In politics, they’re called surrogates.
They’re stand-ins for the candidate. They spread the campaign message and perform damage control, covering ground the candidate can’t reach.
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Few surrogates were as ubiquitous on the 2024 campaign trail for Donald Trump as an up-and-coming Naples congressman named Byron Donalds. He was in the spin room the night of the first debate, when Joe Biden’s reelection campaign effectively ended. He hyped the crowd along with billionaire Elon Musk, TV personality Hulk Hogan and JD Vance during the Madison Square Garden rally for Trump nine days before Election Day.
That hustle paid off. Less than four months later, the newly inaugurated Trump gave Donalds, what in GOP politics, amounted to a golden ticket.
“Byron Donalds would be a truly Great and Powerful Governor for Florida and, should he decide to run, will have my Complete and Total Endorsement,” Trump posted Feb. 20, 2025, on Truth Social. ”RUN, BYRON, RUN!”
Donalds came one step closer to realizing that vision Tuesday, clinching the GOP nomination for governor with about half of Tuesday’s vote. He is set to face Democrat David Jolly in the November general election.
The Trump endorsement gave Donalds an early edge. But it was the candidate’s fundraising prowess and discipline that cemented his status as the GOP front-runner, according to interviews with campaign staffers and Republican strategists.
From the start, Donalds locked up big donors and support from Florida Republicans that outmatched challengers and drove away potential rivals, including Casey DeSantis, the wife of a one-time ally, Gov. Ron DeSantis.
Even with the clear advantage, Donalds had to navigate a fraught relationship with DeSantis, who remained popular among Florida voters, and avoid provocations from bitter rivals in the primary.
It was harder than it looked.
Between two worlds
From the start of his political rise, Donalds navigated between the Trump and DeSantis political worlds.
Married to Erika Donalds, then a Collier County School Board member, he was already a well-known conservative activist when he ran for the Florida House in 2016.
He campaigned for Trump before winning his own race, speaking at a September rally in Lee County for the future president.
Two years later, DeSantis considered him for lieutenant governor in his upstart campaign for governor that also owed its success to Trump’s endorsement, said Brad Herold, DeSantis’ 2018 campaign manager. Donalds didn’t get the job, but DeSantis was impressed.
When DeSantis said on the 2018 campaign trail that Floridians shouldn’t “monkey this up” by voting for Andrew Gillum, his Black Democratic opponent, it was Donalds who stepped in to excuse the remark.
“That man is not racist at all, period,” Donalds, who is Black, told reporters. “It was just a choice of words, there’s nothing to it.”
DeSantis won. Herold and Donalds kept in touch. When a congressional seat opened in Naples, Herold and James Blair, a political consultant who would become Trump’s deputy chief of staff, encouraged Donalds to run. He did, touting his Trump credentials along the way.
“The fake news media doesn’t want to cover black men who are strong supporters of (Trump),” he posted on X in 2020. “So help me spread this message: I’m a Trump supporting, liberty loving, proven Conservative running for Congress.”
In a crowded primary field, he won by less than a percentage point.
Upon assuming office on Jan. 3, 2021, Donalds remained loyal to Trump. Hours after the violent breach of the Capitol three days later, Donalds objected to the certification of the Electoral College vote, essentially voting to overturn the presidential election. He would tell reporters that Biden was not a “legitimate” president.
As Donalds solidified his credentials as one of the most conservative members of Congress, his close ties to DeSantis frayed.
DeSantis was considering running for president. But in April 2023, Donalds became one of the first Floridians to endorse Trump.
“I spent 90 minutes on the phone with him the night before talking about endorsing Trump,” said Herold, now a senior adviser on Donalds’ campaign. “But he didn’t feel any pressure. He made his decision because it was the right thing to do.”
Three months later, Donalds expressed concerns after the DeSantis administration pushed new standards for teaching African American history, taking exception to the concept that Black Americans benefited in some ways by enslavement.
“We will not back down from teaching our nation’s true history at the behest of a woke White House, nor at the behest of a supposedly conservative congressman,” a DeSantis spokesperson responded.
Donalds seemed taken aback.
“What’s crazy to me is I expressed support for the vast majority of the new African American history standards,” Donalds posted on X. “Anyone who can’t accurately interpret what I said is disingenuous and is desperately attempting to score political points. Just another reason why I’m proud to have endorsed President Donald J. Trump!”
Donalds told the Times during a brief interview Saturday that he had no regrets. (DeSantis ran a lackluster presidential campaign that lost badly to Trump.)
