Rep. Randy Fine trounced far-right influencer Dan Bilzerian in Florida’s Republican primary Tuesday after Bilzerian ran ads laced with antisemitic slurs and Hitler imagery.
With two-thirds of the expected vote counted, Fine, 52, had captured 56.7 percent of the ballot compared to Bilzerian’s 18 percent in the deep-red district stretching along Florida’s eastern coast and including Daytona Beach. The lopsided result came despite — or perhaps accelerated by — a final-week barrage of inflammatory content from Bilzerian’s campaign that drew rare bipartisan condemnation from congressional leadership.
Bilzerian’s most incendiary ad deployed a torrent of antisemitic epithets against Fine, calling him a “fat Jew,” “Shylock,” “Jewish supremacist,” “Satanic whore,” and “Satan’s creepy little minion.” The spot used artificial intelligence to alter Fine’s appearance to look heavier and depicted him embracing a bag stuffed with cash, while the Israeli flag flashed repeatedly. As archival footage of Hitler rolled in the background, a singer posed the question: “Should we revisit that Austrian painter’s opinions?”
House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) and Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) both issued rebukes of the commercial, an unusual moment of cross-aisle agreement in an otherwise polarized political climate. The ad’s overt Nazi references and dehumanizing language placed it well outside even the combative norms of contemporary American campaigning.
On the Saturday before primary day, Bilzerian posted on X an image from what he described as an impromptu campaign event with the caption: “District 6 understands the jewish [sic] problem.” The post, which remained visible as votes were cast, made no attempt to encode its message through dog whistles or plausible deniability.
Six days earlier, Bilzerian had shared another post reading: “It’s not red against blue. It’s us against the Jew.” The statement framed his campaign less as a conventional Republican primary challenge than as an explicitly antisemitic political project.
Bilzerian, who initially cultivated a social media following in the 2010s by posting photos purporting to show an extravagant lifestyle of private jets, firearms, and luxury properties, had never previously sought elected office. His pivot to electoral politics came packaged in the same provocation-driven approach that built his online brand, though the Hitler ad represented a dramatic escalation even by his standards.
Fine, who won an April 2025 special election to succeed Mike Waltz after Waltz was tapped by President Trump for national security adviser and later became U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, now advances to November as the heavy favorite in a district that reliably delivers Republican victories.
The congressman carries his own record of inflammatory remarks. In a Fox News interview last May, Fine appeared to suggest nuclear weapons should be deployed against Gaza. “In World War II, we did not negotiate a surrender with the Nazis,” he said at the time. “We did not negotiate a surrender with the Japanese. We nuked the Japanese twice in order to get unconditional surrender. That needs to be the same here.”
Fine has also faced accusations of Islamophobia in his social media commentary. “If they force us to choose, the choice between dogs and Muslims is not a difficult one,” he wrote on X in February. On Sunday, he posted about New York Democratic state lawmaker Zohran Mamdani: “Jihadi [Zohran] Mamdani does not belong as Mayor of NYC. He needs to be deaturalized and sent back home to Uganda.”
In the viral moment that defined the primary’s closing days, Bilzerian’s campaign had tested whether explicitly antisemitic and pro-Hitler messaging could find purchase even within a Republican electorate in the Trump era. The decisive rejection of his candidacy — Fine more than tripled his vote share — suggested limits to such appeals, at least in this Florida district. The result also marked a rare electoral consequence for rhetoric that has proliferated largely unchecked in online spaces where Bilzerian built his following.
Fine is heavily favored to win the November general election in the district.