Florida Republican congressional candidate Mara Macie told Breitbart News Saturday that establishment Republicans are reeling over key local endorsements she is receiving over their candidate, Rep. John Rutherford (R-FL), and are “turning up the heat.”
Macie joined the program after securing the critical endorsement of the St. John’s County Republican Executive Committee overwhelmingly. The endorsement is made extremely significant by St. John’s County’s status as one of the two major counties in Florida’s Fifth Congressional District and the fact that it followed former President Donald Trump’s endorsement of Rutherford in the primary.
“The establishment is definitely turning up the heat. They are not happy about these endorsements,” Macie, who is also backed by St. John’s County Commissioner Krista Keating Joseph, said.
“I told people, ‘This is your opportunity to endorse someone. Every other endorsement is coming from a politician who is either being advised by a bad political consultant to keep swamp monsters in or it is just politicians getting to choose who they work with. Otherwise, it’s lobbyists and special interests that are endorsing people.’ So this is actually the people’s voice, not just any people, but people of the Republican Party of St. John’s,” she recounted.
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Macie then contrasted St. John’s County with Duval County, saying an endorsement would never occur in the same fashion due to the establishment’s hold there.
“Duval, however, will never do that type of endorsement because they are owned by the establishment. They as much have said so at an event I was at…earlier this week. … But they were confronted,” Macie told host Matt Boyle, Breitbart News Washington bureau chief. “The chair and the vice chair of the Duval Republican Party were like, ‘Oh, we would never do that.'”
“The thing is, people, they don’t have the power to tell you no; you have the power to make a motion to endorse, and they have to ride that out, just like they ride out any motion,” she added. “And if they get the numbers that they need, they make an endorsement, or you can vote not to endorse if you don’t like the people in that party. But people have to remember that the power lies with them, and the people of St. John’s knew it, and they wanted their voices to be heard, and they made it heard.”
Boyle said that there are signals Rutherford, who helped Democrats block Judiciary Chairman Jim Jordan (R-OH) from the speakership and was the deciding vote to kill an amendment to stop the warrantless surveillance of Americans, “is very worried right now” and his political allies “are feeling the heat.” He also noted, “I think he’s been skipping events that he was supposed to appear at in the district without telling anybody.”
Macie said he is now attending more events after being called out on a lack of local engagement but is drawing substantial criticism.
“Well, we’ve been calling him out on it. You’ve been calling him out on it. So guess what he’s doing now? He’s starting to show up, but he’s getting a lot of pushback at these events, even the events that he thinks are safe events,” she said before encouraging Duval County listeners to attend a forthcoming event he is slated to attend.
It will be at the Greater Intercoastal Republican Club on Tuesday in Queen’s Harbor, according to Macie.
“Through the grapevine, I’ve heard he’s going to come back to the [Republican Executive Comittee] in Duval to talk. But again, safe place; they control the narrative there – not that the people are all on board, but the people in charge, those are the people that are part of the establishment,” she said.
“So he hears what we say, he hears what the campaign says, he hears what the people are saying, and he comes back with excuses for every single thing we point out about what he does wrong – whether it’s his stock trades, whether it’s FISA, it doesn’t matter,” she continued. “If he hears someone talking about his scorecards, conservative scorecards, he’ll come back, and he’ll go after the people that create the scorecards, whether it’s the New American Scorecard, whether it’s the Heritage Foundation, it doesn’t matter. If he’s got a bad score, he’ll tell you why that foundation is a bad one.”
The primary is set for August 20.
Breitbart News Saturday airs on SiriusXM Patriot 125 from 10:00 a.m. to 1:00 p.m. Eastern.