Winner and Loser of the Week in Florida politics — Week of 7.26.26

It’s officially August, which means the Primaries are right around the corner. And as we get into the closing stretch of what is sure to be a widely watched election, you know what that means …

Are you ready for some football?

There will be plenty of time in the coming weeks to break down every twist in these races — and let’s be honest, breaking down these races is about all anyone in The Process has been doing anyway. But training camps are finally open, and we’ll admit our attention has started splitting right down the middle.

Down in Tampa, Baker Mayfield and the Bucs are not exactly speaking the same language right now. Mayfield had set his own deadline — the first day of training camp — to get a long-term deal in place, and when that day arrived without one, he didn’t hide his frustration.

“It feels like I’m having to prove my worth yet again,” Mayfield told reporters.

A few days later, the Bucs tried to lower the temperature without fully making peace. The team reworked Mayfield’s existing contract to guarantee him $30 million for this season — money that previously wasn’t locked in at all — but stopped well short of the long-term extension he’s actually chasing. And the team was reportedly happy with Mayfield’s public criticism.

Miami’s camp opened with a big and much-needed roster shake-up, as Tua Tagovailoa, Tyreek Hill and Jaylen Waddle have all moved on. Jacksonville’s camp comes with far less drama and a lot more optimism as head coach Liam Coen enters his second season coming off a playoff berth last year.

Primary season and football season have a lot in common: Both involve months of hitting, plenty of trash talk, and by the end, somebody’s sitting on the sidelines watching better performers in the spotlight.

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

Winners

Honorable mention: Charlie Crist. Crist got a trifecta of good news this week, and Ken Welch’s re-election bid absorbed the brunt of all three hits.

A new St. Pete Polls survey has Crist commanding more than a third of the six-candidate field, with Welch trailing at 19% and City Council Member Brandi Gabbard close behind at 15%. Head-to-head, Crist beats Welch 45% to 30% in a hypothetical November matchup.

But there are wrinkles buried in the sub-numbers. Among voters who say they’ve already cast a ballot, Welch actually sits in third place, with Gabbard edging him out for that all-important second spot under St. Pete’s charter. Crist, meanwhile, is clearing 51% support among that same group of early voters — enough, in theory, to let him win the whole race outright on Aug. 18 and skip a runoff altogether.

Pollsters caution the early-voter sample is still tiny and skews toward voters less likely to back Large, a Republican in a nonpartisan race, but even among voters who haven’t cast a ballot yet, Crist still leads comfortably.

The money picture looks just as troubling. Neither Gabbard nor Welch added a dime to their political committees during the most recent reporting period.

Then the Tampa Bay Times weighed in, and even its split decision amounted to a rebuke of the incumbent. Both of the paper’s top editors passed Welch over entirely, with Viewpoints Editor Graham Brink backing Crist and Publishing Co. Chair Conan Gallaty going with Gabbard instead.

Brink, who actually helped endorse Welch back in 2021, wrote that he had changed his mind after watching four and a half years of missed opportunities, workplace complaints and a habit of simply not being around — noting Welch had swiped into City Hall barely a third of the time across his opening eight months in the job. “34%? No wonder he didn’t notice the bullying,” Brink wrote.

Whether it’s pollsters, donors or editorial boards, nobody appears to be betting on a second term for Welch right now. Crist just has to decide whether to spend the next three weeks trying to close the deal outright, or coast into a runoff he’d still be heavily favored to win.

Almost (but not quite) the biggest winner: Mike Beltran. New York City’s election board just proved Mike Beltran right, more than two weeks after conservative influencer Laura Loomer accused him of casting an illegal ballot in the Big Apple.

Loomer said in mid-July that voter files showed Beltran, a Hillsborough Republican running for Florida’s 14th Congressional District, had cast a vote in Brooklyn’s November mayoral election even though he’s lived in Florida and been registered here since 2010. Beltran denied it immediately.

He pointed to his own father — also named Michael R. Beltran — who has resided for decades at the very same Brooklyn address where the younger Beltran had first signed up to vote. Beltran’s theory was that poll workers simply mixed up father and son on election night. He backed that up with a sworn declaration from his dad and, later, vehicle transponder data and photographs placing him in Florida the day of the vote.

