Exclusive: Florida GOP’s Mara Macie Would Vote ‘Exact Opposite’ of Establishment's Rutherford

Florida Republican Congressional candidate Mara Macie told Sirius XM’s Breitbart News Saturday that she would vote “the exact opposite” of her establishment opponent Rep. John Rutherford (R-FL).

Macie joined Breitbart News Washington Bureau Chief Matthew Boyle for a 20-minute conversation hours before Rutherford voted for all aspects of Speaker Mike Johnson’s (R-LA) $95 billion foreign aid package, including a bill that appropriates $60 billion for Ukraine but does nothing to secure the U.S. Southern border.

Boyle, a constituent of Rutherford’s, and Macie aptly predicted the congressman would vote for the series of foreign aid bills that Johnson bundled together under a single rule, which Rutherford voted for, that effectively surrendered control of the House floor to Democrats. This came weeks after he voted against a key amendment to Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) requiring warrants to surveil Americans’ communications.

“I mean, at the end of the day, I would be voting the exact opposite of the way he votes. He votes like a Democrat,” Macie said.

She even warned constituents to watch the foreign aid vote ahead of Friday’s rule vote and Saturday’s vote on the package.

“I have been speaking to constituents at events all week, and just like you, I already know how he’s going to vote, so I’ve warned them I said, ‘Watch this vote, see how it turns out because I guarantee you he’s going to vote against your interests, against what you’re asking him to do,’” Macie told Boyle of the foreign aid package on Saturday.

“And it has turned off a lot of his voters, and I mean people that have been voting for him for years when he was a sheriff here, and new voters in particular because here in Florida we have a lot of people coming in, and a lot of them are like, ‘How is this guy your congressman?'” she continued. “But I think that we’re gonna… have a good fight for the seat even though he has made a name for himself, he’s the incumbent, but he has done a lot of things that constituents are not happy with.”

Rutherford touted the nearly $100 billion spending spree after its passage, which comes as America is still reeling from the effects of 40-year-high inflation under the Biden administration.

She noted that while Rutherford has “loyalists,” a lot of his constituents who voted for him before and even know him personally are becoming fed up with his voting patterns, which included helping block House Judiciary Chair Jim Jordan (R-OH) from winning the speakership.

“I think people are starting to see that he’s just voting the way that the swamp wants him to vote, that the people agree up there, and he is not listening to the phone calls, to the text messages, and he is getting a lot of them,” Macie said. “I have people tell me every time I’m out speaking, ‘We tried to contact his office. We got a canned response,’ or ‘We got an aid,’ or ‘Someone else responded to us,’ or ‘We didn’t get a response at all.’ People don’t feel like he’s listening to them even if they’ve known him. So, outside of the loyalists, people really are looking for new representation, and I can’t blame them. I cannot blame them.”

Rutherford’s refusal to vote for a Jordan speakership, making him one of a small minority of members in the Republican conference who successfully blocked Jordan from the gavel, prompted Fifth Congressional District Republicans to urge Macie into the race, she said.

“The Jordan thing is definitely the thing that woke people up; that’s what got me into this race is that people started calling me and messaging me and saying, ‘Listen, you said that if nobody was running against Rutherford again, that you would do it,’” Macie recalled. “And, you know, I did, I told people that… I was going to give them a choice for better representation if nobody stepped up to the plate. So that’s what I did.”

“Right down to the voting record — that woke people up, but people weren’t paying attention to the fact that his voting record before that was garbage,” she added. “I mean, he has an ‘F’ on four conservative scorecards that I can think of off the top of my head, and a worse ‘F,’ a worse failing grade, than Liz Cheney when she was in office.”

Macie says that her “biggest obstacle” in the race is local media, which she sees as “in the pocket of the establishment.”

“Local media is in the pocket of the establishment, so they’re not covering me because they are trying to make sure that anybody who doesn’t follow the bigger news outlets, just they follow local news, they’re trying to make sure they don’t know who I am,” Macie said. “And if they have to publish something about me… you can just tell by the way that stories are written, they’re trying to do damage control for John.”