans from other states being able to move to Florida and sell their products there. Fishback at one point promised to take a 23andMe test, presumably to show his Groyper fans that he’s not Jewish, but now claims that the company never got back to him.
As reporters have dug in, they’ve discovered more unflattering things about his past, like the fact that he misrepresented himself as a DOGE adviser. When he was in his Bari Weiss phase, Fishback started a right-wing equivalent of the National Speech and Debate Association, and ended up moving in with a high-school student he met through that endeavor after she turned 18, because of course he did. She later tried to get a restraining order against him, again because of course this is how these things go.
In his short time in public life, Fishback has had so many scandals, red flags, and entertaining anecdotes that any profile of him has to be selective in which ones to bring up. He has a Trump-like quality of being so shameless, and so constantly outrageous across so many dimensions, that it simply overwhelms any ability to critique or judge, and in the end creates a bemused if grudging respect even among his critics. I summarized some of the details included in just one ABC News story in the tweet below.
One of Fishback’s latest spats involves him accusing Waffle House of banning him from their restaurants for being opposed to Israel. To make all this even more entertaining, according to reporting by the Free Press, he’s probably not even eligible to be governor of Florida.
A disillusioned Fishback campaign staffer recently leaked some texts to Will Sommer, writing at The Bulwark, in which the conversation revolves around the candidate’s couch being repossessed. The texts also indicate that he wore a fancy watch to a deposition, and that when the attorneys for his creditors suggested he should hand it over, Fishback claimed to have lost it. His ongoing legal battles involve Fishback trying to argue that the Tesla he drives around actually belongs to his dad, so he shouldn’t have to hand it over to his old firm, and needing to appear in court on April 1 to explain why he shouldn’t be held in contempt for not sharing documents that would help his creditors seize his assets.
My take when Fishback started running was that he might represent something that was coming down the line, but it was too early for him to be a real candidate. Donalds had name recognition and the Trump endorsement. Then I started seeing Fishback interacting with crowds of young people. Large crowds don’t always mean you’re going to win, but in a gubernatorial primary, the ability to go viral and get people to show up in person to see you isn’t nothing. The more I watched, the more I had to admit, the guy has real talent as a communicator.
The X account of the University of Florida College Republicans informs me that at their recent Fishback event, they had an estimated 500 people, out of around 600 RSVPs. This blows away the 180 who came to a Byron Donalds rally on the same campus, and 250 who showed up to see Charlie Kirk last year. Though Don Jr apparently beat them all with 800 in 2019. All the non-Fishback estimates come from the campus paper, The Florida Alligator.
After noticing the crowds, the next step was seeing a few profiles of Fishback in the right-wing press that were much more sympathetic than I expected. Here’s a piece by Nikos Mohammadi in UnHerd that treats the racism as an unfortunate distraction from what is portrayed as a sensible economic populist message, rather than the whole key to Fishback’s appeal. The Spectator asks whether he is “the right’s answer to Zohran Mamdani.” Fishback has also gotten a respectful interview in The American Conservative. On X, that magazine has become something of a Fishback booster account.
These pieces really annoyed me, and I ended up arguing with the author of the UnHerd article on X. From my perspective, it is a mistake to consider Fishback’s economic policies and Groyperism separately. If you ask Goebbels his economic policy and he says “we need to get Jews out of banking, medicine, the trades, etc.” you don’t just say well he’s racist but also has some economically populist views. The economic opinions are just part of the scapegoating. Same with the guy who’s posting online about how much he dislikes Indians and then talks about the effects of H1Bs on wages. While you may be able to treat the economic positions of leftists on their own terms, for racists who are clearly looking to blame foreigners and non-white people for problems anyway, their economic views are a natural outgrowth of their bigotry.
