The DCCC has put Florida’s newly drawn 22nd Congressional District on its national target list. Six days out from the August 18 primary, the Republican field is a money brawl with no clear winner — and one candidate in it has nothing for opposition researchers to find.
Washington Democrats do not spend money on seats they expect to lose. That is why the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee’s decision to add Pia Dandiya to its Red to Blue program should be read as exactly what it is: a judgment that Florida’s 22nd is winnable, and a bet on which Republican comes out of the primary.
Red to Blue is the DCCC’s shortlist — the program that routes organizational muscle and national fundraising to the challengers party leadership believes can flip seats. Dandiya is one of only two Florida Democrats added this cycle. DCCC Chair Suzan DelBene framed the pick around Republican redistricting, saying Republicans tried to redraw South Florida to distract from broken promises. Dandiya called her selection evidence of momentum for what she describes as a new kind of leadership in South Florida.
She has the resources to act on it. Dandiya reported raising nearly $2.1 million through June 30, with roughly $1.37 million on hand and more than 11,000 individual donors. She is a former teacher and high school principal who later ran public-sector initiatives for Apple and served as a White House Fellow — a résumé built to sand down the edges of a national party whose direction has drifted a long way from anything South Florida voters asked for.
The district Republicans drew, and the district they could lose
The new CD 22 is one of the strangest maps in the country. Once anchored in Palm Beach County under Democrat Lois Frankel, it now runs nearly coast to coast — western Broward and Palm Beach, out through Hendry County and Immokalee, down to Marco Island and Everglades City. Four counties. Three media markets. The largest agrarian congressional district east of the Mississippi.
On paper it favors Republicans. President Trump carried the new lines with about 54.6% of the vote in 2024 against 44.1% for Kamala Harris. But the same territory went for Joe Biden with 51% in 2020, and the Cook Political Report currently rates it “lean Republican” — not safe, not solid. Frankel saw the lines and moved to the 23rd. Dandiya saw the same lines, abandoned her challenge to Brian Mast in the 21st, and moved in.
That is not the behavior of a candidate who thinks she is walking into a wall. It is the behavior of a candidate who has looked at the Republican primary and likes what she sees.
Point one: Hasdorff is the strongest Republican on the ballot August 18
Look at what that primary has actually produced.
A Victory Insights survey released this month found Belinda Keiser at 13.6%, Casey Askar at 13.1% and Michael Carbonara at 11.4% — a three-way statistical tie the pollster rates a toss-up. David Burck sits at 8.7% and Terri Hasdorff at 5.6%, with Michael Thompson and Richard Evans in low single digits. And 41.5% of likely Republican primary voters are still undecided a week and a half out.
Here is the number that should worry every Republican in the district: none of the three front-runners has built any real goodwill. Among undecided voters, favorability for Carbonara sits at 10%, Keiser at 4% and Askar at 3%. Millions of dollars spent, and the leaders are underwater with the very voters who will decide this thing.
The spending is not close. Askar loaned his own campaign $2.5 million. Carbonara has poured more than $2 million into the race. Keiser has spent north of $1 million. Most of it has gone into a primary that Florida Politics has described as increasingly bitter, with multiple attack websites and outside groups targeting all three leaders — Keiser over past Democratic donations and Keiser University’s business ties in China, Carbonara over litigation involving his fintech company and overseas business dealings, and Askar via an anonymous site, traced to servers outside the country, raising questions about his military record and divorce. Askar has been smeared with attacks over his Middle Eastern heritage that falsely portray the Marine Corps veteran as something he is not.
Republicans should understand what they are watching. This is not a debate about who will cut spending or secure the border. It is an arms race, and the ammunition is opposition research that will not be retired on August 19 — it will be picked up, repackaged and fired again by the DCCC in October.
Hasdorff put the whole thing in nine words at this week’s debate.
“You can’t buy experience. You can buy a race.”
She is the only candidate in this field who can say it and have it land, because she is the only one whose case does not depend on the size of her checkbook.
She spent the 1990s and early 2000s in Washington as Deputy Director of the House Republican Conference — inside the room where House Republicans decide what they are going to fight for. Under President George W. Bush, she directed the international arm of the President’s Faith-Based and Community Initiative, running the overseas side of a program that moved federal partnership away from entrenched bureaucracies and toward the churches, charities and community organizations actually doing the work on the ground. She has run a small business, Capitol Solutions Consulting, for years. She holds an executive MBA from Oxford. She chairs the Republican Federal Women’s Forum, and she has been endorsed by Moms for America Action.
Her framing of the job is the tell. “This isn’t about getting a title,” she said at the debate. “It’s about who can do the job.” She calls herself a government reform expert, and it is not a slogan she picked up from a consultant — working for Speaker Newt Gingrich, she helped lead an audit of federal finances that uncovered waste, fraud and abuse and put reforms in place behind it. As she put it this week, “I was cleaning up swamps before swamp draining was cool.”
She is equally direct about why she thinks reform stalls. “It can be done. It just takes leadership at the top.” That is the argument of somebody who has watched from the inside as good bills died for lack of nerve, and it is a different argument than “send me because I built a company.”
And she does not hide the foundation any of it rests on: “I’m about God over government.”
