Vote the Person, Not the Party

As you may have seen by now, I’m not endorsing candidates, nor am I voting according to party lines. I’ve voted for virtually every party at one point or another because I believe the person and the policies matter more than the party letter after their name.

I love policy, and I tolerate politics, but not the way either has been conducted in recent years. We can’t keep going down this same road if our intent is to eventually get back to common sense and good governance. As both DC and Florida are under a stranglehold of single-party Republican control, my view is that the best way to break this destructive cycle is to break the single-party control and bring back the checks and balances that stabilize policy decisions.

Some people have already reached out and told me I’d never be elected again for daring to have an opinion that differs from the required party line. First, I’m not even sure I’m running to be elected again. Second, if I do, I wouldn’t, and haven’t, done it on their terms.

I can’t continue to argue against the current policy and election systems and then keep my mouth shut when I can actually try to do something about it. I see too many politicians sit quietly, keeping their complaints behind closed doors, just so they will still be considered real Republicans.

But I’m not interested in being a “real Republican” if all that means is accepting purity tests, treating independent judgment as betrayal, and rewarding fealty over common sense. I’d rather be called a RINO than to blindly follow marching orders from a party that treats disagreement as disloyalty. Especially from a party who’s led by a lifelong Democrat who governs like a Socialist. The party’s recent policies are more “in name only” than any endorsement I could make.

However, this has been the playbook for too long in both Washington DC and Tallahassee. You’re forced to pick one of two labels if you want to have a say in our broken election system. Then you’re forced to be “part of the team” and do as they say. As a result, we’ve gotten into tribal politics that have systematically broken any chance we have of bipartisan discussion, honest discourse, or a public voice.

Our closed primaries, gerrymandered districts, and broken campaign finance rules have fundamentally changed politics for the worse. What we have now is leadership-approved and establishment-anointed candidates who win in spite of the public, not with the support of the public.

This has led to a complete loss of much-needed checks and balances. Checks that are supposed to keep any one branch, one party, or one person from having absolute control. As well as the checks that voters are supposed to have on their elected officials when the thumb isn’t on the scale of the primaries.

In Tallahassee, our legislature has a powerful super-majority, and that has all but eliminated the need to hear from constituents…or the other side of the aisle. Look at Senate Bill 180. In spite of public outcry, that bill was amended in the 11th hour as a direct attack on local government’s home rule authority for growth management. Even with thousands of emails and calls to the Governor and leadership, that bill was signed into law. Attempts to correct it in 2026 were derailed by partisan gamesmanship and questionable interpretations of the rules.

Regardless of what you think about this final policy, I don’t believe anyone could disagree with the fact that such a major overhaul of development authority should have been given more careful scrutiny before it became law. Good governance is not about whether you like the outcome; it’s about whether the public and the affected communities feel they had a say in that outcome.

Our communities are being affected every session by appropriations that have become leverage, preemptions that override local decision-making, and laws that are broadly set far from the communities that live with the consequences. I’ve written about this many times on this Substack.

Some people will support these decisions. Some will oppose them. But the break in the system and the lack of checks and balances is greater than any one decision. If a governing body knows they can do whatever they want without a risk of a veto and without anyone to answer to, they typically will.

Concentrated power should always be met with meaningful oversight.

But at the state level, you’re not going to get oversight through more bipartisan involvement at the House/Senate level. The supermajority and gerrymandered districts make changing the concentrated power in the chambers unlikely.

You can, however, bring meaningful oversight with one single vote that is impossible to gerrymander.

The Governor’s influence and veto authority is not just a procedural tool. It’s a constitutional check. It’s the one person who can force the legislators to take another look, who can demand change, or can simply say no when a bill moves faster and more recklessly than the public interest should allow.

Putting our local control and our voice in the hands of a Governor of a different party is not a partisan argument. It’s a structural one.

Whether you like the current direction of our Florida government or not, we should all want legislation to receive real scrutiny before it becomes law. You all have to live with the consequences.

Why David Jolly?

Every day, every meeting, residents of Manatee County express frustration with overdevelopment, a lack of infrastructure and a lost local voice. As a local commissioner, I see firsthand the local control being stripped away, the growth management authority being preempted and your local voices being silenced.

