FORT MYERS, Fla. — The race to replace Republican Rep. Byron Donalds, who’s running for governor, has drawn a unique cast of characters.

The cast includes former members of Congress and pardon recipients from President Trump.

And many of them have only recent ties to the district, which includes parts of Cape Coral, Naples and Fort Myers, and the state.

One of the candidates running for this southwest Florida U.S. House seat is John Strand, a former model and actor, and a convicted and pardoned Jan. 6 rioter, who grew up in Beverly Hills, Calif.

But Strand is not the only candidate running for the strongly Republican 19th Congressional District without deep roots in Florida.

In this crowded GOP primary, where almost all 10 candidates are Trump loyalists, a tension has developed between candidates who claim deeper ties to the community and those who recently moved here — for work, warmer weather or to run in this race.

Even the candidate who won Trump’s endorsement last week, Catalina Lauf, moved to Florida recently, and ran for Congress multiple times in Illinois, as recently as 2022.

While some candidates are accusing each other of being carpetbaggers — someone who relocates to gain political power — voters, many of whom are themselves out-of-state transplants, say they care more about the representation of their conservative values than where someone’s from.

“Carpetbagger” is a campaign attack line

Outside Seed to Table, a popular local grocery store, Jeanine Rutherford, a 67-year-old Naples resident, said one of her preferred candidates is Strand, because “he comes from a very conservative family and he wants to preserve conservative values,” and that it didn’t matter that he wasn’t from Florida.

Inside the venue, Strand said it was “rich and hypocritical” for some candidates to call others “carpetbaggers” because a lot of Florida residents are from somewhere else.

He stressed that he moved to the district before the seat became open, adding, “A lot of people in Florida 19th … very clearly moved here it seems like five minutes ago to run for Byron’s seat.”