Rick Wilson exposes Republicans’ secret ‘red alert’ meeting

Republicans in one of the reddest states are feeling far from confident about their ticket heading into the midterms, and according to GOP insider Rick Wilson, their longstanding worries led to a "secret meeting" earlier this year that ended up causing a "red alert."

Rep. Byron Donalds is the GOP's candidate for governor in Florida, running to replace the term-limited Gov. Ron DeSantis. While polls have consistently given him the edge in the race, there have been major concerns about his ability to win the general election, given that there were several counties across the state where he failed to secure 50 percent of the primary vote. Some of the late-breaking polls in the race have put Donalds neck-and-neck with his Democratic opponent, David Jolly.

Speaking with Axios, anonymous GOP officials in the state said that the gubernatorial election will be a massive experiment in how "racist" their voters really are, given that Donalds is Black.

"We're about to run the biggest experiment to see how racist some of our voters are," the longtime consultant told the outlet, noting that some of the counties where Donalds has struggled are "more culturally Confederate" than the rest of the state.

During his appearance on the latest episode of the "Fast Politics" podcast with host Molly Jong-Fast, Wilson, himself a veteran of Florida Republican politics, called that remark to Axios "the most amazing fricking quote," and revealed what he has heard about the state GOP's alarm about Donalds' candidacy.

"I was told the other day about a secret meeting that DeSantis and his team held in the late spring, and I'm trying to still pin down the date, I'm told it's like late May, while the primary is still going on, where they studied this, they went out and checked out, they went out and tried to run some numbers on this, and it came back like red alert," Wilson said. "And Byron Donalds is a black guy running in North Florida. And these people, on a good day, they're gonna be torn between thinking, 'Well, I gotta vote against the communists, and I gotta vote for that black guy.' And they're not happy."

Early voting discrepancies have also caused major alarm among Republicans, as Democrats have turned out significantly more than the GOP base in the lead-up to Election Day, something DeSantis himself has publicly fretted about. Some estimates currently find that Republican voters will have to outnumber Democrats on Election Day in order to make up the difference. Wilson said the actual turnout needed for the GOP might be a little lower than that estimate, but said that Donalds would be in big trouble even if the needed ratio was around 1.8-to-one.