Loomer wasn’t moved at first. Her team stood behind the reporting, but she did agree to one condition: If New York’s election board ever confirmed the father cast the disputed ballot, she would update the story.

That confirmation arrived this week. The New York City Board of Elections formally revised its records to show Beltran didn’t vote in November — his father did — and the younger Beltran no longer appears anywhere on the state’s voter rolls at all.

Loomer’s side of the bargain hasn’t held up quite as well. Despite her earlier promise, the article remains uncorrected days after the government paperwork came through, prompting Beltran to note dryly that Loomer and her team now “explicitly refuse to do so.”

Whatever happens in the Aug. 18 Primary, Beltran can cross one headache off the list: The voter rolls now say he told the truth all along.

The biggest winner: Higher education. Florida’s public university system just locked in a full decade at the top of the national rankings, and it’s throwing itself a scholarship program to mark the occasion.

U.S. News & World Report has placed Florida first in its state rankings for higher education every year since the metric launched in 2017, and this year’s list keeps that streak alive for a 10th consecutive year.

The rankings weigh factors like degree completion, affordability and student debt loads, and Florida backs up that ranking with hard numbers: no state charges less for in-state tuition, seven Florida schools crack the top 100 among public universities nationwide — a new record — roughly 4 in 5 resident students leave without taking on federal loan debt, and new graduates are pulling in a median $52,600 salary within roughly a year of graduating.

Board of Governors Chair Alan Levine framed the whole ranking around one metric that matters most to him, saying the system’s students “graduate with low or no debt, and they have high-value jobs they can compete for.”

Chancellor Ray Rodrigues credited the system’s steady focus on outcomes for the streak, arguing that emphasis on skills and qualifications is shaping Florida’s next generation of leaders even as public trust in higher education nationally continues to slide.

To celebrate the milestone, the State University System is rolling out “Florida 10 for 10,” a new scholarship initiative that will hand out up to $1,000 apiece to 10 full-time undergraduates at every participating school. Applications open Monday.

Individual campuses used the moment to take a bow of their own. Florida State University President Richard McCullough pointed to his school’s role in a decade of dominance, tying FSU’s rise into the national top 25 public universities directly to state investment under Gov. Ron DeSantis and the Legislature.

Florida A&M University President Marva Johnson described Florida’s public universities as “essential engines of research, workforce development and economic opportunity across the state” — a line that doubles as a reminder FAMU has spent seven straight years as the nation’s top public HBCU.

All told, a dozen state universities now educate upward of 431,000 students under this system, a headcount that ranks second nationally among public university systems, with the quality to boot.

Losers

Dishonorable mention: FWC. Environmental activists say FWC secretly pulled their driving records over the past several years, then pointed to anonymous, threatening social media posts as justification for the surveillance — without ever proving the activists it investigated actually wrote those posts.

That original justification unraveled over the past two weeks as reporters documented just how far the surveillance reached. At least a dozen outspoken critics of the agency, and possibly as many as 21, had their driving records searched going back to 2022, according to filmmaker Brent Fannin, who first noticed his own records had been pulled and encouraged others to check theirs.

Volusia County activist Chuck O’Neal, who founded Speak Up Wekiva and led the 2024 campaign against a constitutional amendment enshrining hunting rights, found his own driving record had been accessed 28 times over three years.

The database FWC tapped into, known as DAVID, exists under tight legal restrictions for a reason. Investigators are only supposed to use it for things like criminal probes, cases of child neglect, or vetting job applicants.

FWC’s own account of why it searched the records has shifted over time, moving from describing an active criminal investigation to calling it a public-safety precaution. An agency spokesperson said the goal was staying “committed to anticipating potential threats, continuously monitoring safety and security conditions” around Commission meetings.

FWC Chair Rodney Barreto offered a simpler explanation to the Miami Herald, saying “when people sign up to speak, their names are checked.”

