Recent discussion has swirled as to whether James Fishback, the young outsider candidate in Florida’s Republican primary with a penchant for appealing to Gen Z, is a right-wing equivalent of the left’s Zohran Mamdani. Ben Clerkin’s February 20 article at The Spectator posed this question openly under the headline “Is James Fishback the right’s answer to Zohran Mamdani?” But there is a different New York mayoral race that may provide key insights into the potential goals and future of Fishback in Florida politics.
Most know William F. Buckley as the founder of National Review, later as the host of Firing Line, and as an important player in the conservative movement from mid-century to the Bush-era. Fewer know about Buckley’s 1965 campaign for New York mayor as the “Conservative” candidate, which pitted him against the liberal Republican John Lindsay and the Democrat Abraham Beame.
In this race, Buckley had two main intentions. The first intention, in which he failed, was to prevent Lindsay from being elected, so that the state’s Republican party would pivot to the right.
The second of Buckley’s intentions was to rescue the conservative movement from the nadir in which it found itself following Barry Goldwater’s loss in the 1964 presidential election, and to package conservative ideas, especially on urban issues, in a new way that could appeal to voters. Buckley’s campaign was successful in re-energizing the conservative base. As Buckley biographer Sam Tanenhaus commented to The American Conservative, “[TAC Co-Founder] Pat Buchanan told me that after Goldwater’s defeat in 1964 and before Nixon’s victory in 1968, ‘Bill Buckley was all we had. He was the biggest guy.’”
Buckley’s performance and ability to promote conservative positions to New York’s problems enabled conservatives to be viewed as a serious political force worth courting by the Republican party. “Pat Buchanan and Richard Nixon courted Buckley after [the election],” Tanenhaus said. “His influence was akin to Tucker Carlon’s and Steve Bannon’s now, but his status was higher because he commanded the respect of liberal intellectuals as well as conservative ones.”
Fishback’s campaign for governor, while a longshot, has the potential to accomplish similar goals. Fishback has garnered significant nationwide attention due to his support for a variety of conservative positions neglected by the party establishment, from his socially conservative “sin tax” proposal on pornography, to his defense of Florida’s Confederate history, to his criticism of Israel and support for a noninterventionist and America First foreign policy (although on this point he is at odds with Buckley, who sought to replace the noninterventionist right with an internationalist one).
Even should his campaign fail—as did Buckley’s—there is still significant room for it to benefit the conservative movement in the United States. Much as Buckley showed the relevance of conservative solutions on issues such as law and order, Fishback may show the relevance of conservative ideas on subjects, and may push his primary opponents—Florida’s Rep. Byron Donalds and Lt. Governor Jay Collins—to move to the right on these issues.
But, speaking with The American Conservative, Fishback seemed deadly serious that his intention was to win the governorship rather than just to promote his ideas. “The goal of my campaign is simple: serve as the 47th governor of a state that my family has known for four generations. Nothing more, nothing less,” Fishback said. “If I wanted to write a book, I could have written a book. I’ve been on Fox News more times than I can count…. If I wanted to spread a message, I certainly had a platform to do that.”
One similarity between the two campaigns is their light-heartedness. Buckley’s campaign was characterized from its start by its joking tone, with Buckley telling a crowd that if elected he would “demand a recount.” This tone made the campaign appear playful, whilst maintaining its serious intention of spreading conservative ideas “‘Lark’ is more accurate than ‘stunt.’ He didn’t need the attention,” Tanenhaus commented.
Fishback too has attracted significant attention for his irreverent and often joking tone, with many viewing Fishback’s campaign as unserious on this basis. But the candidate himself was very straightforward when asked about his campaign’s tone. “I’m not going to apologize for trolling, and I do troll. What I think is fun about our campaign is we can do both. We dish out jokes, but we can also take them,” Fishback told TAC. “It’s fun.”
The language Fishback deploys varies from bombastic to controversial. This too is similar to Buckley who was known for rhetorical bluster in his campaign. In one instance, after a Vietnam War protest, Buckley declared: “I wonder how these self-conscious boulevardiers of protest would have fared if a platoon of American soldiers who have seen gore in South Vietnam had parachuted down into their mincing ranks.”
