Republican State Rep. Keith Truenow, 54, of Tavares, is running for the state senate seat in District 13. The twice-elected state representative is running against two first-time candidates — supermarket businessman Bowen Kou and former property manager Cheryl “CJ” Blancett, who is currently awaiting trial on two counts of felony theft for allegedly stealing $48,000 from the Orlando community that she was managing.

Early voting takes place Aug. 5-18, from 9 a.m. to 7 p.m. daily. Check our list for locations. The deadline to request a mail-in ballot is Aug. 8. Ballots must be received by the Supervisor of Elections office by 7 p.m. on Aug. 20.

The winner of the Aug. 20 GOP primary will face Democrat nominee Stephanie Dukes on Nov. 5. Dukes also ran unsuccessfully in 2022. The district — largely comprised of Lake County with a small part of southwest Orange County near Winter Garden and Ocoee — is so reliably Republican, it’s thought that the primary winner will most likely go to Tallahassee.

VoxPopuli made multiple attempts to interview Truenow, but he did not respond to questions forwarded to his campaign.

The Senate District 13 seat opened up when long-serving Republican State Sen. Dennis Baxley was forced to retire because of term limits. Before he did, he endorsed Truenow to succeed him, saying, “Keith is a true conservative and has been on the front lines of Florida’s fight with the blue state woke liberals” and “Florida is more free because of Keith Truenow.”

Born in St. Cloud, Minn., Truenow moved to Florida in 1979. After graduating high school, he enlisted in the U.S. Air Force, serving four years as a mechanic at MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa.

Married with two sons, Truenow, known as the “Sodfather,” founded Lake Jem Farms, the turf grass company, in 1995 (though he no longer owns the farm, he still handles business development there). He also owns Benchmark Farms, H2O Irrigation Plus Inc. and is part owner of Hurley Peat Inc., according to his financial disclosure form.

He was initially elected to the Florida House in 2020 and re-elected in 2022, representing District 31 and then 26 after redistricting. He chairs the Criminal Justice Subcommittee and serves on two agricultural subcommittees. His website says he “has fought for lower taxes, smaller government and every right enumerated in the Constitution.”

Two employee deaths

Last month, Florida Politics reported two employee deaths on Lake Jem Farms, one in 2017 and the other in 2023, according to the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) reports. Both incident reports included OSHA violation citations.

On June 7, 2023, an employee named Federico Viverodominguez was killed by a tractor when he fell, was caught by the tires and dragged, according to the OSHA report. Lake Jem Farms faced serious penalties for allowing riders on equipment that weren’t needed to operate it and for not having guards in place to prevent “caught-in” hazards. The initial penalty was $26,563, but was negotiated down to $15,938.

In 2017, an employee was killed by blunt force trauma of unknown cause; he had a broken skull and leg when discovered. Lake Jem Farms incurred a $6,467 penalty for not contacting OSHA within eight hours of an employee death from a work-related accident. The company negotiated that penalty down to $3,880. Orange County Sheriff’s Office told VoxPopuli there is no police report for this death.

Truenow told Florida Politics in a statement that the work on Lake Jem Farms is “incredibly dangerous,” that employee safety is “our top priority” and that politics is the only reason the deaths were getting attention now.

Mailers and racism allegations

Since June, the Florida Republican Senatorial Campaign Committee (FRSCC), with Truenow’s approval, has launched a series of advertisements — as well as a website — that have not only attacked his main opponent Bowen Kou’s positions, but his race and ethnicity. Kou who immigrated from China, became a naturalized citizen in 2019.

Mailers suggested that Kou was funded by the Chinese government, that his donors are Chinese nationals and that Kou himself is a Chinese national. Kou’s signs have been defaced with graffiti, alleging he is a Chinese agent. Ralph Smith, state committeeman of the Lake County GOP, said at a July press conference, that the FRSCC mailers showed “the dirty side of Lake County racism that I thought had disappeared.” Truenow himself approached Kou at the Lake County Fair and told him he “didn’t belong in this country” and to “go someplace else,” according to an individual familiar with the incident who spoke with VoxPopuli. A Truenow campaign aide denied the story.

Criminalizing homelessness

Truenow co-sponsored the controversial Florida law that banned public camping and sleeping on public property. The law, which goes into effect on Oct. 1, mandates that if shelters are full, cities and counties are obligated to sweep up the homeless they find in public parks, on sidewalks, benches, overpasses, and remove them to homeless internment camps, that cities must construct with services for mental health and substance abuse, but that will be monitored by law enforcement. Municipalities that allow homeless individuals to continue to camp in public areas, can be sued by residents, businesses and the state attorney general.

Advocates for affordable housing and the homeless say the new law is an unfunded mandate that criminalizes homelessness and poverty and point to the state’s high property insurance premiums and lack of housing units as drivers of the deepening homelessness crisis. Central Florida consistently ranks among the top three worst housing markets in the country, according to the National Low Income Housing Coalition. According to the Coalition, the region lacks 94,000 units of very low income housing and nearly 57,000 units of extremely low income housing. The state also ranks third in the nation for the number of homeless individuals, according to the Annual Assessment Report to Congress. Currently, there are an estimated 31,462 homeless people in the state, according to the Department of Health.

