Winner and Loser of the Week in Florida politics — Week of 3.29.26

Attorney General James Uthmeier seems intent on picking a fight with the NFL over the Rooney Rule, and we’re not entirely sure why.

Uthmeier sent the NFL a March 25 warning letter saying the Rooney Rule violates the Florida Civil Rights Act and demanding that Commissioner Roger Goodell confirm by May 1 that the league will stop enforcing it on the Dolphins, Buccaneers and Jaguars or face possible civil-rights action.

The NFL’s response was basically: no.

Goodell said this week the league has no plans to scrap the rule, believes it is consistent with the law and still sees diversity as a benefit to the league. But Uthmeier isn’t dropping the push, promising to continue hammering the issue.

But here’s an important reminder that makes this push by Florida all the more unnecessary: The Rooney Rule is not a forced-hiring mandate, no matter how hard culture-warriors try to sell it that way. It only requires teams to interview diverse candidates for head coach and general manager jobs, or for certain senior roles.

We’re not dismissing Uthmeier’s haranguing out of some love for woke culture. We’ve written in the past that the Left has, at times, gone nuts with diversity messaging.

But once again, the Rooney Rule does not require a team to hire anybody. And given that the NFL is heading into next season with only three Black head coaches and four Black general managers — after a cycle in which 10 head-coach jobs opened and none went to a Black coach — the idea that the league is overdoing it is a bit nonsensical.

This rule is aiming to open the door for those who haven’t gotten opportunities in the past. And given that there’s no mandate on hiring, it’s not shutting the door on anyone.

Uthmeier has real work sitting on his desk. He has been busy, rightfully, with child-predator stings, child-safety investigations, fentanyl trafficking, organized retail theft and human trafficking. That is the kind of work an Attorney General should want to be known for. That is serious. That protects people.

Picking a fight with the NFL over whether teams have to interview a broader pool of candidates is the political equivalent of wandering off the job to yell at a television.

We look forward to the day when leaders are focusing on real issues affecting people and not manufacturing outrage to rile up the most online segment of their base. Obviously, that day remains far in the distance.

Now, it’s onto our weekly game of winners and losers.

Winners

Honorable mention: City of Orlando. NFL owners voted unanimously this week to let the Jaguars play their 2027 home games at Orlando’s Camping World Stadium while EverBank Stadium in Jacksonville is torn apart and rebuilt into the Jaguars’ much-hyped “stadium of the future.”

The Orlando arrangement is only for one season. But it’s a nice little chest-thump moment for a city that has spent years auditioning for bigger sports relevance and, increasingly, getting it.

Orlando will now earn a season’s worth of NFL attention: hotel bookings, restaurant traffic, TV shots, sponsor activity and the kind of statewide prestige that local elected officials and tourism boosters love to cash in. Camping World Stadium also gets a major showcase at exactly the moment Orlando wants to prove it can handle even more top-tier events.

This is the sort of thing Orlando is built to exploit. The city knows how to host and how to package itself.

The Jaguars are expected back in their renovated stadium for the 2028 season, with the team staying at reduced capacity in Jacksonville during 2026 before the full one-year move. But for 2027, Orlando gets to play in the big league NFL spotlight.

Almost (but not quite) the biggest winner: Alex Vindman. Vindman, the retired Army lieutenant colonel who entered the 2026 Senate race in January, just showed he can turn national attention into real money fast.

The campaign says he has raised more than $8.2 million since launching and has roughly $6 million cash on hand, a haul big enough to yank this race out of the “nice try, Florida Democrats” bin and into the category of contests people will actually watch closely.

He is running to finish the last two years of Marco Rubio’s term. The seat is held by Republican incumbent Ashley Moody.

What this number means is simple: Vindman has instantly become a serious financial force, not just a cable-news name parachuting into a red state. Money does not automatically buy votes in Florida, but it absolutely buys oxygen, staff, travel, digital reach and the ability to define yourself before the other side spends nine figures defining you first.