His campaign has been accused by others of race-baiting, for instance by referring to the Donalds’s plans to make Florida the “financial capital of the world” (which Fishback sees as a recipe for further financialization) and support for AI data centers as constituting a “dark vision” for the state which has been seen by some as a reference to Donalds’s race. Fishback, however, pushed back against this characterization. “I’m going to fight for you with equal vigor, whether you’re black or you’re white, straight or gay, Christian, Muslim or a Jew,” he told me. “I’m going to fight for you if you’re an American citizen in my state, because you deserve a state that you can be proud of and that you can afford.”
“I do think it is in fact dark to financialize the economy,” Fishback added, when pressed about his “dark vision” comments. “I do think it is in fact dark to tell citrus growers and cattle ranchers that their land will be dedicated to AI data centers. I think that is in fact a very dark vision for the state.”
These accusations of bigotry mirror those made by the critics of Buckley. Lindsay told Jewish voters that Buckley’s statements were akin to “some of the worst moments in history,” in what was widely seen as an attempt to compare Buckley to the Nazis. Buckley, for his part, responded to this in a debate with Lindsay, at one point (possibly in anger, by his admission) comparing Lindsay to the Klan for trying to make Jewish voters afraid of Buckley. “He [Lindsay] is trying to do to the Jewish voters what the Ku Klux Klan has been trying to do to the white people in the South, keep them scared,” Buckley said.
In his 1965 campaign, Buckley was able to attract the support of conservative youth and youth organizations. Most notably, “YAFers”—members of the group Young Americans for Freedom (founded in the Buckley family home in 1960)—volunteered for the Buckley campaign, as did college-age Goldwaterites and Young Republicans disaffected with the party’s support for Lindsay. These young supporters represented a sort of “New Frontier,” a cutting edge of the political right, and their ideas would make up the substance of conservative politics in the subsequent decades: Buckley’s brother Jim was elected senator in 1970, and Ronald Reagan carried the state in the 1980 and 1984 presidential elections.
Fishback’s current campaign has likewise garnered particular attention for relying on young, college-age supporters for its ground game and overall electoral support. “What you’re going to see over the coming weeks is thousands of Gen Z volunteers in our campaign knocking on the doors of people who look like their parents and grandparents making our pitch,” Fishback told The Spectator in February.
One place where Fishback has found considerable support is amongst College Republicans organizations in the state, especially because of his positions on affordability and America First stances on foreign policy. Michael Andre, the president of the University of Florida College Republicans, ascribed much of his popularity among Generation Z to Fishback’s opposition to the war in Iran. “Fishback has taken a very firm stance on that issue, and how he believes that we should not be involved, and that there are foreign actors that he believes might be influencing the decision,” Andre told TAC. “I think that is one of the most important issues that has caused Generation Z to lean in his favor.”
“The other most important is his emphasis on affordability,” he said. “In Florida, we’ve had an influx of domestic immigration, with a lot of people coming from New York, and because of that, housing prices have been going up a lot.”
Local issues also have played a role in Fishback’s popularity. John Aleman, a UFCR member, expressed support for Fishback due to the concern that Florida was devolving into the “world’s dive bar.”
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“Florida is not going to be the world’s ‘melting pot’ anymore once our generation is within the ranks of governance, and James Fishback’s campaign seems to understand this,” he told TAC.
Fishback’s comparative popularity among young voters seems to be showing up in some polling, with a recent poll suggesting that Fishback is attracting the support of a plurality (32 percent) of voters 18–34, compared to less than 1 percent of voters over 55.
Florida’s August 18 primary is a long way off, and it is unclear whether Fishback can convert his enthusiasm amongst Generation Z into a primary win in the nation’s fifth most elderly state. Fishback, for all of his popularity among young voters, is still trailing far behind Donalds. But if Fishback is able to garner the support of a significant number of young Republicans, he may very well replicate Buckley’s success in highlighting the issues and stances on which future conservatives will run and win at the state, local, and national levels.
