By Noreen Marcus, FloridaBulldog.org
Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier isn’t doing any folksy politicking to keep his job, but he’s campaigning in his own, especially combative way.
He’s stalking pandemic scapegoat Dr. Anthony Fauci; Judge Nancy Abudu, the first black woman to serve on the 11th Circuit appellate court; non-white immigrants, and evidently all other culture war villains who might energize voters.
Yet Florida’s Republican chief law enforcer can’t count on mudslinging and incumbency alone to get elected, even in a ruby red state. Democrat Jose Javier “J.J.” Rodriguez is running a competitive race despite deficits in the crucial metrics of registered voters and fundraising.
Surprisingly, with the Nov. 3 election fast approaching, Uthmeier doesn’t appear to be outpacing Rodriguez, a labor lawyer and former state legislator from Miami. A survey of 1,004 likely voters conducted online in July by left-leaning national pollster Change Research has Uthmeier and Rodriguez in a dead heat: 43 percent to 43 percent.
Why does the race look so tight? One popular explanation is the Hope Florida scandal.
In an interview with Florida Bulldog, Rodriguez called Hope Florida “the largest and most impactful” of many scandals associated with Uthmeier and the DeSantis administration.
Last year financial turbulence shook Hope Florida, whose stated mission is to mobilize resources for moving Floridians off government welfare. First Lady Casey DeSantis founded the charity, a nonprofit that’s also a short-term initiative directed by the Department of Children and Families.
In October 2025 a Tallahassee grand jury started looking into whether DeSantis’s charity helped misuse almost all of a $10 million settlement payout for politics instead of direct aid to sick children. By last month the grand jury proceeding had ended with no criminal charges or public report.
Uthmeier defends suppressing the report, raising concerns that the grand jury’s findings incriminate him personally and igniting a court battle over media access. He insists “nobody did anything wrong here.”
Meanwhile Rodriguez is treating the scandal like the gift that it is. Hope Florida gives him the ammunition he needs to run as an anti-corruption candidate — “the people’s lawyer.”
“Anytime that my opponent has to answer to the fact that he’s the most corrupt attorney general in the history of Florida is an opportunity for me to remind people of what we could have: an attorney general’s office focused on the people,” Rodriguez said. “He’s focused on enriching himself and his friends and getting cheap headlines in order to cover up the massive corruption.”
Uthmeier avoids talking about Hope Florida; when forced to address the issue he expresses scorn and derision. At an April media event he lit into a reporter who asked if he’d oppose releasing the grand jury findings.
The attorney general refused to discuss “political nonsense” and scolded the reporter – with a “Shame on you!” – before switching topics.
Uthmeier’s media office didn’t respond to a request for comment about Hope Florida from Florida Bulldog.
UTHMEIER’S TALKING POINTS
When Uthmeier goes public he boasts about acts of aggression like targeting Fauci after a statewide grand jury found no evidence he mishandled the pandemic; or, lobbying to impeach Nancy Abudu, a judge on the federal appellate court that reviews the attorney general’s work product.
This month he wrote to U.S. House Speaker Mike Johnson and other prominent Republicans urging Abudu’s removal from the 11th Circuit because of her previous job, litigation director of the Southern Poverty Law Center. Uthmeier accuses her of looking the other way, or worse, while the nonprofit, civil rights advocacy group fraudulently misused donor money to fund the Ku Klux Klan and other extremists.
Uthmeier hasn’t mentioned this fact: Four months ago Abudu dissented forcefully from an 11th Circuit ruling that approved his rationale for “Alligator Alcatraz” (it closed soon afterwards). Uthmeier reportedly conceived the idea of warehousing immigrants in the Everglades’ Big Cypress swamp, an idea he proudly owned when he attended the opening ceremony with a beaming President Trump.
“Uthmeier is grabbing for headlines and he gets the headlines,” said Gil Smart, executive director of VoteWater, an environmental advocacy nonprofit based in Stuart. “It’s a cunning strategy but when you peel back the curtain and look at the campaign contributions, it tells you a lot.”
VoteWater backs Rodriguez, whose grassroots campaign is funded mostly by individuals, labor unions and progressive advocacy groups. He’s collected over $1.8 million, Rodriguez said, a big chunk of it from state matching funds.
