Marshall Rawson won the Republican primary in Florida's 10th state House district last month, and in November his name will be on the ballot with an R beside it.
Talking Points Memo's Christopher Mathias reported what is in Rawson's past. For years he was involved with the League of the South, a neo-Confederate group that is both racist and antisemitic and wants the southern states to secede. He posted on social media condoning slavery and calling for the execution of LGBTQ+ people; an account that appears to be his once wrote, "Multiculturalism kills and public lynchings worked." TPM counted more than $15,000 in campaign donations from dozens of white supremacists.
And in August 2017 he went to Charlottesville. TPM obtained video and photographs of Rawson arriving at the "Unite the Right" rally, joining a crowd carrying swastika flags, greeted by name by League of the South members, carrying the group's black-cross flag himself. One photo shows him standing near James Alex Fields Jr. — the man who, a short time later, drove a car into a crowd of counter-protesters, injuring dozens and killing 32-year-old Heather Heyer.
Rawson has not denied any of it. He says he will "continue to defend historical monuments."
The question, and who got asked
On Wednesday, September 16, Mathias called, emailed and texted 28 Republican officials in Florida with those facts and one question: would you denounce this man?
Twenty-two of them had endorsed Rawson in the primary. The other six were party leaders, and two of them are on this site:
- Byron Donalds, the congressman who recently secured the Republican nomination for governor of Florida
- Ashley Moody, United States senator from Florida
The other four were Gov. Ron DeSantis, Sen. Rick Scott, Florida House Majority Leader Tyler Sirois, and Florida Senate Majority Leader Jim Boyd.
Three of the 28 responded. Not three of the six leaders — three of all twenty-eight.
Ashley Moody was not among them.
What Donalds sent back
Byron Donalds was one of the three. Here is his statement as TPM published it:
I denounce racism, anti-Semitism, and bigotry in all of its vile forms. The Republican Party is the Party that was created to free slaves and fight for the civil rights of all Americans – I will continue that proud legacy as Florida's next Governor.
Read it again and notice what is missing. The question was about a specific man, running under Donalds's own party label, in the state Donalds wants to govern. The answer never mentions Marshall Rawson. It does not say his name, does not reference Charlottesville, does not address whether he should be on the ballot, and does not withdraw anything from him.
It is a statement that could have been written before the question was asked, because it was not written to answer it. Denouncing racism in the abstract costs nothing. Denouncing the racist on your ticket costs something, and that is the sentence Donalds did not write.
The other two replies at least engaged. Tim Marden, the mayor of Newberry, told TPM: "I'm not going to platform nonsense about Marshall. He deserves to serve because the voters chose him by an overwhelming margin. You don't matter. I don't matter. The voters do. That's the end of it." George Thomas, the mayor of Fort White, said the reporting "doesn't change my endorsement of him." Told that Rawson had called for executing gay people and advocated lynching, Thomas argued those were not part of Rawson's policy agenda and he would never act on them as a legislator.
Neither the Florida Republican Party nor the national Republican Party responded to TPM at all.
It is not one nominee, and this site has the receipts
What makes the silence worth writing about is that Rawson is not an isolated case. We have covered four other versions of this story already, each one involving a Republican on this site:
- Mike Collins, the Republican Senate nominee in Georgia, says he has "always condemned" racism and antisemitism. His PAC paid $7,700 to a man who posted a swastika and an image of himself in Klan robes. Separately, Collins says he stands with Israel — while his own son-in-law posts Nazi propaganda.
- Jon Husted, the senator running to keep Ohio's seat, made a man whose profile picture showed SS soldiers his political director. A reporter found it. His campaign did not.
- Brandon Herrera, the Republican nominee in Texas's 23rd District, films himself with a Nazi submachine gun he calls "Hitler's street sweeper" and goose-steps to a song sung by World War II-era Nazis. Republicans spent millions in a primary calling him too extreme for Congress. Now Speaker Mike Johnson raises money for him.
In most of those, the pattern is the same as Donalds's statement: a general condemnation of bigotry, issued while the specific person stays on the ticket or at the fundraiser. Husted's campaign did let its political director go — the day a newspaper found what the campaign had not.
One Republican did point at the man
It is not impossible. On September 13, Sen. John Cornyn of Texas publicly called on his party to condemn Bo French, the Republican nominee for Texas railroad commissioner, after French posted a photo of students at a University of Texas football game and called them "a problem" that is "now obviously far worse than anyone imagined."
This is the Republican nominee for statewide office. Are other Republican elected officials going to condemn the intolerance and racism, or look the other way while it becomes normalized. This is how great political parties self-destruct. Sad.
Cornyn quoted the man's own post and called it what it was. It took one tweet.
Ken Paxton, running for Senate in that same state, was asked the same question about the same nominee — and never said Bo French's name. He attacked his Democratic opponent instead. Paxton had endorsed French in May. Donalds's statement is that answer with better manners.
What the record shows
Talking Points Memo asked 28 Florida Republican officials whether they would denounce Marshall Rawson — a nominee for the Florida House who marched at Charlottesville among swastika flags, was involved for years with a neo-Confederate group, and whose apparent account posted that "public lynchings worked." Three answered. Byron Donalds, the Republican nominee for governor, sent a statement denouncing racism in general that never mentioned Rawson or Charlottesville. Ashley Moody, one of Florida's two senators, did not respond at all. Neither did the Florida Republican Party or the national party. Not one of the 28 denounced him.
Source
Talking Points Memo, "We Asked 28 GOP Officials If They'd Denounce the GOP Nominee Who Marched With Nazis in Charlottesville", by Christopher Mathias, September 17, 2026. Photo via Talking Points Memo.