It also changes the Democratic Primary. Angie Nixon is in that race, and she has every right to argue she has deeper roots here. Others are running as well. But when one Democrat is stacking millions this early, everyone else is suddenly running uphill. That is not the same as wrapping up the nomination, but it is how you become the candidate donors, consultants and national groups take most seriously.

Now for the buzzkill: This is still Florida. Republicans still have a voter registration advantage. Rubio beat Val Demings by more than 16 points in 2022. Rick Scott beat Debbie Mucarsel-Powell by nearly 13 points in 2024. Donald Trump carried Florida in 2024 by 13 points as well.

As we said last week, Democrats have the right to be more enthusiastic after last month’s legislative Special Election results. But the numbers above are not synonymous with a swing-state résumé.

Vindman may have some prospects though. Early polling has Moody ahead but not parked in blowout territory. UNF found her up 45% to 38%, with 15% undecided, and Emerson had it 46% to 38%.

UNF also found 66% of likely voters had never heard of Vindman, which cuts both ways: it shows how much work he has to do, but also how much room he has to grow if the money helps him introduce himself on his own terms.

Vindman is not close to being the favorite. But after this fundraising number, he is no longer a fantasy candidate. In Florida, that alone is a win.

The biggest winner: School choice. Florida’s school choice programs are pulling in major demand. Applications for the 2026-27 scholarship cycle opened Feb. 1, topped 200,000 in the first three days, exceeded 300,000 by midday Feb. 10, climbed above 400,000 by Feb. 27 and crossed 500,000 on March 30 — 22 days earlier than last year.

Step Up For Students, which administers the vast majority of the state’s scholarships, also says its systems processed 15% more applications on Day 1 than a year ago.

School choice is not fringe anymore. It is an integral part of the state’s infrastructure.

Florida’s 2023 HB 1 expansion opened Family Empowerment Scholarship access to all students. The latest numbers show Florida’s choice universe enormous by any reasonable definition.

None of this means every application turns into a scholarship user, and it definitely does not mean critics have no arguments about transparency, district impacts or long-term accountability. Even several members of the Republican Legislature agreed, though legislation responding to concerns raised per an audit about how scholarship money is being spent ended up stalling in the House the Regular Session.

But in raw political terms, school choice is winning the only test that really moves elected officials: Families keep showing up in huge numbers. And in Florida, when half a million people are effectively telling the state they want more options, the people still pretending this is a passing fad are the ones getting left behind.

Losers

Dishonorable mention: Governor’s race also-rans. At this point, the rest of the Republican gubernatorial field is not running a campaign so much as serving as background players in Byron Donalds’ warmup act.

A new Emerson poll is brutal for candidates not named “Donalds.” The front-runner pulls 46% in the GOP Primary. Lt. Gov. Jay Collins gets 4%. James Fishback gets 4%. Paul Renner is at 3%. And when pollsters toss Casey DeSantis into the mix, Donalds still sits at 44% while she manages just 7%.

What makes it worse for the also-rans is that this is not some one-off outlier. Florida Republicans have been hearing the same song for months now: Donalds is ahead. Donalds has support from Donald Trump. Donalds is the clear favorite unless somebody with real juice actually gets in and changes the shape of the race.

Even an earlier UNF survey, which was more flattering to the DeSantis universe than this Emerson poll, showed how hard it is to stop him. Before voters were reminded of Trump’s endorsement, Donalds led Casey DeSantis 28% to 24%. After they were told Trump had backed him, that became a 47%-12% rout.

And that is why the other names look so weak right now. Collins is the sitting Lieutenant Governor and still cannot get out of the single digits. Fishback has noise and internet energy and is still parked at 4%. Renner, a former Speaker, barely registers in recent polling snapshots.

The idea that there is some big anti-Donalds lane waiting to be claimed keeps crashing into the same ugly reality: Republican voters already know who Trump picked. Since then, nobody else has found a way to make the race feel less frozen.

