The nation’s most famous gyrocopter pilot has abandoned his primary challenge against Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz as he prepares to serve 120 days in prison for his shocking 2015 flight to the U.S. Capitol in support of campaign finance reform.

But former letter carrier Douglas Hughes, who entered restricted airspace without permission and landed on the Capitol’s West Lawn, says he will cheer from his cell if fellow progressive Tim Canova defeats the chairwoman of the Democratic National Committee in Florida's August primary.

“Let’s just say I could get in trouble in prison for the party I’ll throw when Debbie Wasserman Schultz goes down,” Hughes says.

It’s unclear right now what that cell-block party might look like for Hughes, who was sentenced last week and doesn't yet know where he will spend his four-month term.

He hopes to be incarcerated at a relatively safe federal facility in Pensacola and will find out when he gets a reporting date in a few weeks – about the time his candidate paperwork would have been due.

He never lived in the South Florida district, but last year Hughes said he would take on Wasserman Schultz, who he criticizes as being the "poster child of establishment politics on the Democratic side."

After speaking with Canova, a law professor who announced his intention to run at about the same time, Hughes says he became convinced the two share common values and that he would support him.

Hughes pleaded guilty in November to a felony charge of flying without a license, and some of Wasserman Schultz's most dogged foes, such as lawyer and party donor John Morgan, found his announced campaign amusing but unappetizing.

Hughes says practical considerations carried the day. "The timing isn’t good, I would have to do the entire run from jail," he says, adding he may launch a more serious bid in 2018, perhaps as part of a grand national effort.

A spokesman for Wasserman Schultz did not respond to a request for comment.

Though popular enough to lead the central party organization, Wasserman Schultz is detested by many progressives for opposing legal access to medical marijuana and mass surveillance reform, and for supporting interventions in Syria's civil war. She also is accused by supporters of Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont of blatant favoritism toward Hillary Clinton in the Democratic presidential primary.

When he has free time in the pokey, Hughes hopes to spend some time on apolitical projects, such as helping fine-tune the English translation of a book his wife wrote in Russian. But he sees political advocacy as his future.

Hughes says the electoral success of Republican front-runner Donald Trump shows how popular campaign finance reform is among the public.

"They’re going, ‘Hey, he’s not offering to spread his legs for everyone else,’ and that’s part of his appeal," he says of Trump.

Still, Hughes says he would support Democratic front-runner Clinton over Trump, who he says accurately describes political prostitution without offering a permanent remedy.

"He’s just honest enough to say he hired whores whenever it was convenient, and he’s got so much money he won’t be a whore," he says. "But I've never heard him say he’s not going to do it in the future or that it’s wrong."