This is due to state bills being past every session, often with little debate or compromise, expanding development through Live Local, agricultural enclaves, and enhanced, favorable flexibility for developers. It’s due to laws that remove development from public meetings. It’s due to restrictions on our ability to collect impact fees. It’s due to statutes that prohibit your local government from enacting ordinances for short-term rentals, retail pet bans and pollution control.

Most of you hate these policies and the impacts they have on our community and your quality of life.

Yet, every election cycle, a majority of our residents vote for a continuation of these policies. A vote for the status quo because of the letter after their names.

If you want things to be different in Tallahassee, you need to go out and vote for something different.

The same goes for Washington.

Congress was designed to be an active check on the executive branch. Too often, when there’s single-party rule (either party), members of Congress have incentives to follow their party’s leadership, protect their standing within the caucus, and avoid the political backlash of dissent.

When common sense and independent judgment become politically dangerous, and going along becomes politically safe, they all learn one lesson. Independent thinking costs more than blind loyalty.

All it takes to secure that blind loyalty is the right endorsements to hold over them. You’ll know a candidate is locked down when they begin running on who blessed them rather than on how they plan to represent you. Because those endorsements from the highest levels demand absolute allegiance. We can see from experience that anyone with those “complete and total” endorsements will never be a check or a balance for anything.

And the policy consequences for this complete control are not hypothetical. We’ve been watching them result in unchecked spending, poorly scrutinized military commitments, inflation-inducing tariffs and market interventions, and appointed, unqualified directors having more authority than their elected counterparts.

Yet few are willing to speak up, even when they know better.

Why Kelly Kirschner?

We’ve lost the concept of independent thinking and bipartisan solutions in Washington, D.C. We presently have a complicit Congress allowing dangerous and costly policies to impact all our lives and our futures. We need good people up in DC to push back.

Kelly has reached out consistently throughout the campaign to truly understand the needs and concerns of Manatee County. He wants to know the issues because he cares about our issues. Kelly’s campaign truly shows he cares about all 850,000 residents of District 16, not just one resident of the White House.

An opportunity to elect a moderate, sensible, locally-grown candidate to look out for all of us and provide the thoughtful dissention our country needs is an opportunity we can not pass up.

This is why checks and balances, at every level of government, were such a critical component to the success of the government designed for us by our Founding Fathers.

The Constitution was not designed for one branch, or one party, to run everything without meaningful resistance. It assumes friction. It assumes that the executive branch will push back on the legislative branch and that legislators will sometimes tell executives no. It assumes that courts will hold both accountable. It assumes that state governments will push back on federal overreach and that local governments will do likewise to state overreach.

This designed friction can be frustrating. It can slow things down. It can make governing tougher.

That’s the point.

A system without friction may feel efficient right up until the point where the people in charge make a mistake and there is no one around with the independence, or the courage, to stop it.

If we want the next decade to look different than the last one, we don’t need to vote based on party affiliation or how much financing a candidate has received from their donors or the quality of their attack ads.

We need to vote for candidates with independence and courage at the state and federal levels.

We need to vote for candidates who can explain their plans without hiding behind an endorsement.

We need to vote for candidates willing to provide the checks and balances necessary to protect the public voice.

And we need to remember, when we vote in November, the office matters far more than the team.

The office is supposed to check the overreaching power.

The team never will.

Why am I endorsing Democrats?

The Republican Party of today has lost its way. It’s no longer the traditionally conservative, small government, free market party of Reagan. It’s gone through a hostile takeover, and it's been emboldened by absolute control at both the federal and the state level.

The party today is not Republican. It’s Trump. It’s MAGA. Don’t let anyone fool you into thinking you’re the “RINO” (such an overused, tired, lazy term at this point) because you actually have conservative views.

So, the options now are to either:

a) continue feeding this loud group that hijacked the party so that you feel like you’re part of the team that, for some people, literally defines their identity,

OR

b) do what we can to put an end to this and bring some sensibility, humility, and maybe a bit of common sense back to what was once a proud political party.

I’m supporting two moderate Democrats because I truly believe they are the best candidates in their races. I also feel they can provide the check we need on these disastrous policies long enough to maybe get some true conservatives back in charge of the party.

Sometimes, you have to take one step back before taking two steps forward.

I’m just hoping those steps forward are toward the center for the good of our country, our state, and our future.

George Kruse is an at-large commissioner on the Manatee County Commission. He was elected 2020 and is in the middle of serving his second term. This column was originally posted on his SubStack. Click here to sign up.