Alarmed by what they’ve seen and felt under the past 15 weeks of President Donald Trump and six years of Gov. Ron DeSantis, a swath of Democratic activists, elected officials and financial donors see a candidate who could, they hope, produce an upset victory in the 2026 Florida governor’s race.
Their candidate is David Jolly — who’s been a registered Democrat for less than two weeks, but was in many ways ideologically and temperamentally aligned with his new party even when he was a Republican congressman a decade ago.
If his name sounds familiar, at least to Democrats, it’s because one of his post-congressional endeavors is serving as a commentator on MSNBC, the favorite cable news channel for people on the left.
In the coming weeks, he’s all-but-certain to become an official, major candidate for next year’s Democratic gubernatorial nomination.
“This is a very serious endeavor,” he said in an interview Wednesday, when he had a packed day of political activities in Broward, the most Democratic county in the state. “I anticipate getting into the governor’s race.”
Jolly is, effectively, already running.
Recently he formed Florida 2026, a committee allowing him to raise and spend political money.
He is midway through a series of 20 town hall meetings around the state, some of which attract hundreds of people. On Wednesday, some 450 people attended a town hall in Plantation, where they peppered him with questions about his background, views on a range of major issues, and plans for ending Florida Republicans’ decadeslong winning streak.
Before the town hall at Plantation United Methodist Church, he met with elected officials, political leaders and potential donors at a downtown Fort Lauderdale restaurant, sat for a media interview, and held another meeting with Democratic activists.
Why run?
Jolly said a constellation of factors have led him both to the point that he’s preparing to run — and created an environment in which a Democrat can win the Florida governor’s office for the first time in more than 30 years.
“We are in the middle of one of the greatest political change environments in decades,” Jolly said. The tumult of Trump’s second term, and the public reaction to it, “has created a moment in American history where people are likely looking for change.”
He said he feels compelled to act. His family has been in the state for generations, but it’s become harder to live in the state. “We have faced some real hard decisions in the past several years about is Florida the right place to raise our kids?”
Path to victory
And he’s convinced he could win the governor’s office next year, and he’s trying to convince others.
“Very importantly, we would not be in this race if I didn’t think there was a pathway,” Jolly said. “We are sober about this. We are not naive. This is not a vanity project. This is truly about meeting a moment where I think a Democratic-led coalition can accomplish change in Florida.”
Jolly said several factors must align.
He said he would have to run a credible campaign that, a year from now, is showing he could defeat the likely Republican nominee, Republican Byron Donalds, who is already running, or Casey DeSantis, who hasn’t said if she’s going to run. Term limits prohibit her husband, Ron DeSantis, from running again.
If polling shows he’s within single digits 12 months from now, Jolly said the campaign would attract significant national fundraising support that would be essential to mounting a successful campaign that could cost $100 million.
Much rests on voters’ feelings about Trump next year, he said.
Another element to an effective campaign is focusing on issues that matter to Floridians, such as insurance rates and schools.
The components of a winning coalition, Jolly said, are Democrats plus no party affiliation/independent voters and a slice of “non-MAGA” or “common sense Republicans” who want government to work on real issues, stop fighting culture wars, and “return to normal.”
He may have already had an impact.
Jolly switched his voter registration from no party affiliation/independent to Democratic on April 23. Hours after Politico reported that news the next morning, state Senate Democratic Leader Jason Pizzo pronounced the Democratic Party “dead” and announced he was quitting his leadership post and the party — after spending much of the last year touting himself as a possible Democratic candidate for governor.
David Jolly, a former Republican member of Congress from Pinellas County, now a Democrat and current MSNBC commentator, attends a town hall meeting at United Methodist Church in Plantation on Wednesday, April 30, 2025. (Jim Rassol/Contributor)
Hard road
“Perhaps,” Jolly would win, said Aubrey Jewett, a political scientist at the University of Central Florida. “At this point it’s so early and given what’s happened to previous Democrats, I’ll say that he’s got a long way to go. He certainly would be considered a long shot.”
Democratic assertions that the party can win a governor’s race — or or any other statewide elections — are familiar, and usually wrong.
Immediately after President Barack Obama won Florida in 2012 on his way to a second term and then-U.S. Sen. Bill Nelson won reelection, Democrats had 558,272 more registered voters than the Republicans in the state. Today, Republicans are ahead by 1.2 million registered voters.
Democrats have lost the last seven Florida gubernatorial elections. And since 2022, Republicans have won 32 statewide elections and Democrats have won six.
Independent analysts don’t see that changing soon.
On Thursday, Sabato’s Crystal Ball, from the Center for Politics at the University of Virginia, issued its first assessment of 2026 governor’s races, listing Florida as “safe” Republican red. The Cook Political Report also has the Florida governor’s race as “solid” Republican.
Matthew Isbell, a Florida-based Democratic data consultant who runs the MCI Maps firm, said it’s early to assess his prospects, because it’s unclear who else might seek the nomination.
Jolly will have to spend time explaining some of the votes he cast as a Republican in Congress from early 2014 until 2017, Isbell said.
“He’s going to have to work to earn trust. Starting now is smart because it gives him time to try and sell his vision. Maybe mea culpa on some stuff. Time will tell,” he said via text message. “It’s not impossible for Jolly to win the primary but I do not think he’s the front-runner if a semi-serious Democrat gets in.”
If a well-funded independent candidate emerges, that could siphon away so many votes of people who want a change after decades of Republican control that a Democratic victory would be even more elusive than normal. “I respect people who follow that political compass and independence. An NPA in 2026 in the governor’s race hands Tallahassee to Byron Donalds or Casey DeSantis. That’s it. There’s no other outcome,” Jolly said.