The Republican who has never had to explain anything
At a forum hosted by the Federated Republican Ladies of Liberty, candidates were asked directly whether they had always been registered Republicans and whether they had ever supported or donated to a Democrat.
Michael Thompson acknowledged endorsing a Democrat in a 2022 local race. Belinda Keiser answered that she had been a “Blue Dog Democrat” many years ago — fiscal conservatives, she noted, of a kind that no longer exists. It is a graceful line, and it is the line every former Democrat reaches for.
It also does not survive the record. Florida Politics has reported Keiser’s donations to Debbie Wasserman Schultz — and whatever Wasserman Schultz is, she is not a Blue Dog. She is among the most liberal members ever to serve in the House and the former chair of the Democratic National Committee, the same DNC that ran the machinery against conservatives in Florida for a decade. A conservative Democrat writing checks to a Blue Dog is a story. A donor writing checks to the head of the DNC is a different story, and Republican primary voters are entitled to notice which one this is.
Hasdorff answered that question as a lifelong Republican, because she is one. There is no version of the fall campaign in which that stops mattering.
The movement has already made its choice
There is a reliable tell in a crowded primary. Follow the organizations that have no reason to guess wrong — the groups that have to live with the member they help elect, that get nothing out of backing a candidate who will vote badly and everything out of backing one who will not.
In this race, they have consolidated behind one candidate, and it is not one of the self-funders.
Hasdorff has been endorsed or recommended by Father Frank Pavone of Priests for Life, one of the most recognized pro-life leaders in the country, and by Major General Robert F. Dees, U.S. Army (Ret.). She carries the backing of Florida Family Action and Moms for America Action, of Glenn Story of Patriot Mobile, and of Stand for Health Freedom, the MAHA-aligned organization fighting for medical freedom and informed consent. FLC Action has rated her highly qualified.
Look at the range of that list. Pro-life. Military. Family policy. Parental rights. Medical freedom. Those constituencies do not agree on everything, and in most primaries they split three or four ways. Here they did not split. They looked at seven Republicans and landed on the one with a twenty-year record they could actually check.
That is what happens when the people who know the difference between a conservative and a check start paying attention. As Hasdorff’s supporters have put it, this is a fighter who is free of special interests and who can actually get something done in Washington — two things that are difficult to purchase and impossible to fake.
Point two: She is the only Republican who is a clean matchup in November
Run the general election in your head.
If Republicans nominate a candidate who emerges from August 18 with roughly 13% of a primary vote, negative favorables among undecideds, an active file of lawsuits or foreign business questions, and a documented history of writing checks to Democratic Party leadership, the DCCC’s job is already done. Every attack ad has been pre-tested, pre-funded and pre-published by Republicans against each other. Dandiya’s team will not have to spend a dollar developing it. They will only have to buy the airtime — and with Red to Blue behind her, they can.
Nominate Hasdorff and that entire playbook goes in the trash. There is no donation history to run. There is no litigation to headline. There is no anonymous offshore website. There is a fiscal conservative with actual federal legislative experience, a small business she has had to make payroll for, a faith-based service record that reached around the world, and a book about the courage it takes to defend what you believe.
The contrast writes itself in a district that includes Hendry County farmers, Immokalee growers, Marco Island retirees and inland Broward families. Dandiya’s pitch is Apple and the White House Fellowship. Hasdorff’s is a payroll she has personally had to meet, a record of hunting down federal waste, and the experience of having already sat inside a Republican House majority and helped run it.
Hasdorff has been blunt about the stakes. “Socialism is at our doorstep. It’s a cancer,” she told an earlier candidate forum in Naples. She has said that if the House falls to Democratic control this November, President Trump will face endless impeachment efforts, national security will be weakened, and the effort to reform Washington and eliminate government waste stops cold.
That is not campaign atmosphere. Across the country, Democratic primaries have been won by candidates running openly on government control of housing, energy and health care — a party moving steadily toward a politics that would be unrecognizable to the Blue Dogs some of these candidates used to be. Voters in CD 22 who want a check on that direction get exactly one chance to pick the person who will carry it, and that chance is August 18.
Six days
Forty-one percent of Republican primary voters in this district have not made up their minds. That is not apathy. That is a field that has spent millions and persuaded nobody.
The money in this race is trying to purchase a nomination. It cannot purchase a record, and it cannot purchase the twenty years Terri Hasdorff has already spent doing the job the winner is asking to be hired for.
Republicans in Florida’s 22nd have a rare thing on Tuesday: a candidate the other side has no file on. The DCCC is spending real money betting they will not use it.
Early voting is underway. Election Day is Tuesday, August 18.
Sources: Florida Politics (candidate field and spending rundown, Aug. 2026; Victory Insights poll coverage, Aug. 2026; DCCC Red to Blue announcement; Keiser donation reporting; Hasdorff campaign launch, June 2026; Dandiya district switch, May 2026); The Floridian (CD 22 candidate forums, June and July 2026); WSFA (Hasdorff on the Gingrich-era federal audit); The Hill and Washington Examiner (Red to Blue additions); Ballotpedia; Cook Political Report rating; candidate debate remarks, August 2026.