National Democrats pour millions into Florida's congressional special elections. Will it matter?

The two Democrats in Florida’s Congressional special elections next month have outraised their Republican opponents by more than five to one.

But a lot of that money won't be spent on campaigning in their districts, because millions of those dollars went to digital fundraising ads, mostly out-of-state.

Democrats Joshua Weil and Gay Valimont combined have raised over $15 million. Most of that hasn’t come from Florida donors. The majority of the money comes from thousands of people, mostly in blue states. Most of those donors gave 200 dollars or less.

How have the Democrats raised so much money from out-of-state people? With targeted digital ads like the one highlighted in this post.

Using targeted digital ads to help drive up fundraising dollars isn’t new in American politics, but it can be costly. According to Federal Election Commission reports, the two candidates have already paid almost $5 million to Key Lime Strategies and Media, a company run by both campaign’s digital fundraising director Jackson McMillian.

On the social media platform X, McMillian said he loaned the campaigns money to jumpstart their fundraising, and that much of the money he has received was a reimbursement.

But how much of that money went to pay for ads versus profits for his company is not publicly available.

Those digital ads have featured people popular with Democrats nationally, like DNC Vice Chair David Hogg and Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

But in posts to X, Ocasio-Cortez and Hogg both wrote they did not give permission to be used in either campaign’s digital advertising.

Hogg specifically called McMillian out, saying he was running the ads without the campaign’s consent and taking a 25% cut of all money raised.

McMillian declined to comment to WFSU about the finance details until after the special elections on April 1st.

"We were excited that Vice Chair Hogg and the Congresswoman expressed support for the campaigns. The campaigns used the public posts, not unlike a news clipping, to show the building momentum around the special elections," he said.

Steve Schale, a long-time Democratic political consultant who worked on the Obama campaign, thinks the campaigns have raised so much money because of concerns national Democrats have about the Trump administration.

“There's this, you know, element of sort of playing on the emotions of Democrats right now,” he said.

He thinks spending so much money to raise out-of-state dollars won’t do much to create the infrastructure needed to reverse the course of the Democratic Party’s struggles in Florida.

“10 million is more money than the Florida Democratic Party spent on voter registration, probably in the last six or seven years combined. That's real money that can do real things in terms of helping kind of get this thing pointed back in the right direction,” Schale said. “I don't blame people for contributing. I just, I wish there was a way to harness this energy, angst, whatever, sort of driving people to, you know, throw money at a plus 25 Republican district, to throw money at races that actually need it.”

Despite the money raised, it will be an uphill battle for both Democratic candidates to win their races. Both congressional districts went to Trump by double digits in 2024. However, the fundraising efforts have given them more money than their Republican counterparts in the final days of the campaign.

Weil has $900,000 more to spend than his opponent, Republican State Senator Randy Fine. Valimont has over a million left over her opponent, former Florida CFO Jimmy Patronis.

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