Trump to rally for Byron Donalds in Fort Myers during early voting

Claire Heddles, Miami Herald on Oct 16, 2026

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MIAMI — President Donald Trump is holding a midterm election rally next Friday during early voting in Fort Myers, a part of the congressional district currently represented by Republican gubernatorial candidate Byron Donalds.

The Oct. 23 rally is in one of Florida’s reddest areas where Donalds is already a known political figure, and where he did well in the primary election.

Trump’s Fort Myers rally comes after he announced last month that he would be holding two events in Florida in support of Donalds, while condemning reports that Donalds’ campaign was signaling distance from the president by pulling prominent references to Trump’s endorsement from its website.

“If Florida thought the story that Byron ‘dropped’ me was true, he would lose the Election, and that would be a terrible thing because he’s going to be a fantastic Governor!” Trump wrote on social media in late September.

Polls show that Gov. Ron DeSantis has retained a significantly higher approval rating in Florida than Trump. While 55% of respondents approved of DeSantis’ job in office, just 50% felt the same way about Trump, according to a Stetson University poll released this week.

Earlier this month Vice President J.D. Vance held another rally in a GOP stronghold in Lakeland, a region where Donalds did not perform as strongly among Republican primary voters. There was still some lingering skepticism at that rally about Donalds among voters who’d supported other Republican candidates in the primary, attendees told the Miami Herald.

Trump won 65% of the vote in 2024 in Lee County, where the rally is being held. The White House has not yet announced the rally’s precise location, but Trump is scheduled to give remarks at 2:00 p.m.

Trump has been barnstorming through some of the county’s reddest states and cities to drive out the MAGA base ahead of the midterm election, in which the party in power has historically faced headwinds.

Beyond the governor’s race, Florida’s congressional contests could help decide whether Republicans hold onto control of the House and can continue greenlighting Trump’s agenda, or whether Democrats win back the House and can stonewall the president. DeSantis and the Florida Legislature redrew the state’s congressional maps earlier this year and created four additional Republican-leaning seats, but those districts aren’t guaranteed victories for the GOP if there’s a wave of Democratic enthusiasm in November.

Amid backlash to Trump’s war with Iran and mass deportation agenda, some Republican candidates, including Miami Rep. María Elvira Salazar, have been pulling away from the president ahead of their elections.