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Mike Wilnau, a Marion County oil and gas industry worker, is making his first run for public office in Florida’s 11th Congressional District, taking on longtime Republican incumbent U.S. Rep. Daniel Webster.
Webster, the younger Republican said, had betrayed the public trust.
“We can’t keep electing the same type of people and expect different results from them,” Wilnau, 27, said in a recent phone interview. “Daniel Webster has been in office since 1979 … He’s a representation of the system that has completely turned on the American people.”
Webster, 76, served in the Florida House of Representatives from 1980 to 1998, then in the State Senate until 2008, before being elected to Congress in 2010. Wilnau said that Webster is too old to continue serving effectively and is not concerned with the needs of his district. Wilnau himself has tried to contact Webster in the past and share his ideas, but never received any responses from the Congressman or his office.
Even so, it’s likely to be an uphill fight for Wilnau, who faces Webster, now in his eighth term in the House, and another first-time candidate, Chanelle Krisette Barnes of Clermont, in the Aug. 18 Republican Primary. The winner will face the winner of the Democratic Primary in the general election on Nov. 3. Congressional representatives serve for two years and earn a base salary of $174,000.
Wilnau grew up in a family “that relied on food stamps and church donations,” according to his campaign website. He learned welding at Lake Technical College and has been working in the oil and gas industry since he was 18. He’s been utilizing those welding skills as a field mechanic with the natural gas company OPAL Fuels for the last three years.
A father of four, Wilnau described himself as a “family man” and “a Christian” who champions traditional conservative values, such as limited government and defending the U.S. Constitution “as it is written.” He said he wants to “restore the American Dream,” including making homeownership more affordable. Other planks in his platform include returning American manufacturing to America, reforming Congress and eliminating foreign influence from American politics.
Affordable homeownership is an issue that particularly resonates for him these days. Originally from Howie-in-the-Hills, Wilnau was pushed out of District 11 by skyrocketing home prices. Now he and his family live about an hour north in Salt Springs, Marion County. But even though his new address puts him in Congressional District 6, he is still running in District 11 because that’s where he “was born and raised,” and that’s the community he thinks of as home. (The U.S. Constitution requires only that members of Congress live in the state they represent, not in their specific districts.) Wilnau plans to move back to Howie-in-the-Hills when he can buy a home there.
As a blue-collar worker, Wilnau said he understands the problems facing average Americans and families in the district. His campaign website touts his “real-world problem solving skills that Washington desperately needs.” He told VoxPopuli that this experience gives him an edge over Webster. (The Congressman has been in government for 44 years, so it may not be remembered that Webster heads the family air-conditioning and heating business, begun by his father and now run by his sons and that he holds an electrical engineering degree from the George Institute of Technology.)
To help encourage American manufacturers to make things in America again, Wilnau has a plan for a two-year tax holiday for American companies that sign a 20-year low-interest lease on one of the “thousands of federally owned abandoned warehouses” that he said are available. The federal government spends millions every year to maintain building spaces that are underutilized or unused entirely, according to a 2025 report by the U.S. Government Accountability Office. Wilnau said that he believes a tax holiday would incentivize American companies currently manufacturing abroad to return to the U.S. to open factories in these unused spaces.
Wilnau said he favors term limits in Congress (several bills were introduced last year) to discourage career politicians from focusing on re-election and their own financial gain. He also wants to ban stock trading among Congressional representatives — U.S. Rep. Anna Paulina Luna, a Republican from St. Petersburg, is attempting to force through a bill to do just that with a discharge petition.
Wilnau also wants to ban omnibus bills, which combine different, often unrelated, issues into a single massive measure to speed up the legislative process and make it easier to pass controversial amendments. He has called these bills “immoral” with “10,000 pages full of crap and one page of something good.”
“They’ll call it the Save Kids Act. You voted against it adding $10 trillion in additional spending … but they hold it over your head that you voted against the kids,” Wilnau said.
A key plank in Wilnau’s platform is banning foreign influence in American politics.
