For the third election in a row, Republican Congressman Brian Mast faces primary challengers...this time for the new District 21, which takes over much the area he's currently representing. District 18 has been redistricted to the west coast.
Among the two candidates we were able to contact, the Second Amendment is a key reason for wanting to bump Mast out of the U.S. House.
Jeff Buongiorno cites the congressman's op-ed piece in the New York Times after the Parkland school shooting in which he noted he would support a quote "ban on assault weapons."
"Why would you vote for a Republican in name who stands for those issues?"
Melissa Martz says Mast broke his oath to the Constitution.
"We have an alleged conservative Republican trying to take our guns away from law abiding citizens, the same as we see on the Left."
The congressman says his thoughts came at a time when a lot of other gun control proposals were being taken up and approved, and calls himself a "strong supporter of the Second Amendment."
"You fast forward in terms of legislation, we just had a vote on an assault weapon ban. I didn't vote for that ban on assault weapons I thought it was terrible legislation. We just had a vote on red flag laws, which are an absolute violation of somebody's right to due process. And I didn't vote for that either or any of these other ones that have been brought up here in Congress."
Buongiorno is a one-time deputy in New Jersey and says he has since built several companies, in the sectors of transportation, supply chain, manufacturing, and tech.
Among his priorities...
"We need to bring manufacturing back to the United States of America..Made in the U.S.A. We need to do everything in our power to lower the price of energy so that we can compete with foreign competition."
Martz calls herself a "Constitutionalist."
She's a registered patent attorney who says she doesn't want to be a career politician, as she explains the county's mask mandate at the height of the pandemic is what sparked her desire to run for Congress.
"But I started suffering under the tyranny of the mandates myself and as an attorney I sued Palm Beach County against their unconstitutional mandate and I say often that was the beginning of my awareness of how deep the corruption ran."
Mast touts the work he's done to clean up Florida's waterways.
"Fighting for our waterways has been why I chose my first committee, 'Transportation and Infrastructure,' in Congress. It's legislation that we passed every single year to get the dollars for the Herbert Hoover Dike and redo the Lake (Okeechobee) Management schedule and the list goes on and on and on."
Repeated attempts to reach candidate Ljubo Skrbic went unanswered.
The winner of the primary will face Democrat Corrina Balderramos Robinson in November.