Immigration and crime

In June, Truenow wrote a commentary for the Orlando Sentinel called “Florida stands for law and order,” in which he equated immigration with increased crime and spoke out in favor of new laws that increased penalties for undocumented immigrants and deployed more resources toward combating illegal immigration. He claimed in the column that some undocumented immigrants “are blatantly taking advantage of our broken immigration system, flooding communities with drugs and violence.”

However, letters to the editor in response to Truenow’s column, FBI statistics and other research show that national crime rates in larger cities are down and that undocumented immigrants commit crimes at rates that are  no higher than native-born Americans. In fact, more than 86 percent of people seized for fentanyl trafficking in 2021 were U.S. citizens, according to the U.S. Sentencing Commission.

Loosening gun laws

Meanwhile, as Florida leads the nation in mass shootings, Truenow favors relaxing the safeguards around firearms.

From 2014 to 2023, there have been more than 19,000 shootings in Florida, resulting in more than 9,500 people dead and nearly 16,000 people injured, according to The Trace, citing the Gun Violence Archive database. Among those shootings were the 2016 massacre at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando where 49 people died, and the 2018 mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, where 14 students and three faculty members died.

Nonetheless, Truenow has advocated for fewer restrictions on gun ownership and voted for the permitless concealed carry bill. Just this year, he co-sponsored three bills reducing restrictions. HB 1223, which died in the Senate, would have lowered the minimum age to purchase firearms in Florida from 21 to 18 years old. HB 17, which also died in the Senate, would have removed a three-day mandatory waiting period between the purchase and delivery of a firearm. But HB 485’s companion bill, SB 1286, which requires the return of weapons seized during an arrest within 30 days of a person's release, was passed into law.

Florida’s insurance crisis

Florida homeowners face escalating insurance premiums, reportedly the highest in the nation, which are driving many to leave the state. In a July debate between Truenow and Kou, the moderator asked the candidates what they would do about “fraudulent [insurance] claims” causing premiums to rise. Truenow referred to Senate Bill 76 and House Bill 837 and said that he worked on the bills with the goal of reducing Florida’s excessive litigation.

The state has the highest number of homeowners insurance lawsuits in the nation, accounting for nearly 80 percent from year to year of all litigation against insurers nationwide.

SB 76 reduces the time to file an insurance claim and also limits advertising by companies that encourage their clients to file insurance claims. HB 837 is a reform bill “to decrease frivolous lawsuits. "We have to pay attention to the insurance companies and hold them in check, you cannot swing the pendulum one way without checking on the other side, that’s not how it works,” Truenow said.

Truenow has been also critical of Citizens Property Insurance, saying the state-run insurer has negatively affected the market. He said that he would like to see Floridians return to the private insurance marketplace. Florida Politics reported that Truenow co-sponsored HB 1503, which was signed into law and, among other things, would permit highly-rated out-of-state insurers with approval by the state Office of Insurance Regulation to cover some properties, typically “riskier, more expensive homes the domestic market won’t cover.”

Targeting LGBTQ+ issues

While Florida Republicans have been considered hostile toward LGBTQ+ rights — with the NAACP going as far as issuing a travel advisory last year for people of color and the LGBTQ+  community — Truenow has largely kept a low profile on the issue but has supported party stances.

He voted in favor of HB 1557, named Florida Parental Rights in Education Act but commonly referred to as the “Don’t Say Gay” bill, that sought to limit discussions of gender and sexuality in the classroom from kindergarten to third grade (later pushed to eighth grade). Republicans said their intention for pushing the bill forward was to put parent’s decisions on what their children are taught ahead of educators having freedom in crafting curriculums.  LGBTQ+ advocacy groups, which filed a lawsuit, reached a settlement with the state in March that rolled back the most discriminatory aspects of the law, including allowing discussion about identity and family in classrooms and assignments, although some parts of the law remain in effect.

Last year, Florida Politics reported that Truenow, Baxley and two other Republican lawmakers criticized Mount Dora’s Safe Place Initiative. Its purpose is to provide safety and refuge for the LGBTQ+ community if they feel they are being discriminated against or threatened. Rainbow decals are stickered to the windows of businesses that participate to show that they are LGBTQ+ friendly.

Truenow and his allies wrote a letter to the city of Mount Dora that called the initiative “negligent, irresponsible and divisive at best … and alienating otherwise friendly businesses and residents from one another on the basis of their participation, or lack thereof, in this virtue signaling program.” 

“We simply won’t stand for any policy that leads to divisive and unsafe conditions for the residents of our great country,” the letter read. “This absolutely goes against Constitutional, Biblical, Law and Order principles that this country was founded on.…” 

However, the city went ahead with implementing the initiative.

District initiatives

Conservative news organization Florida’s Voice reported that DeSantis approved more than $4 million that Truenow requested in appropriations this year for his district for infrastructure, workforce training and other projects.

About $1 million will go to the nonprofit Jonathan’s Landing that helps adults with autism find jobs. Another $500,000 will help with tuition for special-needs students at Beacon College. “I think if we create a path for the students to become young adults and prospering adults and have the tools needed to get on with life after school, I think that it’s an important part of how we build infrastructure, how we bring businesses to the community, and how we employ these students in the future,” Truenow told Florida’s Voice.

Other funds went to improving water service, wastewater system, and vehicle-people mobility as well as a community clinic, a sports complex and a senior care monitoring program. “It’s great pulling in some of those tax dollars back to the communities and build those infrastructure needs out so that we can manage in a better way,” Truenow said.