He has not, however, received financial support from the Florida Democratic Party – Rodriguez actually sent the party $178,000, according to Transparency USA. Campaign spokesperson Jessica St. Jean did not respond to Florida Bulldog’s question about this apparent anomaly.
In contrast, Uthmeier’s donors are mainly the Republican Party of Florida and assorted Bigs: Big Sugar, Big Tobacco, Big Builders. State records show his war chest holds about $8.5 million.
“If there’s a special interest he hasn’t taken money from, I don’t know what it is,” Smart said. “You have to wonder who he’s gonna enforce the law on behalf of.”
“Hope Florida is part of a pattern, unfortunately,” Smart said.
THE WASHINGTON CONNECTION
Uthmeier’s approach to politics and law reflects his Federalist Society background from his student days at Georgetown University Law Center in Washington, D.C. The conservative/libertarian network of lawyers, scholars and law students has been pushing American legal philosophy rightward for decades.
Uthmeier grew up in the Panhandle city of Destin and graduated from the University of Florida. He took a staff position with then-Sen. Marco Rubio in Washington, where he connected with U.S. Rep. Ron DeSantis. After law school and stints with the conservative Jones Day law firm and the Commerce Department, he followed Gov. DeSantis back to Florida.
He must have made himself indispensable to the governor because Uthmeier quickly progressed from assistant general counsel to general counsel to general counsel plus chief of staff. He strategized with his Federalist Society buddies to load up the Florida Supreme Court with activist right-wing justices who support the DeSantis agenda.
Along with Casey DeSantis, Uthmeier served as the governor’s kitchen cabinet during his 2020 presidential primary bid. When DeSantis set out in 2024 to defeat citizen ballot initiatives that would have restored abortion rights and legalized recreational pot, he made Uthmeier the point person for his spoiler campaign.
It was successful: The abortion and marijuana measures fell short of the 60 percent vote required for passage. Two months later DeSantis promoted Attorney General Ashley Moody to the Senate to replace Rubio and replaced her with Uthmeier.
In context, it isn’t hard to believe Uthmeier is responsible for the money-juggling antics that soon caught up with Casey DeSantis’s Hope Florida.
Legislative hearings revealed the charity helped divert $8.5 million from a Medicaid fraud settlement to Gov. DeSantis’s abortion and pot counter-campaign.
Hope Florida had received a $10 million wire transfer from a settlement by managed care provider Centene Corp. for overbilling the state Medicaid program. The money was supposed to expand Medicaid healthcare for children.
Instead, the $10 million went to two nonprofits that sent $8.5-million of it to Keep Florida Clean, a political action committee tied to Uthmeier. This money funded the spoiler campaign.
‘UTHMEIER THINKS HE’S GONNA COAST’
The DeSantis administration described negative ads produced by the campaign as public service announcements. According to state officials, the PSA blast was a sincere attempt to educate the public about the dangers of marijuana use and hidden risks of passing the abortion measure.
The legislative hearings on Hope Florida resulted in Leon County State Attorney Jack Campbell, a Democrat, empaneling the grand jury. But Uthmeier needn’t worry about Campbell releasing any reports because Campbell is fighting the media to keep the grand jury’s work confidential.
A different kind of state report boosts Uthmeier’s chances of election. As of June 30, Florida had about 5.6 million active registered Republicans and about 4 million active registered Democrats, state Division of Elections records show.
“I think Uthmeier thinks he’s gonna coast, “ Gil Smart of VoteWater said.
The attorney general can probably count on political dynamics breaking his way. The Democratic establishment is laser-focused on the U.S. Senate and other legislative midterm races. So they’re less likely to support Rodriguez than, say, whoever wins the Democratic senatorial primary and runs against Sen. Ashley Moody.
Whether the Hope Florida scandal will defy conventional politics to deny Uthmeier his first electoral win is an open question.
“At the end of the day, it’s a matter of how much traction it gets,” Smart said. “Should Hope Florida be a huge issue? Absolutely so, and there’s been some really great reporting on it. But Florida being Florida, we seem to have a high tolerance for these kinds of things.”
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