After Florida’s primary Tuesday, centrist Democrats have renewed hope they’ll be able to capture another rarity: a Democrat in Congress representing a Donald Trump-aligned district.
Welcome PAC — a national effort backing a select few swing-district Democrats, including Reps. Marie Gluesenkamp Perez, Jared Golden and Mary Peltola — told NOTUS exclusively that it’s endorsing Whitney Fox against incumbent Rep. Anna Paulina Luna after her Democratic primary win on Tuesday in Florida’s 13th District.
The group is specifically targeting moderate Democrats who are running against hard-line conservatives in the House who are closely aligned with Trump, such as Reps. Scott Perry and Derrick Van Orden. While Welcome PAC has not pledged a specific investment for Fox’s race yet, last cycle the group spent more than $2 million on candidates.
Fox also has the backing of the Blue Dog Coalition’s PAC, which has only endorsed seven challengers this cycle.
National Democrats have not been treating Florida as a battleground state in recent months. Yet, of Welcome PAC’s slate of candidates this cycle, Fox is going up against the most visibly Trump-aligned incumbent.
Fox’s strategy counts on anti-MAGA Republicans to come out in force, focusing on the Florida issues Democrats see as the sharpest blows to Republicans in Florida: property insurance and abortion.
Still, Luna has significantly outraised Fox at $2.3 million compared to Fox’s $845,000.
The district went for Trump by nearly 7 points in 2020, and Republicans have a 10-point voter registration advantage. Independent voters make up a third of voters in the district.
A poll commissioned by the Fox campaign and conducted by the Democratic polling group GQR in May showed that Republicans and independents in the district are swayed by Fox’s biography. The poll found that Republicans would vote 50-43 for the generic Republican candidate, but when presented with information on Fox, she came out ahead of Luna, 49-47.
Taken with a grain of salt, the poll does give Fox’s campaign an opening.
In their endorsement, the Welcome PAC focused on Fox’s biography in winning over independents and moderate Republicans. They are highlighting her background as a wife and mom of young children and her work with the local county transit authority.
“Not only is Whitney a candidate committed to bridging divides and welcoming conservatives into her coalition, but she’s running against an extremist who’s been stumping for an increasingly unpopular JD Vance,” Lauren Harper Pope, co-founder of Welcome PAC, said in a statement.
Responding to the endorsement, Fox said it shows her message “of common sense and common ground is resonating.”
“I’m not here to be the loudest voice in the room but the most effective one,” Fox said. “With Welcome PAC’s support, we’re building a coalition of problem-solvers, not polarizers.”
Luna was among the earliest endorsers of Trump’s presidential campaign over Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis last year and, in recent weeks, has joined Republican vice presidential candidate Vance on the campaign trail across the Sun Belt.
Donned in a bright pink blazer in Reno, Nevada, at the end of July, Luna told a cheering crowd she was at the rally “because of the egregious lies that JD Vance is anti-woman.”
Luna’s prominence in Trumpworld speaks to the close ties Republicans in Florida have in the presidential campaign. Her top political consultant, James Blair, is also Trump’s national political director and close ally of Trump campaign manager and Floridian Susie Wiles.
On the national ticket, consultants say Luna, a young Mexican American woman, brings a symbolic presence to a national Republican ticket that’s previously struggled to appeal to voters of color.
“There’s not a deep bench of these folks, and a lot of Latinos who were heavily engaged in communicating Republicanism to the American voting public have left the party,” Mike Madrid, a GOP consultant focused on Latino voters and the co-founder of the anti-Trump group The Lincoln Project, told NOTUS.
But he doesn’t see Luna’s role as persuading new, diverse Republican voters.
“These candidates who are more performative than substantive really serve more as a justification for the base, as opposed to a persuasive tool to bring more people into the fold,” he told NOTUS. “Her chief characteristic is not her substantive understanding of policy, it’s her fealty to Donald Trump, and that’s what they’re looking for.”
The district itself is not particularly diverse — it’s starkly whiter, older and wealthier than the state. The median age in Luna’s district is 50, it’s 76% white and just 11% of the district is Hispanic or Latino, compared to 27% statewide.
“I think her main demographic is older white men,” one Republican political consultant from Florida told NOTUS of Luna’s prominence on the national stage, too, adding that unlike Colorado Republican Lauren Boebert — who was targeted by the Welcome PAC in 2022 — Luna has maintained a certain level of credibility outside Trumpworld.
“To her credit, she has gotten as close to the line, I think, as you can to being super-MAGA without turning into a joke,” the consultant said. “Boebert has become a caricature, Anna Paulina is super-MAGA, I don’t think she has become a caricature.”
Republicans in Pinellas County have about a 35,000 active-voter-registration advantage over Democrats. Fox is counting on her anti-MAGA message making a dent in that Republican lead and among the more than 165,000 no-party-affiliated voters.
The week before Tuesday’s primary, Luna projected an unbothered calm, posting a GIF of SpongeBob SquarePants saying “imagination” on X and writing, “This is my favorite part of election season. When blog reporters pretend Pinellas is somehow going to magically turn blue. 😂”
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Claire Heddles is a NOTUS reporter and an Allbritton Journalism Institute fellow. Katherine Swartz is a NOTUS reporter and an Allbritton Journalism Institute fellow.