During an October interview with The Mad Mamluks, who podcast about current issues for “modern Muslims,” he said that the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) “represents the interests of a foreign government buying their way into representatives’ pockets.” He suggested that the organization should register under the Foreign Agents Registration Act (which requires individuals and organizations to disclose when they lobby the U.S. on behalf of foreign entities). He said that AIPAC, which funnels American contributions to pro-Israel Democrats and Republicans, should stay out of American elections.
Wilnau belongs to the Anti-Zionist America PAC (AZAPAC), which calls for the end of all aid to Israel, including arms sales and any security cooperation, and to “remove Zionist influence from American politics.” The group was established last year by Michael Rectenwald, PhD, a former New York University professor, who retired in 2019. His X feed (formerly Twitter) is a mix of posts, many of which are antisemitic.
Some examples:
“I have a problem with Jewish supremacy and the Jewish crime syndicate that runs the U.S.”
“You ought to be ashamed to be a zionist Jew”
“The whole U.S. govt. serves zionist jews. Period.”
“I want to unite the ‘anti-Semite’ left and right.”
“Soon no Zionist will be allowed in civilized society, as it should be.”
Wilnau, one of nine state and federal candidates AZAPAC is supporting this election season, defended his membership in the organization, saying, “I don’t think that being anti-Zionist is the same as being antisemitic. Zionism is a political movement. There’s anti-Zionist orthodox Jews all over the place. I’m personally not antisemitic, I don’t hate anybody.”
Still, Wilnau added that he did not agree with Rectenwald’s statement about the “Jewish crime syndicate” and said he thought it was “hyperbolic.”
Hyperbole may be in the eye of the beholder. Following the Oct. 7 attacks by Hamas and the subsequent Gaza War, antisemitic incidents have been steadily rising globally. Here, in the U.S. according to the FBI, hate crimes against Jews hit an all-time high in 2024, with nearly 70 percent of religiously based hate crimes targeting American Jews. Physical assaults jumped 21 percent from 2023 to 2024, the latest year statistics are available.
“My perspective doesn’t have to be the same as his,” Wilnau said, referring to Rectenwald. “I’m not going to be hyperbolic. I don’t think it’s to that level, but … it’s hard to disagree that there is outside political influence from Israeli donors.” He pointed to Dr. Miriam Adelson, a dual citizen of Israel and the U.S., who contributed $100 million to President Trump's re-election campaign and offered another $250 million if he runs for a third term, as an example.
In general, Wilnau finds lobbying and influence peddling “disgusting” and said politicians were bought and paid for by the elite at the expense of average Americans. He said every level of government is filled with politicians who only want to “line their pockets” and get re-elected — something that he acknowledged has gotten worse since Trump’s re-election.
Recently, The New Yorker estimated that since Trump’s return to the White House, he and his family have enriched themselves via the presidency to the tune of $3.5 billion. The money has come through increased membership fees at Mar-a-Lago, crypto deals, Middle East and Asian real estate and golf course deals, media lawsuit settlements, Amazon’s $40 million documentary about Melania, Jared Kushner’s $2 billion Saudi-funded private equity firm, $500,000 memberships in the private Washington, D.C. club Executive Branch and the Qatari jet, to list just a few examples.
Government ethics reformer Fred Wertheimer, founder of Democracy21, noted in the article, “The way [Trump] pursues every possible avenue he can think of for money gives people who provide that money a clear sense that they are going to get something in return. Almost anyone who sees what’s going on has to assume that this money is buying the President’s favor.”
Wilnau told Mad Mamluks that he was uncomfortable with Trump’s decision to accept the jet from Qatar last May. It felt hypocritical, he said, given Trump’s attacks on Hillary Clinton a decade ago for accepting gifts from foreign governments.
Still, Wilnau maintained on the podcast that Trump called out government corruption, saying “the best thing Donald Trump has done is giv[e] a name to entrenched corruption; that’s what ‘the swamp’ is. I don’t think [Trump] on his own would have ever been capable of draining the entire swamp.”
