Rep. David Jolly, R-Fla., said he doesn’t know who he will support for president in the fall campaign.
“So, I’m going to tell you something you rarely hear an elected official say: I don’t know. I truly don’t know,” Jolly told a New York radio host. “I’m a Republican and I hope we can find a conservative leader that can alter some of the course of where our current president has taken us. But whether or not Donald Trump is that person, I am in no way prepared to make that decision in April for a November [election].”
Jolly is a candidate for Senate in the Florida Republican primary, which takes place in August. That makes his comments about Trump potentially risky given the reality TV star’s handy victory in the state’s March presidential contest. But it comes on the heels of another high-profile stand he has taken in opposition to lawmakers personally engaged in fundraising.
The lawmaker opposes the foreign policy positions offered by Trump and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, the likely Democratic nominee. “If you’re asking me in April my position on Donald Trump in November, I don’t know what Donald Trump’s going to be standing for in November and so I’m certainly not going to take a position five or six months out,” he said. “So, I think like a lot of Americans, we are going to have to begin to spend the summer studying the candidates and decide who’s best for the future of the country.”
Max Goodman, Jolly’s campaign manager, assured Buzzfeed that the congressman “has not changed” in his refusal ever to support Clinton.
Jolly is fresh off a fight with his own political party’s fundraising operation, which could endear him to voters even as he earns the animosity of the National Republican Congressional Committee, the campaign arm of the House Republicans. Jolly introduced legislation last week to ban lawmakers from personally requesting campaign money and participated in a CBS “60 Minutes” segment about fundraising at the NRCC.
“It is a cult-like boiler room on Capitol Hill where sitting members of Congress, frankly I believe, are compromising the dignity of the office they hold by sitting in these sweatshop phone booths calling people asking them for money,” he told CBS. “And their only goal is to get $500 or $1,000 or $2,000 out of the person on the other end of the line. It’s shameful. It’s beneath the dignity of the office that our voters in our communities entrust us to serve.”
Jolly also alleged that the NRCC requires members to raise $18,000 a day, something the campaign team decried as “fiction.” The NRCC’s frustration was exacerbated by the fact that CBS obtained hidden camera footage of congressmen raising money at the campaign headquarters.
“Not since Watergate has the headquarters of a major political party committee been so violated,” NRCC executive director Rob Simms wrote in a letter to 60 Minutes. “CBS conspired with an anonymous staffer to enter our offices and obtain unauthorized footage under false pretenses. This is not journalism. This is trespassing.”
The fight could backfire, however, if voters punish Jolly for attending a fundraiser after participating in the CBS segment. He did not personally request money, however.
“Jolly did attend, and the whole premise of this new Stop Act movement embraced by the American people and the significance of Rep. Jolly’s pledge is that he did not make a single phone call inviting anyone to the event and never made a single personal solicitation for anyone to attend or contribute,” Sarah Bascom, a spokeswoman for his Senate campaign, told Politico. “Rep. Jolly remained attending to his taxpayer funded job and left the campaign staff in charge of organizing the event and inviting attendees.”
