Rep. Randy Fine cruised to a decisive Republican primary victory in Florida's 6th Congressional District on Tuesday, burying far-right influencer Dan Bilzerian, whose campaign featured openly antisemitic ads and social media posts praising Hitler, by nearly 40 points.
Fine captured 56.9% of the vote with most of the expected ballots counted, the New York Post reported. Bilzerian finished a distant second at 18.7%, followed by Aaron Baker at 13.0% and Palm Coast City Councilor Charles Gambaro, a retired Army officer, at 9.7%. The result was never close, and the margin tells you what Republican voters in the Daytona Beach, area district thought of Bilzerian's brand of politics.
The race drew national attention not because of any suspense over the outcome, but because of the nature of Bilzerian's campaign. The 52-year-old Fine is the only Jewish Republican in Florida's congressional delegation, and Bilzerian, a social media personality who built a following in the 2010s by posting photos of an extravagant lifestyle, made Fine's faith the centerpiece of his attacks.
Three days before the primary, Bilzerian posted an image from what was described as an impromptu campaign event with the caption: "District 6 understands the jewish [sic] problem." About six days before that, he shared a post reading: "It's not red against blue. It's us against the Jew."
His campaign ad went further. It used AI-generated imagery to alter Fine's appearance, depicted Fine with horns, a centuries-old antisemitic trope, and included a singer asking, "Should we revisit that Austrian painter's opinions?" The "Austrian painter" is a reference to Adolf Hitler. The ad also referred to Fine as a "fat Jew," "Shylock," "Jewish supremacist," and other slurs too degrading to reprint in full.
Fine did not mince words about what he was facing. In an interview with Fox News, he called the campaign what it was:
"This is an open Nazi who transported himself from Las Vegas to Florida in order to target me. This isn't an organic campaign. It's an organized pogrom against the Jews."
Fine also reported that a swastika had been painted on one of his yard signs and alleged millions in potentially unreported campaign spending by Bilzerian, though no evidence of foreign funding has been confirmed.
The ad was repugnant enough to produce something almost unheard of in today's Congress: a bipartisan rebuke. House Speaker Mike Johnson and Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries jointly condemned Bilzerian's antisemitic campaign tactics on August 17, the day before the primary. The exact language of their statements was not published in the available reporting, but the joint nature of the response underscored how far outside the bounds of acceptable political conduct Bilzerian had traveled.
Rep. Josh Gottheimer, a New Jersey Democrat, was more direct. "Dan Bilzerian is running for Congress on a Nazi platform," Gottheimer said. "That's not hyperbole." The fact that members of both parties could agree on that point, in a Congress that agrees on almost nothing, tells you something about the severity of what voters in Florida's 6th District rejected on Tuesday.
The bipartisan condemnation stands in contrast to the more complicated alliances Jeffries has navigated within his own caucus in recent months, where the progressive wing's relationship with antisemitism has drawn its own scrutiny.
Florida's 6th Congressional District opened up after Mike Waltz, initially tapped by President Trump as national security adviser, moved to become U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations. Fine, then a state senator, won the April 2025 special election to replace him. In that race, Fine defeated Democrat Josh Weil with 57% of the vote, a comfortable margin, though narrower than Trump's 30-point win in the district the previous November.
The Washington Examiner reported that Fine's special election victory, combined with Jimmy Patronis winning Florida's 1st District, brought the GOP House majority to 220 seats. Weil had raised ten times more money than Fine, but national Republicans poured in resources in the final days and outspent Democrats on television nearly four-to-one.
After that win, Fine credited the president directly. "This victory isn't mine. It is Donald Trump's," Fine said, as AP News reported. "It is first electoral win since Nov. 5. And Republicans overwhelmingly showed they remain committed to his agenda."
Political analysts considered the district reliably conservative. Aubrey Jewett, a political scientist at the University of Central Florida, told AP it would take "a small miracle" for Democrats to win the seat.
Fine is no stranger to controversy himself. In a Fox News interview last May, he compared the conflict in Gaza to World War II in stark terms:
"In World War II, we did not negotiate a surrender with the Nazis. We did not negotiate a surrender with the Japanese. We nuked the Japanese twice in order to get unconditional surrender. That needs to be the same here."
In February, Fine posted on X: "If they force us to choose, the choice between dogs and Muslims is not a difficult one." And on the Sunday before the primary, he posted about New York City's Zohran Mamdani: "Jihadi Mamdani does not belong as Mayor of NYC. He needs to be deaturalized and sent back home to Uganda." The word "deaturalized" appeared to be a misspelling of "denaturalized."
Those remarks have drawn criticism, but they did not prevent Fine from winning his primary by a wide margin, and they exist in a different category from the explicit Nazi references and antisemitic slurs that defined Bilzerian's campaign. Voters in the district appeared to draw that distinction clearly.
The broader political landscape continues to churn with intra-party positioning on the right, even as Republicans work to hold their House majority through the midterms.
On the Democratic side, local realtor Eric Yonce won a four-way primary with 32.1% of the vote. Local police officer Ronnie Murchison-Rivera finished second at 26.9%, followed by entrepreneur Steve Morgan at 23.3% and Marine veteran Robert David Cooper II at 17.7%.
Fine is heavily favored to win the November general election in the deep-red district. Just The News noted that Fine's earlier special election victory helped secure the narrow Republican House majority, a majority the party will be fighting to defend across the country in November.
Democrats face their own internal battles heading into the fall, with progressive-establishment clashes playing out in primaries from Michigan to New York. But in Florida's 6th, the Democratic nominee will face a Republican incumbent who just proved he can absorb the ugliest campaign tactics in recent memory and still win by nearly 40 points.
Republican voters in Daytona Beach did what the leaders of both parties asked them to do: they rejected antisemitism at the ballot box. That Bilzerian still pulled nearly one in five votes is a reminder that the fringe does not disappear just because it loses, but losing by 38 points is about as clear a verdict as a primary can deliver.
