- August 31, 2024
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Here we are again. Every two years since 2006, former Michigan entrepreneur and Sarasota Ford dealer Vern Buchanan is running for Congress.
So far, comparatively speaking, you could say Buchanan has had the proverbial cake walk each time, except for his first election.
His record: 12-0 in primaries and general elections.
With the exception of his 369-vote margin of victory over Democrat Christine Jennings in his entry into politics in 2006, Buchanan’s margins of victory ever since have never been below 53%. In the three primaries he has had against other Republicans from 2008 on, he won more than 80% of the votes. In his 2022 primary, he won 86%; 62% in the general, his highest margins.
What’s more, with money a leading determinant of whether a candidate has a chance, forget it. Challenging Buchanan is like trying to break into a bank vault. The federal election system is so rigged in favor of incumbents, it truly is a miracle when a challenger unseats an entrenched incumbent.
Buchanan, for one, is listed as the seventh wealthiest member of Congress with a net worth of $157 million. And federal election records show he has taken in $4.5 million in contributions over the past two years, and through March he had $1.7 million in cash in his campaign bank account. As we said, a vault.
And yet, Buchanan, 73, has a Republican challenger — a first-time candidate from Bradenton who is giving it his all to unseat Buchanan in the Aug. 20 primary.
Meet Eddie Speir, 55, a former Colorado software entrepreneur who moved to Bradenton in 2010 for his three children to attend IMG Academy; who is the founder and owner of the private, grades 6-12 Inspiration Academy in West Bradenton; and who is campaigning passionately that Buchanan is part of the political Establishment that has gotten us where we are.
Speir’s slogan: “To take down a RINO, you’re gonna need a Speir.”
It’s a longshot. A long longshot.
If campaign money is the fuel to get a politician to D.C. and stay there, Speir has little chance to compete with Buchanan.
Take Speir’s campaign contributions. For 2023-24, through July 8, they totaled $1.1 million, with $522,000 coming from Speir himself as a personal loan. Records show 117 contributions made to his campaign, all individuals. Not a dime from a big political action committee.
Contrast that with Buchanan. The past two years, he has received 732 contributions, with 61% (448) of them coming from mostly D.C.-based PACs that read like a Who’s Who of Forbes 500 companies and industries. The biggest contributor: the Republican House PAC — WINRED, which funnels hundreds of millions of dollars to keep incumbents entrenched in their seats. WINRED alone has contributed $3.9 million to Buchanan.
Meanwhile, Buchanan himself, according to the Federal Election Commission records, hasn’t contributed a dime to his own campaign. He doesn’t need to.
A longtime veteran of Sarasota-Manatee politics told us it probably would take $10 million for any challenger to have a chance.
But even then, if Buchanan became at all worried, he would just open the money tap and flood District 16 with the tried-and-true media blitzes directed by Max Goodman, Buchanan’s campaign consultant from the start of his political career.
Goodman is regarded as one of the savviest political consultants in Florida, an expert at emotional advertising that makes his candidate look human and likable and advertising that makes the opponent look unfit for dog catcher.
The veteran political observer estimated to us Buchanan and Goodman likely have spent close to $25 million since 2006 on advertising — probably twice the amount opponents have wasted. Try as they might to sink Buchanan with negative advertising, it hasn’t worked.
Buchanan just keeps going, barely above the radar, plodding through congressional votes as a moderate, rarely if ever drawing attention.
Buchanan has been in office so long he is now the longest-serving Republican congressional member from Florida and serves in Washington as co-chair of the Florida congressional delegation.
Suffice it to say, even if Buchanan is almost never interviewed on Fox News or by other national conservative media outlets the way, say, Sen. Rick Scott is, or the way Ron DeSantis was when he was in Congress, and even if most Floridians outside of his district don’t know anything Buchanan has done or stands for, Buchanan still has remarkable name recognition.
Especially in Manatee County. Manatee’s staunch Republicans, where they outnumber Democrats almost 2-1, have carried Buchanan to all of his victories.
On top of that, in the last congressional redistricting, the Legislature gave Buchanan the gift of one of the safest Republican congressional districts in Florida. Along with Manatee, Buchanan now represents southeast Hillsborough County, that county’s most conservative region. No longer does Buchanan have to tussle with a liberal Democrat from Sarasota.
Despite these seemingly insurmountable advantages, Speir passionately believes Buchanan has serious vulnerabilities.
For one, wherever Speir campaigns, he raises the question with voters and Republican groups: How many of you have ever met Vern Buchanan or seen him in person? Particularly in Hillsborough County, few hands go up.
This is a legitimate knock on the nine-term congressman — his low visibility in the district. As time has passed, Buchanan’s presence, especially among the hoi polloi at county fairs or other large public events, has waned.
