Byron Donalds

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The congressman became one of President Donald Trump’s most reliable allies in the House and at one point was floated as a potential 2024 running mate.

MIAMI — Byron Donalds could make history on Tuesday.

If he wins on Election Day, he’d become the first Black Republican governor of Florida — and the first Black Republican governor ever elected in the U.S. Only three Black governors have ever done so, and they’ve all been Democrats.

“It can be very lonely sometimes,” he told HuffPost earlier this month, reflecting on what it’s like to run a gubernatorial campaign as arguably one of the most visible Black Republicans in politics.

He had just left an event with the Jack Brewer Foundation, a conservative, faith-based nonprofit group in Miami’s historically Black neighborhood of Overtown. While there, he spoke to several young Black boys from the foundation — which mentors young people and works to combat fatherlessness, according to the group — about the importance of hard work and sacrifice to get ahead in life.

While traveling with Donalds to his next campaign stop, HuffPost asked him whether he’d had a mentor of his own throughout his campaign. He paused for several seconds and glanced out the window.

“I do know that I understand the gravity of what’s happening,” Donalds, 48, told HuffPost about his campaign. “A lot of perceptions, I think, of Black Republicans are kind of riding on what happens here.”

When Donalds first ran for Congress in 2020, he introduced himself in a campaign ad as “a strong, Trump-supporting, gun-owning, liberty-loving, pro-life, politically incorrect Black man.” He has since become one of President Donald Trump’s most reliable allies in the House and at one point was floated as a potential 2024 running mate. Donalds has Trump’s endorsement in this race, and received the support of outgoing Gov. Ron DeSantis in September.

But as he crisscrosses Florida to court Black voters, a constituency that has seldom backed Republicans in large numbers, he is more measured in how he talks about his relationship with the president, whose approval ratings have hit a near-historic low. Trump’s rhetoric about Black Americans — from perpetuating the “birtherism” movement against former President Barack Obama, to casting doubt on then-Vice President Kamala Harris’ racial identity at a Black journalists’ convention in 2024, to frequently describing Black urban communities in 2016 as desolate, poverty-stricken or mired in crime — has drawn sustained criticism.

When questions around his loyalty to Trump do arise, Donalds is quick to push back on perceptions of his agenda as a proxy for Trump, casting himself as his own man despite consistently voting with Trump’s political agenda throughout his time in Congress.

“With Black voters in particular, I think the first [misperception] is because I’m endorsed by President Trump, and that just means that I’m only going to do whatever he wants or whatever he says,” Donalds told reporters after a luncheon with Black men at a Caribbean restaurant in Florida earlier this month. “That’s not true. I have my own thoughts. I have my own opinions. I have my own ideas.”

But even at roundtables and community events aimed at Black professionals and entrepreneurs, Donalds has aligned with the Trump administration in a particularly notable way: He pitched his campaign message around “meritocracy” and his rejection of diversity, equity and inclusion — a position that has not landed with some.

“To DEI, I’m going to be very clear. I’m not a supporter. I’m not a fan. I think it’s about merit and opportunity,” Donalds told a group of roughly 30 Black business leaders earlier this month at a private social club in Miami.

The attendees began to glance at each other, shifting in their seats. There was no applause.

“The way I move is, can you get the job done?” he added.

At a keynote event for Black professionals in Hollywood, Florida, the next day, he made the same case again, where some attendees in the crowd of roughly 100 murmured and sucked their teeth in response.

“As a Black man, there’s no way you can tell me that you don’t see DEI and equity and things of that nature being an issue,” said Levi Collins, 39, who was in the front row. “To get up there in a room full of Black professionals and try to run that game ... I think that’s where he lost the crowd.”

Donalds grew up in the working-class neighborhood of Crown Heights, Brooklyn, one of three children raised by a single mother who, in one of his campaign ads, says she worked two jobs to provide for her kids. He moved to attend Florida A&M University at age 17, and later graduated from Florida State University.

He has described himself in his early 20s as “pretty lost,” addressing a period that included an arrest for possession of marijuana when he was 18. On the stump, he tells the story of how he became a Christian while working at a Cracker Barrel in Tallahassee at 21, and shares how he left the Democratic Party in 2010 to become involved in the Tea Party movement. From there, he worked his way from the Florida House of Representatives to Congress.

Since entering Congress in 2020, his voting record shows few breaks from his party’s right flank. Donalds holds a 97% lifetime score from Heritage Action, the conservative group that tracks how often members of Congress vote with its positions, including a 100% rating in the current Congress, compared with the average Republican score of 87%.

In the final sprint to Election Day, Donalds has blitzed across the Sunshine State to court Black voters, but it’s an uphill climb. According to an Oct. 28 New York Times/Siena College poll of all likely voters, Donalds is narrowly ahead of his Democratic opponent David Jolly by only four percentage points, 48% to 44%.

Roughly 10% of Black likely voters support Donalds, compared to 80% of Black likely voters who support Jolly, according to an Oct. 21 University of North Florida Public Opinion Research Lab poll.

A source familiar with the campaign who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss internal strategy told HuffPost the campaign is aiming to win above 25% of the Black vote.

If his support doesn’t improve, it would trail the roughly 13% of Black voters who backed DeSantis in his 2022 reelection bid, and 15% of Black voters in the state who supported Trump in the 2024 presidential election, according to CNN exit polling.

Steve Vancore, a longtime Florida pollster and political strategist, said the Donalds campaign goal faces long odds, in part due to the diverse bloc of voters within the Black community in Florida.

“The Black community is no longer as monolithic as it once was,” Vancore said. “Especially when you have Black communities that hail from the Caribbean. They don’t have the same world and life experience that other Black communities have.”

“It would stun me beyond belief if Byron Donalds got 20% of the Black vote,” he added.

The Republican Party, despite increasing the racial and ethnic diversity of candidates, has for decades struggled to reach and attract Black voters in high numbers in comparison to Democrats. A 2022 Pew Research Center analysis showed about 1 in 10 Black voters identified with or leaned toward the GOP.

While much can be attributed to policy priorities that misalign with the concerns of most Black Americans, Donalds acknowledged the outreach failures of his party.

“Democrats, they consistently are organizing in communities and having these conversations and these dialogues,” he said. “I disagree with their solutions. I disagree with their policy, but you have to recognize the reality that they continuously are in communities talking with voters.”

The Republican Party, he said, has treated Black voters as a short-term election-year exercise — a critique he has made before.

“I