In a redrawn congressional district, Kathy Castor faces her toughest battle

When the Republican-controlled Florida Legislature approved Gov. Ron DeSantis’ congressional redistricting map earlier this year, members intended to remove some of Florida’s longest-standing Democrats from the 28-member delegation.

People like Debbie Wasserman Schultz and Kathy Castor.

Wasserman Schultz swiftly (and controversially) shifted to a seat designed to remain blue in South Florida. Castor didn’t have that luxury in the Tampa Bay area, where her Congressional District 14 had historically been solidly Democratic while the rest of the region has predominantly been red (with a six-year interregnum between 2016 and 2022 when Democrat Charlie Crist represented the congressional seat in Pinellas County).

The reconfigured map removed a portion of St. Petersburg and other parts of eastern Pinellas County and included more conservative parts of Hillsborough County, changing it from a district that went for Kamala Harris by more than 7 points in 2024 to one that supported Donald Trump by more than 10 points.

Now, nearly 20 years into her tenure, Castor, 60, faces the biggest challenge of her career as she runs against Republican Mike Beltran, who served in the Florida House for six years and won a contested eight-person primary in August.

Yet even with that strong GOP bent, several national nonpartisan election raters have moved the race from “leans Republican” to “toss-up.”

With a substantially new electorate to introduce herself to (her campaign has said she maintains 35% of her original district), Castor has run television ads proclaiming her ability to work with Republicans and how she has “broken” from her fellow Democrats in supporting legislation such as a full ban on congressional stock trading.

She was one of eight Democrats to vote for a resolution “denouncing all forms of socialism” earlier this year (along with Central Florida Democratic Rep. Darren Soto, also now running in a more GOP-leaning district).

Speaking in Lakeland last month on a bill that featured Vice President JD Vance, Beltran, a trial lawyer, claimed the new district lines had Castor “masquerading as a moderate” in a desperate attempt to maintain her presence in Washington.

Both candidates have attempted to portray the opponent as too extreme and out of the mainstream.

Beltran, 42, is a New York City native and Harvard Law School grad who moved to the Sunshine State in 2010. An attorney, he served in the Florida House representing southeast Hillsborough from 2018 to 2024.

He has boasted about his independence from his party, such as opposing Gov. Ron DeSantis’ budgets on several occasions. “I’ve worked across the aisle in Tallahassee,” he said during a Tampa Tiger Bay forum Oct. 16, adding that he had opposed “all sorts of special interests: Big Pharma. Big Tech. Landlords. Developers. Trial lawyers. Insurance companies. And the list goes on.”

On some issues, though, he’s leaned more to the right than the majority of his fellow Republicans in the Legislature.

A Second Amendment advocate, he challenged GOP leadership during the 2023 session by filing an amendment to allow the open carry of firearms. The GOP House speaker and Senate president said at the time that the permitless-carry bill Beltran tried to amend was just fine how it was crafted, without an open-carry provision. (Florida’s ban on open-carry was ruled unconstitutional by a state appeals court in 2025).

Abortion rights differences

He is strongly against abortion rights. In the immediate aftermath of the reversal of Roe v. Wade by the U.S. Supreme Court in 2022, he promised to support banning all abortions in the state, with certain exceptions.

He sponsored legislation to make performing or attempting to perform an abortion a third-degree felony, subject to 10 years in prison.

That prompted Castor to declare Beltran “the most extreme candidate that has been up for election in the Tampa Bay area when it comes to abortion.”

“Did you not sponsor a bill that would criminalize the behavior of doctors and nurses, their ability to provide reproductive care? Because I was doing some research on your record and I was appalled that you would target doctors, nurses, providers for the care they need,” she said in a debate held on WMNF 88.5 FM in Tampa (which this reporter co-moderated).

Beltran didn’t deny the legislation but went on offense in his response.

“You what I’m appalled at? That you voted against the Born Alive Protection Act,” he said. “That law says that if a baby is born in a botched abortion and the baby is alive on the operating table, that medical providers don’t need to provide care to that baby. That’s infanticide that you voted for. You voted against the bill that would have protected them. You said that you wanted to protect mothers. You said that you wanted to protect children in the first year of their lives — what about those children? “

A factor that could help Beltran is voters’ exhaustion with incumbents.

Serving in Congress for two decades has left Castor vulnerable to charges she was part of a body that failed to deliver for voters.

Immigration

Regarding comprehensive immigration reform efforts, which have gone nowhere for years, Beltran says he supports more “legitimate” immigration measures that include support for H1-B and guest worker visas. He argues Democrats had a chance to change immigration policy when they controlled all levers of the federal government during a period of the Obama administration.

“Where was the immigration reform then? It’s hasn’t been done in 20 years that my opponent was in office,” he said.