Seeing the ways in which the populist right-wing press is willing to look past Fishback’s flaws was an important indicator, but I still thought we needed some polling. In the last few weeks, we finally got some. While a few months ago he wasn’t even being asked about, now, according to a University of North Florida survey, if we assume Casey DeSantis isn’t going to run, Fishback is in a distant second place at 6%, behind Donalds at 31%. Among 18-34-year-olds, those percentages are reversed, with Fishback beating Donalds, 32% to 8%. Granted, the sample size for the younger group is only 39 people but, according to ChatGPT’s calculations, that gives us a 95% confidence interval of Fishback being at somewhere between 17% and 47% among that demographic. It also says that we can be 99% sure that he’s actually leading Donalds among young people. People make a mistake in thinking that a small sample size means data is worthless. It just gives you wide error bars, but if one candidate’s measured advantage over his opponent is large enough, that can make up for that fact and you can be confident about who is in the lead.
In other words, Fishback’s advantage is so substantial among young people that, if this poll accurately sampled 18-34-year-old GOP voters in Florida – a nontrivial assumption – even with a small sample size we can be nearly sure that he’s winning that group. Moreover, among those 35-54, the sample size is 121, and Fishback is still at 11%, consistent with the finding for the younger age group.
The New York Times has a page that collects different polls in political races. Among those that meet their criteria for “selected pollsters,” the University of North Florida survey mentioned above, covering February 16-20, is the only one conducted on the Florida Republican gubernatorial primary since early January. Something called the James Madison Institute sponsored a non-select poll that ran from February 13-16, and it had Fishback at 3% overall, and 9% among 18-34 year-olds. This is obviously much different from the UNF survey, so if we take the two polls together and just average them, we get Fishback at maybe 5% overall, and 20% among the youngest Republicans.
Whatever Fishback’s true level of support among the youth is, it’s still early, and undecideds are in the range of 40-50%, meaning that people aren’t really paying attention to the campaign. Donalds isn’t the only grown-up candidate in the race, as it also includes Jay Collins, the current lieutenant governor, and Paul Renner, a former speaker of the state House. If Donalds falters, then, it doesn’t necessarily have to be Fishback who fills the void.
So right now, we’ve got one front runner, two serious candidates, and Fishback and potentially Casey DeSantis as wildcards.
Could Fishback actually win? Why not? Donalds is a stiff who sucks at talking. Fishback, people used to say, is running an “online campaign.” At some point we all need to learn that online is where much of life happens these days. It’s become clear that Fishback doesn’t just go viral and participate in Twitter Spaces; you also see him going viral through actually doing events and meeting with large groups of young people. He’s even got groupies. What else do you need to consider the Fishback candidacy real? He hasn’t had enough time to turn his online attention into a lot of support among voters, except among the 18-34-year-old demographic, which is most online and so probably most exposed to his message. But I don’t think that older Republican voters are necessarily going to be immune to Fishback’s charms when they see more of him.
The UF College Republicans X account informs me that around 80% of their members are supporting Fishback. This indicates that he’s particularly popular among young Republicans with the highest level of interest in the race. Usually, political parties follow the lead of their more active members, which is another reason to be bullish on Fishback.
“Ah, but surely the Republican primary voter will reject a lying, scandal-plagued, smooth-talking conman whose shortcomings keep being exposed by the mainstream media!” If we’ve learned one lesson from the last decade, it’s that such a person is exactly who Republican voters want. And although Trump is exceptional, it doesn’t mean that GOP voters can’t see aspects of what they like about him in other candidates. Fishback has reached the youth first. Maybe there’s a boomer wall that will stop him from going any further. Or maybe this is now just a party that wants candidates who will take racist populism as far as possible and show them a good time.
Polymarket has Fishback at 10%. This is down from him hovering above 15% in early February. I was not surprised when he reached his highest point, as novelty candidates tend to have surges in prediction markets. This happened with Casey Putsch running against Vivek in the Ohio primaries, though he’s proved to be much less plausible as a candidate than Fishback.
What I’m actually surprised about is that Fishback is lower than he was back when he wasn’t showing up in the polling at all. Now, he’s somewhere between second and fourth place in the few polls we have, and with a lot more buzz. For him to stay at 10% puts a lot of faith in the Republican primary voter, and his ability to behave responsibly when it is time to vote. I don’t know if Fishback is too low; I’d say he’s about rightly priced. But again, Donalds is boring, and there’s a lot of time for him to flounder. I would put Donalds closer to 65%, hold Fishback at 10%, and buy Collins, Renner, and DeSantis.
