A bombastic Jewish Republican is unexpectedly at risk of losing his congressional race in a deep-red Florida district seat on Tuesday.
And if Randy Fine does lose, it will be to a Muslim candidate with a track record of harshly criticizing Israel.
Fine, a culture-warring state senator running in Tuesday’s special election for the state’s solid-red sixth district, has seen polls tighten in his race against Josh Weil, a middle-school teacher and political neophyte. A March 22 poll showed Weil trailing by only four points — within the margin of error — and his fundraising haul has dwarfed that of Fine: The Democrat has pulled in $10 million to Fine’s $1 million.
Weil’s campaign slogan: “We can do better than Fine.”
Until very recently, Fine seemed virtually guaranteed to ascend to the seat. President Donald Trump urged him to run for it back in December and he won the Republican primary in the Republican district with more than 80% of the vote.
But now — with many voters nationwide disapproving of Trump’s upending of the federal workforce, a nosediving stock market and other drastic changes to the government — the election is seen as one chance to hold an early referendum on his administration. It is taking place on the same day as another Florida congressional race and a vote for a Wisconsin Supreme Court vacancy.
For his part, Fine told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency on the eve of the vote that he isn’t worried. “I’m very confident in the outcome,” he said, believing reports of the race’s closeness to be overblown. “We expect to have a really great day on Tuesday.”
But he also acknowledged that he could be facing “a turnout challenge.”
To reinforce his campaign, Fine has zeroed in on his opponent’s religion. Weil, a native of East Meadow, Long Island, was raised by a single mother who he said was a “born-again Christian” and converted to Islam after marrying a Muslim woman in 2010.
Dubbing Weil “Jihad Josh,” Fine accused him on Monday, without evidence, of relying on support “potentially from Muslim terror-supporting nations to try to take out a Jewish guy.”
“Where is his money come from when you have a Muslim jihadist running against hardcore pro-Israel Jews?” Fine mused to JTA.
He also seized on Weil’s past call for an end to U.S. aid to Israel, and what the candidate has described as its “state-sanctioned violence against Palestinians,” to try to make an issue out of his record on the Middle East. “This is a hardcore antisemite, pro-Hamas, pro-Hezbollah, ‘from the river to the sea’ kind of guy,” Fine said, referencing a pro-Palestinian slogan many Jewish groups see as a call for Israel’s elimination.
Mentioning another common pro-Palestinian symbol, Fine added, “He campaigns with watermelons.” Weil’s Instagram page appears to have shared earlier this month, before deleting, an image of him surrounded by watermelons and declaring him “AIPAC-Free.”
Weil’s campaign did not respond to a JTA request for comment.
It isn’t the first time Fine has picked a fight with a Muslim Democrat. The candidate announced his congressional run by tweeting “#BombsAway” at Democratic Reps. Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar, which was condemned by anti-bigotry groups.
Weil’s campaign has not emphasized his stance on Israel, but Fine has occasionally found ways to spotlight the issue on the campaign trail.
“They want $50 million boxes of condoms going to who knows where,” Fine said of his Democratic opponents in a video he posted to social media Monday while canvassing. The comment obliquely referenced a debunked claim that the Biden administration had sent condoms to the Gaza Strip — which Trump’s allies spread to justify shuttering the U.S. Agency for International Development.
But speaking to JTA, Fine insisted that neither his Judaism nor his stance on Israel have played a significant role in his House campaign. Florida’s largely rural 6th Congressional District has few Jews, though it is home to an active population of white nationalists. When door-knocking, Fine said, such matters barely come up.
Randy Fine, as a Florida state legislator, addresses a Republican Women’s Club about the U.S.-Israel relationship in Jacksonville, Florida, Aug. 13, 2024. In late November, Fine announced his run for the U.S. House. (Courtesy of Randy Fine)
Within Florida, the lawmaker has become better known for other culture-war issues: He’s aggressively targeted drag queens and transgender people. He’s also made a name for himself by publicly breaking with Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, partially over Fine’s unhappiness with how the governor, a onetime ally, has failed to curtail white nationalist activity in the state.
Politically conservative Jews have embraced him: The Republican Jewish Coalition offered an early endorsement, and Fine planned a virtual rally on Monday night featuring Jewish pundit Ben Shapiro.
Weil, meanwhile, has a track record of critical comments on Israel that departs from mainstream Democrats. As far back as 2021, during a failed Senate campaign, he called to end U.S. military aid to Israel. He also used that campaign to criticize evictions of Palestinians taking place in the east Jerusalem neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah, a move that also alarmed liberal Jewish groups.
Last month he appeared on a podcast hosted by Jen Perelman, a Jewish former Democratic candidate who in 2024 declared she was making “atonement for my Zionist upbringing.” On the podcast, Perelman remarked about Fine, “He is a hardcore Zionist. He’s horrible.”
On the podcast, Weil — who was also recently endorsed by Sen. Bernie Sanders, the progressive Jewish doyen — claimed his campaign has received positive feedback from voters on both sides of the aisle who are “watching money go out to Israel and to Ukraine and other places.”
“If you have a hat that says ‘America First’ on it, and you voted for people who told you, ‘We have to put America first and Americans first,’ and then you as an American ask for help and they said ‘No,’ the same day they send $80 billion to a nuclear superpower wealthy nation on the other side of the world, they get pissed off,” the candidate told Perelman.
In the race’s final stretch, other prominent Jewish Democrats are lining up behind Weil. Nikki Fried, the Jewish pro-Israel chair of the Florida Democratic Party, campaigned for Weil over the weekend alongside the chair of the Democratic National Committee.
While he claims his Judaism doesn’t often come up in his district, Fine told JTA he was running for his seat on behalf of “Jews around the world.” If he wins, he’d be the fourth Jewish Republican member of Congress. He hopes to help guide Trump’s thinking on issues such as antisemitism and Israel — even as Fine said he wholeheartedly approved of the job the president was doing so far.
“I can’t wait to be a leading voice, to be there to help advise and guide on those issues,” he said. “And President Trump asked me to run. One of the reasons he asked me to run is I think he wanted another Jewish warrior up there.”
JTA has documented Jewish history in real-time for over a century. Keep our journalism strong by joining us in supporting independent, award-winning reporting.
