John Rutherford Town Halls Florida

Ten Years, Zero Town Halls. Now John Rutherford's Own Republican Challenger Is Running Against His Absence.

Rutherford says constituents who want a town hall will 'scream and holler, and act like fools.' His Republican primary opponent, Mark Kaye, launched his campaign with this: 'In 10 years of service, this guy hasn't held a single town hall meeting.'

MAGA Report Cards · Aug 10, 2026

Ten Years, Zero Town Halls. Now John Rutherford's Own Republican Challenger Is Running Against His Absence.

Florida's Republican primary is August 18, 2026. Early voting has started. And the man challenging John Rutherford for the Republican nomination in Florida's 5th District has been making the same argument since the day he got in.

Mark Kaye, a Jacksonville podcaster and former radio host, announced his campaign in June 2025 by saying Rutherford "lacks transparency with his constituents." Then he gave the number:

"In 10 years of service, this guy hasn't held a single town hall meeting."

Fourteen months later, in News4JAX's voter's guide, Kaye was asked what he could do for voters that his opponent can't. His entire submitted answer was one sentence: "The other person running for the office is John Rutherford who has only helped himself."

That is a Republican, in a Republican primary, in a safe Republican seat, making his case out of the fact that the incumbent won't stand in a room and take questions.

He's not making it up.

What Rutherford actually said

In March 2025, constituents in Northeast Florida were circulating a petition asking Rutherford to hold a public town hall — "immediately," it said. Jacksonville Today's Dan Scanlan reached him in Washington and asked about it.

Here is what he said, on the record:

"They want you to host these town hall meetings, and they will go there and just scream and holler, and act like fools, and I am not going to be a part of that."

"That is what happened the last time, and I am not going to participate in that."

"People are welcome to come to my office. I will meet with one, two, three or four people, but I am not going to set up an opportunity for a mob to act out in front of media; ain't going do it."

Read that middle sentence again. Not "I'll host a moderated forum." Not "I'll do a telephone town hall." His offer is that an entire congressional district may come see him one, two, three or four at a time.

Anne Tressler, who organized the petition, pointed out the obvious:

"It would be great if we could all schedule a meeting — that would be wonderful. But what about all of these other people who want a meeting?"

Nothing changed. As of this month, the record stands where Kaye described it.

What he was avoiding questions about

The timing matters. March 2025 was not a quiet stretch.

That same week, Rutherford went on C-SPAN's Washington Journal and admitted his own constituents were worried about the DOGE cuts:

"I have constituents sort of concerned about the cuts as well. But I think part of what's going on is DOGE is moving so fast that it's got people's heads spinning. In fact, I want more information about what's going to happen before it happens. They're moving so fast."

He was a member of the House DOGE Caucus at the time. A month earlier he had defended Elon Musk outright: "Musk is carrying out the orders given to him from President Donald Trump to clean up the waste, fraud, and abuse that have plagued the federal government for far too long."

And the cuts were landing on downtown Jacksonville. The Charles E. Bennett Federal Building — which houses Internal Revenue Service, Department of Labor and Housing and Urban Development functions — was listed among 440 structures that could be sold. The Army Corps of Engineers' Jacksonville District, the second-largest civil works district in the Corps, was told its Southbank lease was being cancelled and that the roughly 800 of its employees who work in that building would have to move out by the end of August. (The GSA withdrew that termination two weeks later.)

Florida Politics noted the connection plainly at the time: Rutherford "is among the Congressional Republicans who have resisted calls to hold town halls," so "his constituent concerns are coming from smaller group settings."

That is the whole design. If the only people who reach you are the ones who can get an appointment, you never have to answer the question in front of anyone else.

The other things nobody gets to ask him

A town hall is where a constituent would get to ask, out loud, about:

His stock filings. Between his swearing-in and December 2021, Rutherford's filings disclosed 157 late-reported stock transactions, worth between $652,000 and $3.5 million. The Office of Congressional Ethics found "substantial reason to believe" he violated the STOCK Act — while he was serving on the Ethics Committee itself. He is one of 45 Republicans we cover who broke that law. Notably, the second item on Kaye's own list of top priorities in that voter's guide is "Banning Congressional Stock Trading."
The Iran war. On the day the bombing started, his office put out a statement backing it — one that misspelled the operation's name three times and said the Iranian regime "must be obliterated." Congress never voted to authorize the war.
His campaign money. Rutherford ranks #429 out of 440 House members in grassroots funding, and the largest outside spending recorded in his FEC file came from two "pro-police" super PACs tied to a convicted telemarketing fraudster.

None of those questions have ever been asked of him at a public meeting in Northeast Florida, because there hasn't been one.

"Faithfully served"

In the same voter's guide where Kaye gave that one-sentence answer, News4JAX asked Rutherford what he hopes to be remembered for. His answer:

"I hope to be remembered as someone who faithfully served Northeast Florida with integrity, protected our communities, stood up for conservative principles, and always put the people I represented first."

He also wrote: "My experience matters. I've spent more than 40 years serving this community — as a police officer, Sheriff, and now Congressman."

Forty-one of those years he spent as a cop, walking into rooms full of angry people because that was the job. Now the job is standing in a room and answering for his votes, and he has decided that the people who show up to ask are a "mob."

Rutherford is not unusual in this. We've written the same story about French Hill going 52 weeks without one, Bob Latta going since 2015, and John Carter going thirteen years. What's unusual here is who's saying it out loud: not a Democrat, not an advocacy group, but the other Republican on the primary ballot, eight days from the vote.