Regardless of what happens in the Florida gubernatorial primary – again, Fishback may not even be eligible! – I think we’ve seen enough to understand that Trump wasn’t a one-off. The conservative movement is now stacked with blowhards, racists, and conmen from top to bottom. If you can entertain a crowd, you’re in the running, and bigotry is part of the fun. Those who would object are lame, and probably closet libs. It’s telling that in one X space, Fishback told a guy to go join the Democratic Party if he did not like the way he talked about “By’rone.” The Based Ritual doesn’t always demand that you actively be racist, but one thing it doesn’t tolerate is objecting to racism.
So do I actually want Fishback and Fuentes to win, so I can say I was right about everything? Trust me, if there were ever a primary between Fuentes and Ben Shapiro, I would give my vote to Shapiro. But yeah, I can’t deny there is a smug satisfaction in watching everything I’ve prophesied come true. And if the alternative to Groyperism is a more “moderate” right-wing populism that hates markets anyway, wants to keep all the brown people out, and just refuses to scapegoat Jews like it does every other minority group, then Fishback can perhaps play a role in running the GOP into the ground and helping something better emerge after it goes through a necessary rebuilding.
Whether or not Fishback ends up winning, I see little to indicate that he doesn’t represent the future of American conservatism. Young Republicans and newer entrants are, compared to older members of the party, less consistently conservative and more open both to left-wing ideas and explicit racism. A decade of Trumpist domination over the GOP has accelerated human capital polarization between the two parties, and the full consequences of that shift are yet to play out. As conservatives who are more educated and have higher levels of media literacy die off or leave the party, those who are left behind or actively enter the Trumpian GOP are those more likely to get behind scammers and bigots. Fishback’s performance in the gubernatorial race will help tell us how far along we are in the GOP’s transition to a more populist and racist party, but the ultimate destination is the same.
As young conservatives grow older, I doubt they’ll discover the merits of the MSM, and they are probably going to be less likely to meet the most important milestones of previous generations, namely getting married and having kids, which are often said to have a moderating effect on individuals’ political attitudes. This means that it would not be unreasonable to expect that the quality of Republican politicians and influencers will just continue to get worse indefinitely. Figures like Fishback should become a regular part of our politics.
Fishback’s sympathetic coverage in the populist-leaning right-wing press is a sign of how even the most odious figures will come to be normalized by the mainstream and relatively intellectual parts of the new conservative coalition. In some ways, this is ideological. Some right-wing writers want Republicans to become more economically statist and skeptical of Israel, and they look past Fishback’s flaws because they agree with him on these issues. But to get behind a character this bad is about more than ideological alignment; it’s a reminder of how populism involves a degradation of all moral and intellectual standards.
In 2016, liberals took the position that Hillary had a 99% of winning. At least subconsciously, wishful thinking seems to have been their bias -- "it can't happen here." Now, in 2026, liberal institutions seem to have woken up to the threat of right-wing populism, and prefer to highlight it (and maybe even exaggerate it).
Even if Fishback has much less than a 10% chance of winning, it is still a better strategy to exaggerate the threat than to ignore it. If you can do this while wearing a smile and enjoying yourself, all the better.
Where "exaggeration" becomes harmful is when it is hysterical. We've all seen the tiktoks of liberals screaming and crying, which is not a winning message. Smugly proclaiming "I told you so" is much more attractive than having a mental breakdown.
The more that we draw attention to Fishback, the more Republican donors are to sit out or flip sides. The more moderate GOP donors we can peel off, the larger the war chest becomes for moderate Democrats. It's a win-win.
When you point out that Fishback is extreme, the net effect is not to make moderate conservatives into extremists -- its to make them more sympathetic to Democrats. This is because moderation is largely a product of personality traits, and individuals would rather switch coalitions than remain "ideologically loyal" to a brand. This will be even more true once the GOP loses its charismatic figurehead in Trump (we already noticed a split in the GOP flare up with the death of the great uniter, Charlie Kirk).
Great read!