Kristoffer Ealy is a political scientist, political analyst, and professor in Southern California. He teaches American Government and political behavior, with a focus on political psychology, voting behavior, and political socialization. Subscribe to his Substack, The Thinking Class with Professor Ealy.
Byron Donalds has spent the Florida governor’s race treating a debate stage like it comes with a subpoena. During the Republican primary, he refused to debate his opponents and dressed the cowardice up as corporate wisdom: “If I’m applying for a job, it’s not my responsibility to help my competitor get a job interview.” Apparently Florida democracy is LinkedIn now, and Byron is the regional manager deciding who gets past HR.
Then the general election arrived, and suddenly the man who had spent months acting like debating was charity work discovered an almost Jeffersonian reverence for public discourse. David Jolly said Donalds backed out of a joint Tampa Tiger Bay Club appearance; a club board member supported Jolly’s account, while Donalds’s campaign said the event had never been confirmed. On Sept. 18, Donalds announced that he had accepted three televised debate invitations. Jolly’s campaign said the two sides had not coordinated those events. Two days later, Jolly said he was done negotiating and declared, “you can’t debate a liar.” Donalds immediately transformed into the patron saint of candidate forums: “I said 3 debates. Jolly said 12 debates. Yesterday, Jolly said no debates. Who’s the liar Dave?” This is less a principled commitment to deliberative democracy than a case study in motivated reasoning: debates were useless when Donalds had something to lose from them and sacred the moment their absence became useful ammunition against somebody else.
The funniest part is where one of Donalds’ proposed debates was supposed to happen: Florida A&M University. Byron Donalds attended FAMU from 1996 to 1999 before eventually graduating from Florida State, yet his campaign biography manages to discuss his education without mentioning the three years he spent at one of the most important Black universities in the country. FAMU apparently occupies the same place in Byron’s biography that an embarrassing old Facebook album occupies in everybody else’s: technically real, occasionally useful, but preferably several clicks away from the homepage.
And now he wanted to return there for a gubernatorial debate.
That is political identity management so clumsy it practically deserves its own case study. Donalds is perfectly happy to use FAMU as a stage when the optics serve him, but apparently not important enough to survive the editing process on his own biography. Even better, Strike Forward for FAMU—an independent alumni-led organization created to advocate for the university’s interests—endorsed David Jolly. So the alumni organizing around the school Byron apparently misplaced somewhere between Tallahassee and his campaign website looked at the race and picked the other guy. There are subtweets less obvious than that.
I understand why Jolly finally told Donalds to shove the debates. Donalds has accumulated a record of false and misleading claims that gives an opponent plenty of reason to assume a televised exchange will become ninety minutes of chasing assertions around the stage with a butterfly net. But I still think walking away is strategically wrong. A political debate is not merely two candidates reciting white papers at each other. It is a mechanism of public accountability: simultaneous questioning, time constraints, adversarial scrutiny, and considerably fewer opportunities for a campaign staffer to hit “publish” after sanding every answer into paste.
Even Donalds once understood that. In 2023, when Donald Trump was considering skipping Republican presidential debates, Donalds said Trump should participate because voters needed to hear candidates’ ideas. That principle apparently came with an expiration date somewhere around the moment Byron himself became the guy expected to stand under the lights.
