Race To Succeed Vern Buchanan In CD 16 Is Getting Increasingly Interesting

By Mitch Perry, Florida Phoenix

September 25, 2026

As Donald Trump’s poll numbers continue to erode, some Republicans, even in Florida, are slightly backing away from being linked to the president.

Sydney Gruters is not one of them.

The 44-year-old Sarasota resident is running against Democrat Kelly Kirschner and NPA candidate Mark Davis to succeed longtime Republican incumbent Vern Buchanan in Florida’s 16th Congressional District — dramatically reconfigured in the mid-decade redistricting earlier this year in Tallahassee.

Gruters is a former legislative and political aide to Buchanan whom Trump appointed in his first term as rural development state director for Florida and the U.S. Virgin Islands in the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Her most recent job was vice president and executive director of the New College Foundation, the Sarasota college transformed from a progressive, arts-focused campus to a conservative redoubt in a state-directed makeover led by Gov. Ron DeSantis.

She is best known in political circles as the spouse of Republican National Committee Chair Joe Gruters, a very Trump-friendly Sarasota state senator and former Republican Party of Florida chairman whose close alliance with the president paved the way for his election to lead the RNC a year ago.

“I am proud to have his endorsement,” Sydney Gruters said of Trump in a recent interview with WFLA News Channel 8 in Tampa. “He has done a phenomenal job. He’s been elected to be our leader overwhelmingly by the American people, and that is not something I’m running away from. I’m very proud to have his endorsement and I’m very much looking forward to working with him when I get elected.”

Kirschner, 51, is a former Sarasota mayor and city commissioner who has also served in higher education. He was vice president and dean in the division of executive and continuing education at Eckerd College in St. Petersburg for 13 years before stepping down from that position last year.

Former veteran and businessman Mark Davis, 42, is the third person on the ballot, running as a progressive non-party-affiliated candidate.

“I’m just a regular dude in the middle of Florida who decided that ‘enough is enough,’ and I just got upset one day during Trump 2.0, and I think that we’re all tired of this Trump administration and decided to do something about it,” Davis said this week in a virtual candidate forum sponsored by the League of Women Voters (LWV).

“I got loud and vocal online and made some pretty large scenes in the local community. I stood up to Ron DeSantis, and really it was the community that said, ‘Hey Mark. We love your fire. We love your tenacity. We would like you to run,’” he said.

The district previously was primarily located in Manatee County but now sprawls across six counties after Florida Republicans rewrote its boundaries in a project designed to snag as many as four additional seats for the GOP — Manatee, southern Pinellas (including downtown St. Petersburg), eastern Sarasota, southern Polk, and the rural, agricultural economies of Hardee and DeSoto counties.

Big differences on immigration

With Republicans the party in power as an unpopular war grinds on with attendant high gas prices, Democratic candidates up and down the state have published internal polls indicating surprising strength in GOP strongholds, like CD 16.

Kirschner recently released an internal poll showing him leading by a single point in the race, even though the district is a 13-point Republican-leaning district, with 27% NPA voters.

“I’m increasingly telling people that this won’t be a razor thin or narrow margin of victory. It’s going to be a healthy margin of victory on Nov. 3,” he told a Phoenix reporter on WMNF 88.5 radio in Tampa last week.

Gruters doesn’t refute that Kirschner is doing better than expected.

“If you look at polling right now, it’s not as great as we would all want it to be,” she acknowledged while addressing the Pinellas County Republican Executive Committee in Clearwater earlier this month. “That doesn’t mean we’re not going to win. We’re going to win, but we all have to work together. We all have to be united, because guess who is united? The Democrats.”

She’s running on affordability and ending corruption in Congress. She says she supports congressional term limits and a ban on stock trading for members of Congress.

Kirshner scoffs at her platform, saying her husband has presided over “the transactional politics” of the past decade in Tallahassee, which he says Republicans, Democrats, and independents are “fed up with.”