Sure, there are still a lot of undecided voters out there. Emerson found 39% undecided in the GOP Primary, which in theory leaves room for movement.

In practice, though, undecided is not the same thing as available. If you are a year into the race environment and still stuck at 4%, voters are not “considering” you. They are politely ignoring you.

Almost (but not quite) the biggest loser: Gulf Coast. This week, the Trump administration’s Endangered Species Committee — the ominously nicknamed “God Squad” — voted unanimously to exempt Gulf oil and gas drilling from the Endangered Species Act.

That is an extraordinary carve-out that strips away a layer of legal protection for species already hanging by a thread, including the critically endangered Rice’s whale, sea turtles and Gulf sturgeon. Reuters reported it was the first such exemption in more than three decades and the first ever granted on national security grounds.

The Gulf pumps a huge share of America’s oil — about 15% of U.S. crude — which is exactly why the administration says it wanted to bulldoze past the legal fights. But Florida’s Gulf Coast also knows what happens when the offshore industry screws up. The Deepwater Horizon disaster killed 11 workers and spilled 134 million gallons of oil in 2010, and scientists say Rice’s whale numbers dropped 22% after that blowout.

When officials make it easier to waive protections in the name of urgency, Gulf communities are not irrational for hearing: Congratulations, you get to absorb more risk so somebody in Washington can brag about production.

The ugliest part is how abnormal this is. It comes as the administration scrambles for stability while fighting a war with Iran that no one asked for. The committee had not met in 34 years before being hauled out for this move. That is not normal process. That is the federal government yanking an emergency lever to help the oil and gas industry and cover their own behinds.

Almost immediately, lawsuits started flying to block the exemption, with environmental groups arguing the carve-out violated federal law and lacked any real legal foundation.

And look, not every drilling project instantly becomes a catastrophe, and not every environmental lawsuit is holy writ.

But if there are ill effects here, the people making this decision do not have to live with the downside. Florida’s Gulf communities do. They are the ones with beaches, fisheries, wildlife habitat and tourism economies sitting closest to the blast radius of federal bravado.

The biggest loser: Pam Bondi. Bondi spent 14 months proving the oldest rule in Trumpworld: There is no bottom, and there is no loyalty reward.

You can twist yourself into knots for the boss, torch your own credibility, drag the Justice Department through the mud, and still get tossed overboard the second he decides you have not humiliated yourself enough.

Until further notice, that is Bondi’s legacy now. Not just that she was fired as Attorney General, but that she got fired after spending her tenure trying to bend federal law enforcement around Trump’s resentments and obsessions. And in the end, even that was not sufficient.

Trump is temporarily replacing her with Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche, who also happens to be his former personal lawyer, because apparently the last arrangement was not servile enough.

Reports say Trump and his allies had grown frustrated that Bondi was not aggressive or effective enough in prosecuting his political enemies. Think about how absurd that is. She helped gut the traditional independence of DOJ, oversaw firings of career officials, and pushed cases and investigations aimed at Trump foes.

And after all that institutional vandalism, the verdict from Trump’s side was basically: nice effort, but where are the scalps?

There was also the Jeffrey Epstein fiasco, which blew up in Bondi’s face. The handling of the Epstein files drew bipartisan backlash, with critics accusing her of overpromising explosive revelations and delivering a botched, incomplete spectacle instead.

Worse still for Bondi, getting fired does not even get her off the hook. House members still want her to testify under oath about the DOJ’s handling of those files, meaning she may get the rare privilege of being publicly embarrassed both before and after losing the job.

And that is the through line here. Bondi made the classic mistake of every ambitious Trump loyalist who mistakes degradation for job security. She acted like showing maximum obedience would protect her. It never does. In Trump’s orbit, loyalty is not a shield. It is a rental agreement. The moment you stop being useful — or worse, the moment you fail to satisfy the latest whim — you become disposable.

That is the trap. Sell your credibility for proximity to power, and under Trump, eventually you are left with neither.