At the start of a talk in June to the Riverview Republican Club, Speir said this of Buchanan: “If you’ve ever interacted with him, he doesn’t have a social personality. He’s not engaging. He’s not a good speechwriter. He doesn’t inspire confidence.” Buchanan is famous in Sarasota and Manatee for meeting people for the third or fourth time and appearing as if it’s the first.
Speir, in contrast, has been on a whirlwind mission since he filed to run for office in June 2023. It started with his team of family members and colleagues from Inspiration Academy walking door-to-door all over Manatee and southern Hillsborough to gather the 5,300 signatures needed to qualify.
“I didn’t want to pay $10,000 to get on the ballot,” Speir told his Riverview audience. “I wanted to actually engage and connect with people.”
Gathering the signatures did two things: It raised his name recognition from zero to something and began his journey toward one of his goals — creating for his candidacy the largest Republican grassroots movement in Manatee political history. In his speeches, he claims it is.
Speir and his volunteers also took their petitions to grocery stores, public parks, the Social Security office, Premier Sports Complex, a chili cook-off in Parrish and the Manatee County Fair. Except at the fair and chili event, authorities booted out the volunteers.
In spite of the resistance, it worked. Speir submitted 6,100 signatures and qualified.
Attending events and speaking to Republican groups has kept apace. Speir keeps his itinerary on his website (EddieSpeirfForCongress.com). In the next 10 days: a candidate fair in Sun City; Tiger Bay Club debate, Bradenton; Sun City golf cart parade; and candidate meet and greet at Gold Coast Eagle Distributing.
“It’s all about name recognition,” Speir told us.
And getting the message across.
Speir’s messaging is focused on what he perceives as Buchanan’s weaknesses and Speir’s America First and constitutional patriotism.
On Buchanan, Speir’s themes are that Buchanan’s voting record proves he is too much of a liberal, a RINO big spender; that he is part of the entrenched Washington establishment responsible for the state of the country; and in spite of Buchanan’s longevity in Congress, that Buchanan’s influence there is de minimis.
At the start of 2023, when Republicans took control of the House, Buchanan was the senior Republican on the House Ways and Means Committee, the tax-writing and one of the most powerful committees in the House. His seniority put him in line to be chairman. What’s more, Buchanan had proven himself a loyal party man, raising $4 million in contributions for the 2022 elections; and, Florida had the second-largest Republican delegation in Congress. A nice portfolio.
But his Republican colleagues on the House Steering Committee passed over Buchanan. Missouri Congressman Jason Smith promised in his bid to the committee to be aggressive defunding an increase in IRS hiring. Buchanan pitched his business background and ability to work across the aisle.
Speir claims to his audiences: “(Buchanan) actually is not well-liked in D.C.” And then he punches more with: “The senior member (of the Florida delegation) should be making waves and doing things for Floridians. But, in fact, he’s not doing that at all.”
Speir harps on Buchanan’s voting record, with a tab on Speir’s website devoted it. It focuses on nine specific topics on which Buchanan voted on the opposite side of the Republicans’ conservative Freedom Caucus.
Speir says Buchanan’s voting history puts him in a category of spending more money than each of four far-left, progressive members of “the Squad.” Speir directs viewers to the R Street Institute’s SpendingTracker.org site, which shows that Buchanan’s voting through seven sessions totals $5.5 trillion, ranking him average in Congress overall, but “high” in the Republican Party.
Speir documents votes on immigration, the Second Amendment, the Paris Climate agreement, spying on Americans; and the World Health Organization’s effort to subsume U.S. sovereignty in the next world health crisis.
These votes may be news to Republican voters, but they’re not really a surprise. Everyone who has voted for Buchanan since 2006 knows he is nowhere close to the conservatism of, say, Florida Congressmen Byron Donalds or Matt Gaetz or Reps. Jim Jordan or Marjorie Taylor Green. Everyone who has voted for Buchanan knows he toggles between RINO and moderate Republican. He once touted that he was the most bipartisan member of Congress.
In fact, when you look at -Buchanan’s ratings among the conservative think tanks and taxpayer and business organizations in D.C., his scores reinforce what voters have long known — and tolerated (see box).
And that toleration explains Buchanan’s longevity and why no one has or is likely to unseat him.
After almost losing in 2006 in his first election to Democrat Christine Jennings, Buchanan has always been careful not to go too far right. He has never done so much one way or the other — or, some say, not done much at all — to make voters say: “Vern must go.”
He clearly has learned how to play the political game, which, of course, is all about being reelected. When Gov. DeSantis made his attempt to be the presidential nominee, Buchanan didn’t jump in and pledge his support for the governor. He waited and watched, becoming the eighth — not first or second — Florida congressional member to back not DeSantis, but Donald Trump.
