Republicans in one of the country's reddest states are showing little confidence in their ticket heading into the midterm elections. According to GOP insider Rick Wilson, longstanding worries culminated in a "secret meeting" earlier this year that ended with what he described as a "red alert."

Rep. Byron Donalds is the Republican nominee for governor of Florida, a race to succeed the term-limited Gov. Ron DeSantis and a seat no Democrat has won since Lawton Chiles' 1994 victory. Although polls have consistently shown Donalds with the edge, serious concerns persist about his ability to win the general election. In several counties across the state, he failed to secure 50 percent of the primary vote, and some late-breaking polls have placed him neck-and-neck with his Democratic opponent, David Jolly, a former Republican congressman who is now running as a Democrat.

Speaking to Axios, anonymous GOP officials in Florida suggested the gubernatorial contest will amount to a massive test of prejudice within the party's own base, given that Donalds is Black. "We're about to run the biggest experiment to see how racist some of our voters are," the longtime consultant told the outlet, noting that some of the counties where Donalds has struggled are "more culturally Confederate" than the rest of the state.

On the latest episode of the "Fast Politics" podcast, host Molly Jong-Fast interviewed Wilson, himself a veteran of Florida Republican politics and a co-founder of the anti-Trump Lincoln Project. He called the Axios remark "the most amazing fricking quote" and shared what he had heard about the state party's alarm over Donalds' candidacy.

"I was told the other day about a secret meeting that DeSantis and his team held in the late spring, and I'm trying to still pin down the date, I'm told it's like late May, while the primary is still going on, where they studied this, they went out and checked out, they went out and tried to run some numbers on this, and it came back like red alert," Wilson said. "And Byron Donalds is a black guy running in North Florida. And these people, on a good day, they're gonna be torn between thinking, 'Well, I gotta vote against the communists, and I gotta vote for that black guy.' And they're not happy."

Early voting figures have deepened Republican anxiety, with Democrats turning out in significantly greater numbers than the GOP base in the lead-up to Election Day — a trend DeSantis himself has publicly fretted about. In a state where registered Republicans outnumber Democrats, that early-voting deficit places unusual weight on the party's Election Day performance. Some estimates currently find that Republican voters will have to outnumber Democrats at the polls on Election Day in order to make up the difference. Wilson said the actual turnout the GOP needs may be somewhat lower than that estimate, but argued that Donalds would be in serious trouble even if the required ratio were around 1.8-to-one. How Donalds performs in the North Florida counties where his primary support fell short of a majority, and whether Election Day turnout closes the early gap, will be the key figures to watch on election night.