Gainesville resident Tom Wells has filed to challenge Kat Cammack for Florida’s Third Congressional District seat.
Wells first ran for the seat in 2016 as an independent in the general election. He garnered 3.7% of the vote behind Republican incumbent Ted Yoho’s 56.6% and Democrat Kenneth McGurn’s 39.8%. Wells launched unsuccessful bids for the office in 2018, 2020 and 2022.
The Ph.D. in theoretical physics said his parents heavily influenced his politics and outlook. His father was a physician in the military and later in rural mid-Georgia.
“He never learned to deny care to anyone for lack of money,” the candidate said of his father on his website. “Working daily to exhaustion, he provided our small town the Medicare-for-All that we as a nation still suffer the lack of.”
Wells added that Bernie Sanders ignited his political activism in 2015.
The candidate’s campaigning at an event on the University of Florida campus in 2022 resulted in his conviction of resisting an officer.
Wells was handcuffed after handing out campaign literature during a Family Extravaganza hosted by UF’s Hispanic Student Association.
According to court documents, University of Florida Police approached the defendant after the event organizer told them Wells was harassing students.
“The event coordinator asked Wells to leave due to him making the students uncomfortable, and she did not want to make the event politically-based,” wrote the arresting officer. “(Another officer) and I approached Wells and informed him that the event coordinator wanted him to leave the premises, and he refused. He stated he did not recognize our authority to escort him out.”
The officer added that after the defendant resisted their efforts to escort him away from the event, the two officers took the 71-year-old to the ground, handcuffed him, and walked him out of the event.
Wells’s trial lasted 20 hours. After the guilty verdict, Judge Meshon T. Rawls ordered Wells to pay $276 in fines and court costs.
In addition, the university banned him from the campus for three years.
