GOP candidate for Governor Fishback asks New Yorkers to stop moving to Florida: “We are not a refugee camp! Florida is full!”
Florida – Florida’s Republican race for governor was supposed to be moving in one direction: toward U.S. Rep. Byron Donalds, the Trump-backed frontrunner with the money, the polling lead and the institutional momentum.
Instead, the contest has been knocked sideways by a fight over who gets to stand on a debate stage, and by businessman James Fishback, who is now using the opening to make one of the sharpest arguments of the campaign: Florida should stop taking in everyone else’s political refugees.
The spark came when the Republican Party of Florida rolled out its “10/10/10” rules for the Sunshine State Showdown debate.
To qualify, candidates had to reach at least 10% support in polling, raise more than $10 million and secure more than 10,000 donors. Only Donalds cleared the bar. Lt. Gov. Jay Collins, former House Speaker Paul Renner and Fishback were left outside the debate.
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That decision quickly turned into a problem for the party.
Gov. Ron DeSantis, who cannot run again because of term limits, publicly criticized the process and said he would not have qualified under similar rules when he first ran in 2018.
He warned that it was “counterproductive when you try to engineer an outcome,” arguing that Republican voters should be allowed to hear from the field before the August 18 primary.
For Fishback, the controversy did something money alone could not do. It gave him oxygen.
The 31-year-old hedge-fund businessman and fourth-generation Floridian has already been campaigning as a combative outsider, one who says he wants to build on the DeSantis record while pushing harder on affordability, overdevelopment and the needs of longtime residents.
His campaign website describes him as a fourth-generation Floridian running to succeed DeSantis and “make life more affordable” for families.
Then, on June 14, Fishback posted a video on X that pushed his message into even louder territory.
“New Yorkers need to stop moving down to Florida. Well, well, we got Democrats up there. We got somebody we don’t like. Then vote in the next election. But you are not going to come here as refugees. We are not a refugee camp. We are a state. We’re a community that looks out for our own. And we cannot absorb another 800,000 people the way that we have in the last five years. Ladies and gentlemen, three words, Florida is full. Florida is full.”
New Yorkers need to stop moving down to Florida.
Florida is full. pic.twitter.com/ErRvlLXqRW
— James Fishback (@j_fishback) June 14, 2026
It was blunt, almost deliberately so. But the line landed because it touched a real pressure point in Florida life.
For years after the pandemic, Florida became the landing place for people leaving high-tax and heavily regulated states, including New York.
The migration wave helped reshape neighborhoods, housing markets, schools, roads and local politics. Net domestic migration has slowed sharply from the peak, with one analysis putting Florida’s 2024 net domestic migration at about 64,000, far below the 314,000 recorded in 2022. But slower growth does not erase the effect of the earlier surge.
That is the space Fishback is trying to occupy. His message is not just that too many people moved to Florida. It is that too many came while bringing the same political habits they said they wanted to escape.
Housing has made that argument more emotional.
Florida’s market is no longer as frenzied as it was during the pandemic boom. Redfin reported more than 200,000 homes for sale statewide in May 2026, and several Florida metros have seen longer selling times, price cuts or more buyer-friendly conditions.
Still, many middle-class Floridians do not feel relief. Home prices remain high. Insurance bills have climbed. Property taxes have become harder to swallow.
For a longtime resident watching new subdivisions rise, traffic thicken and familiar towns turn into construction zones, “Florida is full” can sound less like a slogan and more like a complaint from the kitchen table.
At the same time, Florida remains a magnet for wealth. In March, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan reportedly bought a $170 million waterfront mansion on Miami’s Indian Creek Island, setting a Miami-Dade County residential price record.
That contrast is central to Fishback’s pitch. Billionaires can still buy the waterfront. Retirees can still arrive with cash. But young families, teachers, police officers and small-business owners are left wondering whether the Florida they grew up in is becoming too expensive for them to keep.
The reaction to Fishback’s video has been fierce. Supporters say he is saying aloud what many Floridians already believe. Critics call the message divisive and hypocritical in a state built, in part, by generations of newcomers.
Either way, the video has done what the debate fight already began to do: it has made Fishback harder to ignore.
The race may still favor Donalds, but the Republican primary no longer feels sealed shut. And with one line, “Florida is full”, Fishback has turned migration, housing and Florida identity into a new front in the battle to inherit the DeSantis era.