Trump, in turn, has endorsed Buchanan once again. Even though Speir positions himself as the “America First,” “Drain the Swamp” candidate, Trump’s endorsement of Buchanan can be viewed as a concrete wall for Speir.
“This is a David and Goliath situation,” Speir told the Riverview Republicans. “I’m going against the Establishment. I could spend a lot of time on all of the lies and propaganda being used against me on the local level and at the state level that is trying to silence my voice … This is a Marxist war against America and our freedoms.”
Born in Seattle, Speir and his family moved to Colorado when he was 3. He grew up in Denver.
In 1987, he went to the University of Northern Colorado in the hot eastern plains of Greeley, where he competed as a 142-pound wrestler. He admits he wasn’t a model citizen then. “Drugs, fights, I was on a path of destruction” at age 20, he told us.
But he also tells of his conversion to an evangelical Christian. It occurred when he saw a shooting star three times while driving at 3 a.m. on Highway 1 in California on a trip to Seattle. “God got a hold of me,” he says.
After earning a business degree with an emphasis on computer information systems, Speir’s first job was as assistant director for IT at his university.
He did that for a year. Then, in 1993, Speir, 24, started his own company, 3t Systems in Denver, specializing in IT consulting for medical offices.
3t grew over the next decade, expanding into software development for the mortgage origination industry. After a merger in 2004, 3t became the largest IT consultancy in Colorado. At its peak, it reached more than $18 million a year in revenues and 285 employees.
After that merger, Speir spun off the software development operation into a new company, Mortgage Cadence. Its internet-based software became a hit in the post-2008 real estate crash, so much so that the international giant, Accenture plc, acquired 85% of Mortgage Cadence in 2010 and completed 100% of the acquisition in 2013. Purchase price: More than $150 million.
In 2010, with sale proceeds in hand and after Speir’s wife survived a plane crash in the Colorado Rockies (three days, two nights, with wind chill of 40 below zero), they decided to leave the cold of Colorado. They chose Bradenton and IMG.
Then came serendipity.
Speir met Robert Allen Jr., a New College of Florida trustee whose son was attending the tennis academy at Speir’s Inspiration Academy. Speir and Allen’s political philosophies clicked.
This also was the time Allen and Gov. DeSantis had ignited the effort to transform New College into becoming a public Hillsdale College replica. Allen lobbied the governor successfully to have Speir appointed as a New College trustee.
It did not go well.
Speir was outspoken, challenged New College’s lawyer and strayed from the tactics and strategy of the new trustees and New College interim President Richard Corcoran. When it was time for the Senate to confirm the new trustees, Speir was the only one not confirmed.
It’s a long, messy story. But here is what it did for Speir: His rejection prompted him to think about running for public office. On the same day he contemplated that, he read the news story about Buchanan losing his bid to be chairman of the Ways and Means Committee.
“I felt a quickening of my spirits and wanted to get involved,” Speir told us.
When we spoke about Speir’s chances to win with a Republican who has been in the trenches of Florida politics for 30 years, he said: “He’s delusional.”
Speir doesn’t see it that way at all. When you hear and see his passion and patriotism, it’s palpable and deserving of respect. You can feel he wants what is right to begin the turnaround that’s needed for the country.
“I love this country,” he says. “Freedom-loving people feel like there’s no hope.”
Speir’s platform is simple: Inflation (“You could cut 80% of the federal budget, but they just don’t have the will.”). Secure our borders. (He visited the Texas border.)
“If we get government out of the way, and not look to the government to solve the problems that the government has created, and get back to true, limited-government conservatism, that will unlock and unleash the massive amount of intellectual capacity that we have.
“I learned this in business,” he tells the Riverview Republicans. “You’ve got to confront the brutal facts, and when you confront the brutal facts, never lose hope that you will be victorious in the end.
“It’s in our DNA. We are freedom fighters. All it takes is political courage and will.”
It is truly rare for a first-time, unknown candidate to slay an entrenched incumbent who has the name-recognition Buchanan has.
But, likewise, we have always been of a mind that serving in Congress should not be a career. Former Congressman Dan Miller, R-Bradenton, did it right. He said 10 years and stuck to it.
If we had our way, we’d flush out every member of Congress, save for a handful. It’s not personal. It’s about freedom.
Which of the two — Buchanan or Speir — is the freedom fighter for you?
We recommend: Eddie Speir
Source: EddieSpeirforCongress.com
Correction: This article has been updated to correct the description of the Climate Action Now Act, a misspelling of Jason Edward Speir, the votes on HJ Resolution 46 and HR 863, and which events Speir's volunteers were removed from.
