Republican Attorney General James Uthmeier speaks during the Governor DeSantis Leadership Forum in Tampa in September. (Photo by Joe Raedle/Getty Images)

Florida’s Republican attorney general James Uthmeier won election to keep the post that Gov. Ron DeSantis appointed him to, even after a grand jury placed Uthmeier at the center of one of the state’s biggest political scandals in recent years.

On Tuesday, Uthmeier fended off a challenge from former Democratic state Sen. Jose Javier Rodriguez, a trial attorney who had pledged to investigate Uthmeier’s role in the Hope Florida scandal, in which a grand jury found DeSantis administration officials had routed $10 million from a state Medicaid settlement into nonprofits that then funneled much of the money into a political committee controlled by Uthmeier, who was then the governor’s chief of staff.

Since stepping into the attorney general’s office last February, Uthmeier made a name for himself as an aggressive culture warrior and didn’t let his lack of a voter mandate prevent him from using his office for a series of attention-grabbing moves, from choosing Martin Luther King Jr. Day to broadcast his disapproval of “racial quota” laws to clashing with major organizations ranging from the NFL to Planned Parenthood to OpenAI.

DeSantis’ onetime presidential campaign manager, Uthmeier presided over a staggering expansion of executive power during the DeSantis era and played a key role in some of the most controversial actions to come out of the administration, from the secretive flights of dozens of migrants to Martha’s Vineyard to the creation of “Alligator Alcatraz,” the now-shuttered state-run immigration detention facility that’s estimated to cost Florida taxpayers $1 billion.

Rodriguez meanwhile ran on a promise to take on the “corrupt and powerful.” As a state lawmaker, Rodriguez had earned a reputation as a staunch environmental advocate and a chief critic of the powerful electric utilities that wield significant influence over Florida politics. Rodriguez lost his seat in the Florida Senate by just 32 votes after operatives working for the state’s largest utility, Florida Power & Light, enabled a ghost candidate scheme to siphon votes away from him.

Kate Payne is The Florida Trib’s state government reporter. She can be reached at kate.payne@floridatrib.org.

Kate Payne is The Florida Trib's state government reporter.

She’s spent her career in nonprofit newsrooms in Florida and Iowa and her reporting has run the gamut, from interviewing presidential candidates on the campaign trail to middle schoolers in the lunch line.

Kate has won awards for her political reporting, sound editing and feature writing and was named 2024 journalist of the year by the Florida chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists.

Kate’s previous newsrooms include the Associated Press, Iowa Public Radio and WLRN Public Media in Miami. Her stories and photographs have been published by The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Christian Science Monitor, NPR and PBS, and her reporting on the death penalty has been cited in a filing at the U.S. Supreme Court.

You can reach Kate at kate.payne@floridatrib.org