“They’re fed up with the machine-style, Tammany Hall-style politics in the state of Florida, nowhere more evident in Sarasota-Manatee counties, where Joe has presided over the Sarasota County Republican Party,” he said.

Gruters replies that Kirschner “may paint himself as a moderate, but he is anything but that,” citing his stance on Medicare for all. Kirschner says he supports “looking into” the idea; Davis says that for his part he’s an unapologetic supporter of universal healthcare.

Those stances baffle Gruters.

“What is the government doing that is so amazing that you’re going to entrust them to managing this?” she said during the LWV forum.

She cited her time working with the USDA on rural development, and said she’s seen the hospitals and health community centers providing access to care for people in places like Wauchula and Arcadia. “The federal government is supporting that growth and that economic development … for these communities to make sure that every resident has access to affordable, safe, quality healthcare.”

Kirschner says the first thing he’d push for if elected is to have

When it comes to immigration, Gruters takes a hardline perspective. Joe Gruters sponsored Florida’s 2019 law banning sanctuary cities, legislation that has been the vehicle for Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier to threaten elected officials with removal from office when they expressed concerns about or opposition to working with ICE.

Big differences on immigration

“Under the last administration, we had over 15 million undocumented immigrants come into this country,” she says, adding that all six sheriffs in the district support her campaign.

“Because they know that we have to start with safe communities, and when you’re letting people who come in here, who are violent criminals, murderers, it affects all of us. And so I think we have to be more outraged for the victims of illegal immigration and those who are coming in here unlawfully.”

The Pew Research Center reported in August 2025 that the unauthorized immigrant population reached a high of 14 million in 2023, with 3.5 million entering the U.S. from 2021-2023, the first two years of the Biden administration.

“Abolish ICE,” says Davis.

Kirschner, a Bradenton native, recently held a press conference to announce that a handful of Republicans were endorsing him for the seat, including Dan Miller, who represented Sarasota in Congress from 1992 to 2002. “All my life, I’ve voted Republican. This year, I’m voting for the person, not the party label,” Miller said.

Gruters was not impressed. She told WFLA TV, “If I were him, I’d be more focused on my base,” adding, “57% of the Democrats voted against him in the primary.” While it’s true Kirshner received a plurality (43%) and not a majority in his primary race, he was running against four other Democrats and beat the second-place finisher by more than 23 points.

During this campaign, Kirshner has taken plenty of verbal shots at Gruters’ husband Joe, but he also has assailed Republican leadership overall, alleging a lack of fiscal conservatism at New College of Florida; Sydney Gruters served as executive director of the New College Foundation the past two years.

“Prior to the takeover of New College, a New College degree cost all of us as taxpayers less than $60,000 to pay for that degree,” he said this week.

“Today, we are spending nearly half-a-million dollars for a degree from New College. The vast majority of those students are now athletes; it’s no longer an honors college. It is the height of Tallahassee grift … .”

According to a report by Florida’s Department of Government Efficiency last November, it now costs $494,715 to produce a degree at New College, far surpassing any other state institution.

A note about Davis: He was arrested in July on a misdemeanor charge of obstructing a police officer when Manatee County sheriff deputies were serving a court order at his home while conducting a court-ordered welfare check on his children. Davis has said child services were called to his house because of “my political beliefs.” He told WTSP 10 News that he raised more than $5,000 after the arrest became public.

Inside Elections, a nonpartisan analysis website, noted some movement in the race, but not too much. The organization last week shifted the race to “Likely Republican.”

Meanwhile, the campaign could get rougher if Kirschner continues to hang around. Observers believe the Gruters’ ties to the White House will bring additional financial resources to their campaign if needed next month.

“Sydney Gruters is the fighter families need to lower costs, cut taxes, keep communities safe, secure our border, and put Florida first,” says RNC spokeswoman Emma Hall. “Democrat Kelly Kirschner doesn’t stand a chance with socialist hack Angie Nixon and far-left lunatic David Jolly at the top of the Democrat ticket.”

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