The race to replace outgoing Congressman Vern Buchanan features Democrat Kelly Kirschner, Republican Sydney Gruters, and NPA candidate Mark Davis. We find Kirschner the easy choice among the three.
Kirschner brings a strong record of service and a clearly articulated vision for helping Manatee County residents. A third-generation Florida native and Cardinal Mooney grad, Kirschner earned a bachelor's and master's degrees from Georgetown University before joining the Peace Corps, where he spent four years in northern Guatemala helping Mayan farming families reach new markets and grow household income.
He returned to the area for a stint in the private sector, where he remained engaged as a prominent community activist before winning a seat on the Sarasota City Council. As a council member, Kirschner proved uniquely capable of successfully transforming ideas into action while standing up to entrenched special interests. He has proven himself a practitioner of good government, which gives us strong confidence that, if elected, he is best prepared to serve the district meaningfully.
Kirschner has continued to demonstrate his skill set and commitment to the community in his years since serving as an elected official, both through his work with the non-profit UnidosNow and as Vice President of Eckerd College. Those accomplishments fortify an already impressive resume that we believe suggests he would not only be the best qualified of the three candidates, but also a particularly attractive candidate for an institution filled with too many members whose chief qualifications were their ability to solicit fundraising from special interests and political machines.
We find Sydney Gruters unqualified for an office for which the bar should be infinitely higher than the post-Citizens United landscape has made it. She has struggled to articulate any sort of coherent platform, routinely falling back on tired MAGA talking points. The fact that she has been so intensely protected from having to communicate in all but the safest of spaces, and that her rare ventures into even the most tepid of forums suggest that the reason her handlers have kept her on such a short leash is that she simply does not know very much about the issues at stake.
Gruter's recent participation in a WFLA-8 Zoom forum as well as a Republican Women’s Club forum during the primary strongly recalled Sarah Palin’s 2008 debut. Simply put, if she were not the wife of the Republican National Committee Chair, she would not be taken seriously as a candidate, even in the most Republican-friendly environments.
There is no evidence that NPA Mark Davis will be a factor in the race, and while he might have enough good sense to reject MAGA, he acknowledges being new to politics and public policy and shows a similarly large gap in political acumen compared to Kirschner. Davis’ approach seems much more suitable to a social media influencer than a member of Congress. The most generous description might be quixotic, though at times he comes off as bordering on unhinged.
Both Kirschner and Davis participated in our podcast interviews, available below. Gruters declined our invitation. All three candidates are scheduled to participate in an upcoming League of Women Voters Zoom panel.
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Charles
— The corrupt cabal is spending a fortune to place a puppet into this congressional seat and have gotten the district redrawn to make Manatee voters the major factor in the election because these voters seem the easiest for them to influence (manipulate) in order to get her elected — but Kelly Kirschner is the wise choice who will work for all of us rather than their candidate who will do the bidding of the corrupt cabal.
I am talking about my support for Kelly to all voters I encounter and hoping that they also will spread the word — do the same please. It is going to be difficult to overcome the fortune being spent to market the cabal puppet to the easily-influenced voters in the district, but I think our efforts can prevent that.
Sunday, September 20 Report this
rjckeuka4
As a lifelong Republican I was happy to attend the "Republicans for Kirschner" event on Tuesday morning. I was pleased to hear County Commissioner George Kruse speak on Kirschner's behalf and that same night when David Jolly was interviewed on MS Now's Lawrence O'Donnell show, he included a clip of Jolly describing his hurricane insurance plan...and who was standing beside him...again our County Commissioner Kruse. It's finally hitting home with "legitimate" Republicans, MAGA isn't Republican...it's RINO...something I've been saying since writing an Op Ed for the Bradenton Herald in response to KVO when he was first elected. Go Blue!
Sunday, September 20 Report this
teamj1009
I,too, have been a lifelong Republican and can no longer support 100% every Republican on any ticket. So therefore myself and my wife will no longer vote that way. We will now vote for the most qualified candidate and, if they are Democrat, then so be it. All of us have been let down with the chronic lies, hollow promises and blatant corruption. This is from the Federal, State and all Local Gov'ts. We are done! So lets be the instrument of the needed change.
Sunday, September 20 Report this