The endorsement, Donalds said, “was more about who can hit the ground on Day 1 and lead the country. To this day, I still think that’s President Trump.”
Go time
As a senior adviser to Trump’s 2024 presidential campaign, Danielle Alvarez kept a running list of which surrogates would go where and respond to which situation.
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It wasn’t easy to find reliable surrogates, she said. Many who volunteered weren’t around when needed. Or they were doing it just to be noticed.
“They all want to be next to Trump,” Alvarez said. “Going on a trip to Wisconsin? You’re going alone. Trump’s not going with you. Some have a problem with that. Byron was never like that.”
The typical surrogate would jump at a TV spot — on Fox News. Donalds, Alvarez said, was happy to go on MSNBC.
He appeared on CNBC’s Squawk Box a day after handling the fallout from a comedian at a 2024 Trump rally who called Puerto Rico a “floating island of garbage.”
“Is it a racist rally if you have a Black man from Florida who’s originally from New York speaking at the rally?” Donalds asked the host, Andrew Ross Sorkin. “I don’t think so.”
Back in Florida for family reasons, Alvarez thought Donalds would be a great candidate for governor. When she reached out to inquire, he was already pursuing it.
By late 2024 and into the new year, Donalds visited Mar-a-Lago and showed Trump a memo that made the case that he could win the governor’s race. It included poll numbers and a list of pledged backers, many of them DeSantis loyalists.
“That made a big impression on the president,” Herold said.
“We knew the first question in the governor’s race was going to be, ‘Who is the president supporting?’” said campaign manager Ryan Smith.
At 6:12 p.m. on Feb. 20, a Thursday, without any heads up, Trump posted his endorsement.
“It was electrifying,” Smith said. “It meant go time.”
Doing the work
Nobody thought the Trump endorsement would happen that quickly, Alvarez said.
“There was no campaign, no account,” she recalled. “It was a sprint.”
The cold-shoulder reaction from DeSantis made the Donalds campaign anxious. Rather than applaud the endorsement from the man who crushed him in the presidential primary, DeSantis suggested that his wife would be a good candidate, dismissing Donalds outright.
“You’ve got a guy like Byron — he just hasn’t been a part of any of the victories that we’ve had here,” DeSantis told reporters.
Later that week, all the paperwork was filed. It was official. Donalds was the first major candidate in the race.
“Ron DeSantis has done a tremendous job for our state, but now the job is to keep the best state in the country as the best state in the country,” Donalds told Sean Hannity on Fox News. “And I’m excited to announce my candidacy with you tonight.”
A week later, DeSantis shared photos on social media of his wife golfing with Trump at his golf course in Palm Beach.
The campaign moved to swat down rumors of a dual endorsement, which, if true, would have complicated the path to victory, Smith said.
Donalds didn’t hesitate in making donor calls, doing the work that a lot of candidates hate. When the campaign released its first finance report more than a month later, it announced a haul of $12 million. That’s more than any of his opponents raised in their entire campaigns for Florida governor.
“Most candidates, you get the showman, the retail politician, or you get the nerdy executive type,” Herold said. “He has the ability to do both.”
Nagged by a scandal involving the Hope Florida Foundation, mention of Casey DeSantis in the conversation for governor faded over last summer. Rumors of other big names joining the race never materialized.
Those who did get in, like former House Speaker Paul Renner and Lt. Gov. Jay Collins, couldn’t get traction. By the end of the primary, Donalds was consistently leading polls by 35 percentage points.
Investor James Fishback ran a renegade campaign that skillfully used social media to get attention. But Donalds rarely took the bait, largely avoiding engagement despite several racial provocations.
The campaign held hundreds of events, won endorsements from 43 of Florida’s 67 sheriffs and 75% of the Legislature, knocked on more than half a million doors and raised $111 million, more than 11 times its next closest competitor.
Donalds heads into a showdown with an overwhelming monetary edge over his opponent, Jolly. And while Trump has low approval ratings, as he did in 2018, Florida has become more red.
On Tuesday night, Donalds celebrated with his family and supporters in a packed Orlando resort ballroom. Drowned out by chants of “Byron! Byron! Byron!” Donalds didn’t dwell on the moment too long.
“The general election starts tonight, and I can’t do this alone,” Donalds told the crowd. “I need your prayers, I need your energy, and I need your hard work. So I ask you: Are you with me to keep Florida? Are you with me to keep Florida free?”
The crowd roared back.
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