The majority of the more than $16 million raised for two long-shot Florida Democratic House candidates came from passionate, desperate donors across the country, who were hopeful that a miracle could narrow Speaker Mike Johnson’s slim majority and stop Donald Trump.
“Two special elections on April 1st could end Trump’s control of Congress,” one $300,000 Facebook ad buy from Democrat Josh Weil’s campaign said. The largest audience for that ad was in California, according to Facebook records.
The fundraising message — however improbable it actually was for the ruby red districts — worked. Millions of small dollar donations poured in from across the country. Just 8% of the donors for the two Democratic candidates were from Florida, campaign finance records show.
Both candidates lost, but the strategy was lucrative, especially for Jackson McMillan, a controversial 23-year-old Florida political consultant and digital fundraiser. As national fundraising groups barely played in the all-but-foretold race, McMillan raked in the dough for his candidates.
But he’s not without enemies, across both political parties. To hear his critics tell it, McMillan is committing flagrant “donor abuse” and lying about the viability of the races to line his own pockets. Finance records show that his firm, Key Lime Strategies, was paid more than $4.7 million between the two campaigns.
McMillan says the “consultant cabal” is just mad they’re not getting a slice of the pie. (He has also defended himself against claims the cut of the money he receives per campaign is inflated on the grounds that his firm also loans money to candidates.)
“They’re upset because they didn’t get a piece of it. Make no mistake, there is a consultant cabal in Florida,” McMillan told NOTUS after Tuesday’s elections. “They’re upset that a company owned by a 23-year-old and run with seven young staffers, young Democrats from Florida and a few out in California, was able to build a movement and that the old consultant cabal didn’t get a single dime of the movement that we built here.”
Underlying the drama is the larger question of who’s actually benefiting from all this money, and whether, in the long run, Florida Democrats will have anything to show for the multimillion-dollar fundraising haul.
“All that money that could have been used to actually canvas, to actually knock on doors, to do mailers, to actually build a base. It was burnt. It was pocketed and burnt,” another young Florida fundraiser, Jeremy Armando Rodriguez, who has worked on Reps. Maxwell Frost’s and Darren Soto’s campaign finance teams, told NOTUS. (When NOTUS asked for comment, McMillan responded: “I’m very proud of the over million doors that got knocked largely by paid canvassing task forces on these campaigns.”)
Voter registration ahead of the Florida special elections grew in Republicans favor from January to March, according to state records, despite the GOP getting massively outspent in both districts. In the panhandle’s 1st District, Republican registration jumped by more than 2,700 people from January to March, while Democrats only gained about 200.
The picture was even worse in the 6th District, where more money was raised and Republican candidate Randy Fine was viewed as more vulnerable. From January to March, Republicans registered more than 2,200 people and Democrats added just two (yes, two people) to their rolls. McMillan told NOTUS that excess funds would go back to local county parties to help build long-term Democratic infrastructure, though it’s not immediately clear how much money that will be.
Critics of the fundraising and spending strategy say much of the money was just going in circles: It was fundraising to pay for more fundraising.
“While small-dollar donors give in good faith, believing their contribution might flip a seat, the only people consistently benefiting are the consultants cashing the checks. This isn’t just poor planning. It’s donor abuse,” Democratic consultant Chris Mitchell wrote in a Florida Politics column ahead of the election.
“A lot of that money you saw raised was actually going to the ad spend to get those resources to begin with,” Mitchell later told NOTUS this week. “Using that energy and fear to raise dollars from donors that really believe when they see this ad that we can flip Congress, that we can do it. And that’s just blatantly a lie and false. We were never going to win these races.”
In a phone call with NOTUS this week, McMillan had a response for almost every criticism lobbed at him. On the accusation of taking a big payday? “What we did on these campaigns is no different than what Val Demings did in her U.S. Senate run in Florida, or no different than what Harris did or Biden did,” he argued. “People are just used to the name next to the firm doing it being a big D.C. K Street consultant and not some Florida locals who have developed these skill sets.”
McMillan insists that despite lagging voter registration numbers in the districts, his firm’s focus on Gen Z staffers is helping build the future of the Florida Democratic Party.
“Key Lime is borne out of the vision that coming up as a young Democratic staffer in the state of Florida, there are not year-round jobs for us,” he told NOTUS. “Our best talent leaves the state because we don’t provide a way for young people to stay in politics year round, and that wasn’t offered to me — so I had to build it.”
McMillan is now an undeniable presence in Florida politics, but the criticism of his methods doesn’t fall along clean old guard versus Gen Z lines.
One of the most noteworthy criticisms of McMillan’s fundraising strategies came two weeks out from the election, when Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said one of the ads for the candidates — messaging on the possibility of taking back the House and featuring a clip of her — was “being run as an ad without my consent,” she wrote on X. “I’m not personally involved in any races right now.”
David Hogg, a Democratic National Committee vice chair who is also from Florida, chimed in with a sharper, more personal criticism: “People like Jackson McMillan are the exact type of consultants who people say are the problem in our party. I’m done dealing with these assholes and it’s time they start being called out,” he wrote on X.
McMillan then pulled the ad “out of an abundance of caution,” he told local news outlets. He also defended his broader fundraising efforts to NOTUS after Tuesday’s results — and maintained that there was always hope for a miracle win.
“We made them build a turnout machine, take time out of the president’s schedule to engage specifically here on election day,” McMillan told NOTUS. “If Elon Musk did not personally intervene with his crypto PACs that dumped millions in here at the last minute, we would have dominated these races.”
Then there was the eyebrow-raising $62,000 Airbnb rental that functioned as Weil’s campaign headquarters, as first reported by Florida Politics. McMillan told NOTUS he doesn’t oversee the spending side, but defended renting the Airbnb as one of few options for a centrally located campaign headquarters.
But amidst the criticism of McMillan’s methods and the eventual losses in the districts, Florida Democrats do have something to show for all that money: a significant overperformance from November. Former Rep. Matt Gaetz won the 1st District with 66% of the vote in November, while Jimmy Patronis won with 56.9% on Tuesday. Donald Trump’s national security adviser, Mike Waltz, won the 6th District with 66.5% of the vote last fall, while Randy Fine won with 56.7%.
“These races should have never been competitive, but we outworked them. We outraised them and we slashed their margins by more than half, and they panicked,” Nikki Fried, chair of the Florida Democratic Party, told reporters Wednesday. “They had to call daddy, posting emergency town halls, slashing last minute cash and even sacrificing Stefanik’s nomination to protect their very slim majority,” referring to Trump’s last minute reversal of Rep. Elise Stefanik’s United Nations ambassador nomination.
Consultants looking at the struggling state party’s long-term viability say it’s time to return to the basics. Even if the high drama fundraising strategy works, it won’t lead to Democratic wins until the biggest problem of all, voter registration, starts to shift.
“There’s definitely this perception of people [who] want to be able to think they give some money and all this is going to go away, and that’s just not going to happen,” longtime Florida Democratic consultant Steve Schale told NOTUS. “It’s gonna go away because we invest in real voter registration and organizing, and these things that are not fun, interesting and sexy — and frankly, don’t make fundraisers money.
Whether this special election’s $20 million will move the party toward that goal remains to be seen. But for the 23-year-old raising the money, even losing was winning.
“This is a war and these were battles,” McMillan said. “Ultimately we may have lost these battles, but we sure got closer than anyone anticipated ever being able to.”
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Claire Heddles is a NOTUS reporter and an Allbritton Journalism Institute fellow.