Lee and Collier

The Republican nomination for Southwest Florida's open congressional seat went to Jim Schwartzel by 6,426 votes across Lee and Collier, and on the Democratic side Victor Arias took his nomination while losing Collier County by 27 votes

Money & World

The Editorial Team · August 19, 2026

Downtown Fort Myers seen across the Caloosahatchee River. A long marina of moored white boats and wooden docks runs along the near bank behind a line of palm trees, with low and mid-rise buildings in tan, red and blue standing behind it. Open grey-blue water fills the lower half of the frame under a bright, partly clouded sky. No people, signage, text or place name is legible. — *Photo: ReignMan at English Wikipedia / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 3.0)*

What it changes

Southwest Florida has spent this election cycle with a congressional seat nobody was defending, and tonight it has two names on it. Byron Donalds, who holds the 19th District, is not on the District 19 ballot at all in either county, and the same Lee County document that carries these results shows him taking the Republican primary for governor with 54,106 votes in Lee against 13,526 for Jay Collins. WINK News reported the statewide call at 8.33 p.m. So the seat is open, and ten Republicans went at it. Jim Schwartzel finished with 26,140 votes across the two counties, 29.14 percent, and Catalina Lauf finished with 19,714, or 21.98 percent. The gap is 6,426 votes. Jim Oberweis took 14,105, and after him the field falls away quickly: Madison Cawthorn 7,592, Chris Collins 6,614, Mike Pedersen 5,578, and then four candidates who between them could not gather ten thousand votes. What is worth noticing is that Schwartzel did not win this on one county. He carried Lee with 29.39 percent and Collier with 28.5 percent, which is about as even a performance across a two county district as a candidate is likely to get. Lauf was the stronger of the two in Collier, 23.5 percent there against 21.39 percent in Lee, but the district's votes are where its population is, and 71 percent of the Republican ballots cast on this contest were cast in Lee. A candidate who splits the two counties evenly in a district shaped like this one wins it. The Democratic contest is the more interesting arithmetic. Victor Arias won the nomination with 15,406 votes to Howard Sapp's 13,909, a margin of 1,497. But Arias lost Collier County. Sapp took 3,450 there to Arias's 3,423, a difference of 27 votes, and Sapp finished ahead on the Collier page at 44.5 percent to 44.1. Arias's entire margin, and his nomination, came out of Lee, where he beat Sapp 11,983 to 10,459. Robert M. Neeld took 4,550 district wide and finished third in both counties. The scale gap between the two primaries is the number a reader should carry into November. There were 89,701 votes cast on the Republican contest in this district and 33,865 on the Democratic one, which is to say that roughly two and a half Republican ballots were cast for every Democratic ballot on the same night in the same precincts. Primary turnout is not general election turnout and the two electorates are not the same people, but a gap of that size is the shape of the district rather than an accident of one evening. Both pages still say preliminary at the top. Vote by mail cures and provisional ballots are canvassed in the days after election night, and neither District 19 margin is anywhere near close enough for a recount provision to reach it, so the canvassing to come is a matter of exact totals rather than of who won. Lee County finished the night at 29.72 percent turnout, 141,250 ballots cast against 475,217 registered voters.

The document: Lee County Supervisor of Elections, 2026 Primary Election preliminary summary results, page updated 9:39 p.m. August 18, 2026.

The Republican nomination for Southwest Florida's open congressional seat went to Jim Schwartzel by 6,426 votes across Lee and Collier, and on the Democratic side Victor Arias took his nomination while losing Collier County by 27 votes

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