The closest a comprehensive immigration reform bill came to passage was in 2013, led at that time by then Republican U.S. Sen. Marco Rubio (now Secretary of State), which passed 68-32 in the Senate. However, then-GOP House Speaker John Boehner refused to bring the bill up for a vote in Congress’ lower chamber.

For her part, Castor says she has voted for millions of dollars to enforce the southern border, but adds, “We also need laws for a pathway … to citizenship for people who play by the rules and pay taxes and learn English.”

Regarding Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in the Trump 2.0 era, Castor says the agency is “out of control” and needs to be “reigned in.” She specifically argues ICE agents must use body cameras like local enforcement does.

Beltran insists Congress needs to give U.S. Customs and Border Protection and ICE “the tools they need to do the job correctly,” and says it was important for the Trump administration to prioritize removing gang members, violent criminals, and national security threats. “And we’ve done that.”

As far as alleged incidents of ICE attacking U.S. citizens and running amok on city streets, he acknowledges that “when you’re dealing with tens of thousands of people, there are going to be a few mistakes.”

Castor has brought home the bacon for her Tampa Bay area district over the decades, including improvements to senior housing, Tampa International Airport, and MacDill Air Force Base. Her public profile probably received the most attention when she served for eight years as chair of the Select Committee on Climate Change from 2018 to 2022 (she’d been an environmental attorney).

Beltran has pointed out that he’ll hardly be a stooge for the Trump administration if he goes to Washington, emphasizing that he has voted against the GOP line.

“I’ve had the courage to vote against special interests when my own party had lost its way,” he has said. “I’ve voted against insurance companies, home builders, trial lawyers.” He’s also boasted that he resisted pressure to endorse Ron DeSantis when he ran for president in the 2023-2024 cycle, one of seven Republicans in the Legislature not to do so.

Property insurance

One of the biggest points of contention between Democrats and Republicans in Florida in both legislative and congressional races is property insurance reform.

Republicans have hailed laws they passed in 2022 and 2023 to address the spiraling crisis for homeowners. Beltran and other members of the GOP point to those laws (such as (SB 2-A) as major tort reform that protects insurance companies from civil lawsuits, which the business community blames for inflating premiums to cover defense costs and raising monetrecoveries.

Those laws restored access to private market coverage, they contend, boasting the state’s Office of Insurance Regulation reported 20 property and casualty insurers entering Florida’s market as of May of this year.

Democrats have called the laws a “bailout” for the insurance companies, claiming that while the legislation extended a $1 billion subsidy to insurance companies, it did little to decrease premiums.

The Castor campaign has said that Beltran took tens of thousands of dollars from insurance companies while many Floridians struggle to find insurance carriers. The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee has been airing a negative ad  accusing him of going soft on the industry.

He says that’s nonsense.

“They say that I’m in the pocket of insurance companies,” he said at the Tiger Bay forum. “Go ask any insurance lobbyist in Tallahassee which Republican was the biggest pain in their neck in Tallahassee. It was me. I voted against insurance companies more than anyone else in my party.”

As for where the public is on all of this, a public opinion survey published last month by the Public Opinion Research Lab at the University of North Florida in conjunction with the Orlando Sentinel and South Florida Sun-Sentinel found that 55% of respondents saw no sign the homeowners insurance market is improving, with 26% saying it’s getting worse.

Beltran says the vitriol against Republicans on the issue is “preposterous” and that the party would not enjoy supermajorities in the Legislature “if we were doing a bad job.”

Stock trading

Another contentious issue is banning members of Congress from individual stock trading, which overwhelming bipartisan majorities in both parties say they support.

Castor was one of 13 Democrats who voted earlier this year in support of the Stop Insider Trading Act, which would ban members of Congress and their spouses and dependent children from purchasing individual stocks.

In the WMNF radio debate, Beltran alleged that in her two decades in Congress, Castor increased her net worth “by as much as 4,000%.”

“She’s an eight-digit multimillionaire,” he said.

Because members of Congress report their personal finances, assets, and liabilities in broad ranges rather than exact figures, it is difficult to determine how wealthy members of Congress are. Castor’s 2025 financial disclosure form showed she had an estimated net worth of between $7 million and $22 million.

In his financial disclosure form, Beltran reports earning $1.7 million from his legal work in 2025. He has loaned his congressional campaign more than $2 million.

Third-party spending has been considerable, illustrating how badly both parties want this seat.

The Trump-aligned No Going Back PAC has spent over $6 million opposing Castor. That includes an ad alleging Castor is now worth up to $31 million.

All told, third-party groups have spent more than $7 million against Castor and more than $5.25 million against Beltran, according to Midterm Mondays, which totals candidate and independent spending for every candidate running in the United States.