The trouble is that not everyone whose records got pulled ever spoke at a meeting at all. Sierra Club Miami’s Sandy Moise said she had never addressed the Commission, and felt sick learning her file had been searched. Hendry County rancher Ben Olsen had his records pulled 14 times back in April 2024. That’s a full year before controversy over Florida’s bear hunt, which appears to have prompted many of these searches. And Olsen himself didn’t take a position on that hunt.

The fallout has reached the courts and the Capitol both. Taylor County Property Appraiser Shawna Beach and her husband have taken FWC to court, arguing the searches trampled their constitutional protections and ran afoul of federal privacy statutes. Sen. Carlos Guillermo Smith has asked Florida’s Inspector General to dig into the surveillance as well.

Almost (but not quite) the biggest loser: Fabián Basabe. Basabe unsurprisingly continues to face blowback after he was found liable for battery, sexual harassment and defaming two former staffers.

Five of the seven members of the Miami Beach City Commission said this week that Basabe should resign, invoking a pledge he made on camera before the 2024 election to step down if a jury ever found the allegations against him true.

“He should resign immediately, and Election Day can’t come soon enough,” Commissioner Alex Fernandez said.

Commissioners Tanya Katzoff Bhatt, Laura Dominguez, Monica Matteo-Salinas and David Suarez all said essentially the same thing in their own words.

The resignation calls landed the same week Basabe lost yet another endorsement. Sunny Isles Beach Vice Mayor Jeniffer Viscarra became the fifth official to publicly withdraw support for his re-election bid. That puts Viscarra alongside Rep. Jose Alvarez, Surfside Commissioner Ruben Coto, Bal Harbour Council Member Buzzy Sklar and Sunny Isles Beach Commissioner Alex Lama on the growing list of onetime supporters who have walked away since the verdict.

As for that verdict, attorney Peter Ticktin filed a 25-page motion this week seeking three possible outcomes from Judge J. Lee Marsh: toss the $450,000 verdict entirely, grant a fresh trial, or at least knock down the damages.

Basabe brought Ticktin on only after going it alone at trial without a lawyer — a decision he already conceded, within hours of the verdict, had been a serious misstep.

Whether that has a prayer of succeeding remains to be seen. But in the meantime, Basabe is continuing to feel the brunt of the court’s decision while having his own prior promise thrown back in his face.

The biggest loser: Jay Collins. This week gave Collins not only a high-profile legal defeat, but also a walked-back attack on one of the state’s most prominent donors.

The biggest headline was probably Judge David Frank tossing out Collins’ legal fight to knock rival Republican James Fishback off the Governor’s ballot, ruling in a 25-page order that Fishback’s sworn testimony about never abandoning his Florida residency was enough to clear Florida’s legal presumption in his favor.

The ruling was perplexing given the facts laid out. But Collins’ team failed to get the ruling they wanted, and Fishback wasted no time turning the loss into a call for Collins to resign from his current office altogether.

Then came the Ken Griffin mess. Collins’ campaign posted a message Tuesday attacking Griffin over his $10 million donation to rival Byron Donalds, contrasting hardworking Florida families against wealthy donors padding their portfolios.

That same day, the post vanished and the campaign disowned it entirely, with spokesperson Jennifer Vickery blaming an outside contractor who allegedly published it without anyone’s sign-off.

That explanation didn’t sit well with allies of Gov. Ron DeSantis, who have long considered Griffin a friend of the administration. One adviser summed up the episode by saying, “Attacking him is certainly a choice.”

By Thursday, Collins was trying to change the subject with suspect polling numbers nobody else has found so far. Appearing on Fox Business, he told host Maria Bartiromo his internal polling now has him “sitting over 30% right now, closing the gap with Byron Donalds.”

Every independent survey of the race says otherwise: Collins has averaged roughly 10% support all year, with his single best showing sitting at 15% in February. Even his own campaign’s polling from three weeks earlier had him at only 20%.

All in all, only one poll matters — and that’s on Aug. 18. And we have a feeling what those numbers are going to show.

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Ed. note: Michelle Todd Schorsch is the Chair of St. Pete Shines, a political committee backing Crist for St. Petersburg Mayor. Todd Schorsch is married to Peter Schorsch, the publisher of Florida Politics.