He is one of two Democrats challenging Republican incumbent Greg Steube.
By Johannes Werner
Original Air Date: May 13, 2026
Host: Congressional District 17 covers most of Sarasota County, all of Charlotte County, and parts of Lee County. The area has been represented by Greg Steube in the U.S. House since 2019, and he easily sailed through re-election three times. This time, he is again being challenged by two Democrats—Matt Montavon and Allen Spence. They will first face off in the Democratic primary Aug. 18. Here’s our profile of Allen Spence.
Spence, NextGen Dems
Johannes Werner: Spence is a fan of heavy metal music and began his campaign with a mini pony tail. He came to the station wearing a purple suit – to signal that Florida is a purple state. He’s also a dad, works in finance and lives in the upscale, solar-powered community of Babcock Ranch.
He believes the recent redistricting changes actually make the race easier for him, because his district now includes downtown Fort Myers. He graduated from Fort Myers High – so he now runs in the district he grew up in.
Money and finance is a constant in his thinking. He is a remote employee of a New York clearing company, and his job is about settling stock trades. One personal motivation: It took him a long time to get out from under student debt. He wants people to participate in stock markets to get their share of wealth. He wants the federal government to protect individual investors more and prevent financial abuse.
Asked whether he would engage with these financial issues in Congress, he responded this:
Allen Spence: I’m gonna go wherever the party tells me to go. So I might not get to go where I wanna go. I would like to get there, but I will go wherever the party told me is the best place or where they want me to be.
Allen Spence and family
JW: Spence voted for Trump. And he makes it a point on the campaign trail.
AS: I don’t really wanna talk about why I voted for him that much, but I kinda have to on the campaign trail. The bottom line is that I’m really embarrassed by it. It’s not something I’m proud of. I regret it. I feel like I was tricked, I was conned. I took them at their word when they said that they were the party of law and order. They were the party of fiscal responsibility. And all we have to do is look at what’s going on now. We see the government debt’s at $39 trillion. It’s out of control. The law and order – we’ve seen American citizens murdered. We’ve seen American citizens’ civil rights affected by these immigration raids. That’s why, if you go to my website, I have a section where there are US citizens who had their civil rights violated, and those things really bother me. But the thing that did it for me was January 6th. What we have in America, the peaceful transfer of power, is important. And the president broke that. He broke that compact that we have. And it’s special because it doesn’t happen in every country. And our congressional representative supported those people that attacked the Capitol, that attacked our country.
JW: He voted Democratic in the last elections and participated in the No Kings rallies and Tesla Takedown protests in Fort Myers. What prompted him to protest was DOGE.
He campaigns on nuts and bolts issues, many of them fiscal. First on his list is returning to the pandemic-era monthly child tax credits. He would be joining the Progressive Caucus of the Democratic Party in this initiative.
He also wants to cap credit card interest. In a slightly different take on the Biden initiative that proposed a fixed percentage, he wants the cap to be more flexible, and to incentivize buy-in by lenders.
No. 3 on his list is national risk pooling, blocking property insurance companies from picking and choosing markets within the United States.
AS: I want to get rid of these state subsidiaries. I don’t want property insurance companies to price insurance statewide. I want it to be national. And I don’t want them to exclude certain geographic areas. So if you look at insurance, you get the best insurance pricing by spreading the risk out amongst as many people as possible. It needs to be diverse. And when they start cherry-picking different parts of the country, it’s a problem.
JW: Another one: “End the Trump-Steube tariff taxes”. He has a link on his campaign website that allows people to report on their issues with tariffs.
He says he wants to restore people’s trust in government.
AS: So my most important one, so we have, I don’t know if I can say it, the get-shite-done plan. That’s the name of our plan.
JW: In a step towards moving away from the Electoral College and unequal representation, he wants to join a plan to add national senators and increase the size of the House. Also, instead of making it harder, the government should make it easier to vote, he says.
How will he be heard? In the last two election cycles, incumbent Greg Steube essentially ignored his challengers. Spence is going on the attack.
AS: The representative Greg Steube took an anti-tax pledge, and I believe these tariffs are taxes. That’s what the Supreme Court said. So he’s breaking his pledge supporting these tariff-taxes that we end up paying for. He will always compromise his personal values when the president has asked him to. So he took an anti-tax pledge. He’s done it on several other issues as well.
Steube’s Venice office. | Photo: Spence
JW: Spence created a viral moment on social media when he challenged Steube to host a town hall and went to Steube’s Venice office.
AS: So I don’t know if you saw, but I went to his office in Venice, and we called him ahead of time. We had a citizen petition for him to have a town hall, and we list all the reasons why. And we ended up getting there, and the room for his suite says “storage”. And, uh, we got in there, and there are chairs stacked to the ceiling. Nobody was there. There was constituent mail just laying discarded on this desk, and there’s a map of the district and his name on the wall. I took a picture of that. That went viral on social media. So we filed a House ethics complaint against him, because he represents this office in his emails, on his website as a constituent office. But the reality is, it’s not. They told me that he hasn’t been there since July of 2024. His people haven’t been there.
Reporting for WSLR News, Johannes Werner.
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