Florida Voters Reject Cory Mills’ Reelection Bid Amid Dating Violence Allegations

This story was originally reported by Mel Leonor Barclay of The 19th. Meet Mel and read more of their reporting on gender, politics and policy.

Republican voters in Florida rejected Rep. Cory Mills’ reelection bid in Tuesday’s primary, Decision Desk HQ projects, shutting out of Congress a lawmaker who is facing allegations that he assaulted a woman and threatened to publicize nude videos of a former girlfriend, among other possible misconduct.

Ryan Elijah, a former local Fox television news anchor, is the GOP nominee in the district, which President Donald Trump won by 12 percentage points in 2024.

Mills campaigned heavily on the president’s endorsement, which Trump renewed in February, months after the allegations against Mills surfaced. 

In the last weeks of the campaign, Mills faced headwinds from within his party as two Republicans in Florida’s congressional delegation endorsed Elijah, and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis said he would not support Mills. Political analysts said in the lead-up to Tuesday’s primary that Mills’ nomination could make Florida’s 7th Congressional District competitive for Democrats. Trump himself left Mills out of a string of endorsements posted to Truth Social in the final days of the campaign.

“He is willing to put himself before his people, and he is willing to put himself before the party,” Republican Rep. Anna Paulina Luna of Florida said of Mills in an interview with The New York Times earlier this month, after endorsing Elijah. “I don’t want to serve with people like this.”

Mills denied wrongdoing. 

Mills will become the fourth congressman this year to lose his seat after being accused of misconduct against women. Republican Rep. Tony Gonzales of Texas resigned in April after facing accusations of sexual coercion involving a staffer; Democratic Rep. Eric Swalwell of California resigned on the same day after facing accusations of sexual assault. Both men were facing expulsion when they resigned. Earlier this month, Republican Rep. Chuck Edwards of North Carolina announced that he was ending his reelection campaign after the House Ethics Committee recommended his censure over inappropriate conduct toward two women staffers.

Heading into November, Republicans will be defending a fifth congressman accused of misconduct against women: Rep. Max Miller, who represents Ohio’s 7th Congressional District, is facing serious allegations of domestic violence against his ex-wife and young daughter. Miller continues to vehemently deny the accusations of abuse, but the scandal has given Democrats an opening in a previously safe Republican district. 

In February, the Metropolitan Police Department in Washington, D.C., investigated Mills after officers were called to a luxury apartment to respond to an assault allegedly committed by Mills against a 27-year-old woman. The Washington Post reported in April, citing body-camera footage and documents related to the incident, that officers on the scene were about to arrest Mills but were ordered not to after the alleged victim changed her account after appearing to talk to Mills. When police sought to arrest him the next day, a local prosecutor declined to sign the warrant. 

No charges resulted from the agency’s investigation, but the incident remains under investigation by the House Ethics Committee. 

The panel is also investigating a protective order issued against Mills by a Florida judge in October. The protective order was requested by Mills’ former girlfriend, Lindsey Langston, who was serving as a Republican state committee member in Florida and the reigning Miss United States at the time. She said Mills threatened to publicize nude images of her. The judge granted the order, stating that Langston “does have a reasonable cause to believe that she is in imminent danger of becoming the victim of another act of dating violence without an injunction being entered.”

Elijah will face Democrat Bale Dalton, a former NASA chief of staff, in November.