‘Ghost candidates’ in St. Johns Commission races?

In the hotly contested races for St. Johns County Commission, four candidates with connections to one another are largely sitting on the sidelines. Their inactivity raises questions about why they’re running and whether they’re merely shadow candidates attempting to influence the election in favor of other candidates.

And by running as write-ins, two such candidates have locked down their Aug. 20 primary elections to only Republican voters .

None of the four returned calls from Jacksonville Today to discuss their candidacies.

Meet the candidates

Write-in candidates Taylor Ohntrup and Fitch McGraw are running for the District 1 and District 3 St. Johns County Commission seats, respectively. Neither has a campaign website, but, according to public social media profiles and the company’s about page , they share a common tie: a St. Augustine-based marketing agency called McGraw.

Ohntrup is listed as the social media manager at McGraw, and Fitch McGraw’s dad, Ronnie “Chip” McGraw, owns the company.

Two other candidates connected to McGraw will appear on primary voters’ ballots. District 1 candidate Weston Ferguson is McGraw’s chief operating officer. And District 5 candidate John Higbee III, who lives in Jacksonville, according to voting records is the grandfather of James Higbee, McGraw’s senior vice president.

James Higbee and Ferguson previously ran for Florida Senate as no-party-affiliated candidates in 2022 against incumbent Republican Sen. Travis Hutson. Both withdrew before Hutson handily defeated Republican Gerry James.

Before then, according to Higbee’s social media, he served as social media manager for County Commissioner Christian Whitehurst from 2021 to early 2022.

According to the St. Johns Supervisor of Elections Office, Ferguson hasn’t raised any money beyond $6,000 checks she wrote to herself to cover her qualifying fees, and Higbee has raised just $15 more than his own $6,000.

Additionally, neither has listed any campaign expenditures — including for a website — on their campaign finance reports.

Both do have campaign websites, though, and they were registered within 10 minutes of each other on June 17 and were built using the same WordPress theme. Their similar wording echoes the anti-development stance of other candidates in the race. Higbee’s campaign site says he wants to stop all new development, and Ferguson’s says on day one in office, she would “vote for a moratorium on growth.” Unlike those candidates, their photos do not appear on their websites or any other campaign materials.

Ghostly behavior

Longtime Florida government watchdog Ben Wilcox isn’t familiar with these four particular candidates, but he says not campaigning at all is a telltale sign of a “ghost candidate.”

“Ghost candidates that we’ve found have two purposes for being on the ballot,” Wilcox tells Jacksonville Today . “One would be to siphon votes away from another legitimate candidate, and the other purpose is to close the primary, so that only voters of one party will be able to select their eventual representative.”

Wilcox serves as research director at Florida Integrity, a nonprofit government watchdog aiming to root out corruption in Florida.

He says ghost candidates’ mere existence is not illegal (though it would be if someone were paying them to run), but they do take advantage of loopholes in Florida’s election laws to confuse voters and stack the deck in favor of other candidates.

“It’s a very cynical take on democracy,” Wilcox says.

Who stands to gain?

In St. Johns County, incumbents Christian Whitehurst, Roy Alaimo and Henry Dean face a slate of challengers who are being endorsed by the St. Johns County Republican Executive Committee: Ann-Marie Evans, Clay Murphy and Ann Taylor.

Republican Executive Committee Chair Denver Cook says write-ins make it harder for such newcomers to perform well.

“The utilization of write-in candidates in Florida primary elections is a known strategy to close primaries,” Cook tells Jacksonville Today . “This strategy helps to reduce the number of voters participating in a primary election, thereby reducing the cost of re-election and is a practice that benefits well financed incumbents over grassroots candidates.”

Florida’s closed primaries mean voters are restricted: Democrats vote for only Democrats, Republicans for Republicans. In a race where every candidate belongs to the same party, the primary acts like a general election and opens up to all voters. But write-in candidates — like Fitch McGraw and Taylor Ohntrup —close the primary back up because the winner of the primary technically will face them in the general election.

It’s possible that write-in candidates can campaign before the general and behave like the candidates on the ballot. But Wilcox says often they do not.

“They enter the race with the sole purpose of closing that election and disenfranchising the voters of the other party and the no-party-affiliated voters,” Wilcox says.

Who is Chip McGraw?

Whether they work there or have a family member who does, the four quietest Republican candidates in the races for County Commission share one connection: the McGraw web marketing agency, one of many small businesses owned by St. Augustine’s Chip McGraw.

In addition to owning the agency, he co-owns surf school Stoked to Surf (which is co-owned by his son, the write-in candidate Fitch McGraw) and outsourcing company NOW BPO. Chip McGraw is also the head of a charity, LATAM Aid Foundation, and, according to his social media, is the co-owner/developer of a luxury resort in Nicaragua.

Chip McGraw has donated directly to only one St. Johns County Commission candidate: $1,000 (the maximum allowed) to incumbent County Commissioner Roy Alaimo, his son’s opponent.

According to voter records and social media, McGraw’s brother, Batey McGraw, works as a vice president for home builders Dream Finders Homes, the Jacksonville-based developer responsible for large St. Johns County master planned communities like Shearwater and Silverleaf.

As of mid-July, Dream Finders as well as its CEO Patrick Zalupski and his wife, Leah, had donated to all three incumbent candidates, including $2,000 for County Commissioner Roy Alaimo. (It wasn’t immediately clear whether the second $1,000 donation was rescinded for going beyond the limit allowed).

Neither Ronnie McGraw nor Batey McGraw responded to Jacksonville Today ’s requests to comment.

Another connection

The inactive County Commission candidates Higbee and Ferguson also share another connection — to PACs based in Tallahassee and Gainesville that are connected to the St. Johns County Commission incumbents. Both of them employ Tallahassee-based campaign treasurers Kim Bailes and Noreen Fenner, who work for candidates across the state. Fenner also runs a number of PACs, including Citizens Against Wasteful Spending, which received $250,000 from a PAC connected to the incumbents.

Gainesville-based William Stafford Jones, the campaign treasurer for incumbent Whitehurst, also manages hundreds of political action committees, including some behind mailers attacking St. Johns Commission challengers Ann-Marie Evans and Ann Taylor, who espouse slowing the growth of development. Both Evans and Taylor have been targeted with “liberal” and “woke” labels. The same PACs are also sending mailers in support of Michael McDonald, an anti-growth District 3 candidate who’s trailing third in fundraising in his race. McDonald says he has no clue who is behind them and believes they’re meant to confuse voters.

The Tallahassee- and Gainesville-based PACs connected to Higbee and Ferguson are funneling thousands of dollars into the election in support of the incumbents. Individuals can donate only $1,000 to municipal candidates, but 10 PACs run by Jones each donated $1,000 on April 8 to incumbent Commissioner Henry Dean.

Brianna Jordan, a local political consultant who’s working on the Dean, Alaimo and Whitehurst campaigns, tells Jacksonville Today her candidates aren’t working directly with the PACs. Jordan did not respond to a question about whether the three are connected to the McGraw agency.

Editor’s note: This story was updated to add a note about James Higbee previously serving as Christian Whitehurst’s social media manager and to include an image from two of the candidates’ websites.

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