People attend a town hall held by David Jolly, a former Republican member of Congress who is close to announcing his candidacy as a Democrat for Florida governor, at United Methodist Church in Plantation on Wednesday, April 30, 2025. (Jim Rassol/Contributor)
Candidate’s evolution
Trump’s ascension began Jolly’s departure from the Republican Party.
Jolly said he wasn’t a doctrinaire conservative, even when he was a Republican, describing himself as a Republican who was more in the mold of the first President George Bush, when that approach “was 20 years past its expiration date.”
Bipartisan Index prepared by the Lugar Center at the McCourt School of Public Policy at Georgetown University rated him among the most bipartisan members of Congress.
In December 2015, while he was still in Congress, Jolly called on Trump to drop out of the presidential race. He lost his bid for reelection in 2016. In 2018 he left the Republican Party.
“Arguably I was never a good enough Republican when I was there,” he said. “I supported marriage equality, climate science, gun control, campaign finance reform,” he said.
He said he has changed his views on some issues, including two major ones, abortion and guns.
Citing his background, growing up in an evangelical household as the son of a preacher, “I wrongly conflated being pro-life with being anti-Roe,” he said. Now, he said, he believes abortion rights should be protected by law — and said he would introduce legislation to do that if he becomes governor. “I changed,” he said.
Jolly also has changed his views on gun control.
“I came up embracing a broad Second Amendment interpretation,” he said. “I’m now for the licensing, registration, and insurance of firearms. You can follow that journey through my time in Congress after the Pulse nightclub (massacre in 2016). I was the only Republican joining the Democrats on the (House) floor, saying we’ve got to do something.”
He favors much more stringent background checks, covering all forms of changing gun ownership including gifting within families, and banning assault weapons.
“Folks, guns are the problem. Access, largely unlimited, unrestricted access to firearms, is the problem,” Jolly said. “When Republicans suggest that guns aren’t the problem, people are the problem, they’re lying to you.”
While Jolly said he’s changed his views on some issues over the years, he rejects some of the handwringing that’s consumed some in the Democratic Party since the November 2024 presidential election loss.
“Leading Democrats today who come out and say, ‘oh, we’ve got to change who we are, we have to change our values,’ they’re wrong. They’re wrong. The Democratic Party’s values are absolutely right and don’t need to be changed,” he said.
Janie Libanoff holds a sign during a town hall held by David Jolly, a member of Congress from Pinellas County who is preparing to run for the 2026 Democratic gubernatorial nomination, at a town hall at United Methodist Church in Plantation on Thursday, May 1, 2025. (Jim Rassol/Contributor)
Issues
Many of Jolly’s positions resonated with the town hall audience, which often applauded his answers.
One woman questioned Florida Republicans’ support for cracking down on and deporting immigrants who are in the country illegally and then pushing to relax limits on young teens’ work.
“Child labor is wrong,” Jolly said as he pilloried “the Tallahassee politicians” for creating a tight labor market “and when they kick them (undocumented immigrants) out of the state or the country and create this labor shortfall, the answer is to employ children,” he said, adding that “Republicans in Tallahassee who are advancing this should be condemned for what they’re doing.”
He said quality public education, vital to individuals and the economy, is being damaged as money is siphoned off to vouchers to help cover private school tuition, a financial arrangement he said isn’t sustainable. He wants to end “the trend of attacking public schools and public school teachers and trying to control the thought and the speech of our teachers.”
Jolly said the high cost of property insurance is making living unaffordable for many in the state. He’d like to see a state catastrophic insurance fund to take on risk of natural disasters, which his website says would “dramatically reduce” property and car insurance rates. And he said, climate change is real and requires government action.
South Florida
Jolly, 52, was born in Pinellas County, where he lives with his wife and two daughters. (He had some time in South Florida when his father was pastor of a Miami-Dade County church.)
Someone like Jolly, who served as a member of Congress from the St. Petersburg area, would usually have a tough time getting known. Florida has 10 media markets, and it’s hard for one member of Congress (the delegation currently has 28) to get known outside their home area.
A big advantage for Jolly, Jewett said, is his post-Congress time as a commentator on MSNBC, making him familiar to Democratic voters in Florida and potential campaign donors around the country.
Jolly said a campaign would likely be based in South Florida, where he’s already building a network of supporters.
Mitchell Berger, a Fort Lauderdale lawyer who has decades of political experience as a major national fundraiser for Democratic presidential, gubernatorial and U.S. Senate candidates, said he’s fully committed to the Jolly effort. “David Jolly is somebody who is genuinely concerned about the future of the state and the nation,” Berger said. “He has a servant’s heart, and a servant’s spirit.”
Berger is a longtime close political associate of former Vice President Al Gore. In 2022, he was finance chair for Democrat Nikki Fried’s unsuccessful gubernatorial campaign.
Also advising Jolly is Fernand Amandi, Miami-based Democratic pollster and strategist. The Broward town hall was organized by Lourdes Diaz, president of the Pembroke Pines Democratic Club and past president of the Democratic Hispanic Caucus chapter in Broward.
Broward County Commissioner Steve Geller, a former Democratic leader in the Florida Senate who was Broward campaign chair for Democrat Charlie Crist’s unsuccessful 2022 gubernatorial campaign, introduced Jolly at the town hall. He said Jolly is “somebody that can unite the Democratic Party and appeal to all voters in the state of Florida.”
Reactions
Mitch Ceasar, a former chair of the Broward Democratic Party, said Jolly “seemed very genuine” — an assessment not shared by the Florida Republican Party, which said in a statement that Jolly is “a craven, desperate politician who will say and do anything.”
State Republican Chair Evan Power called him “a sanctimonious and phony ‘independent’ and has now reached the end of his political journey by switching to the Democrats.”
Joyce Beach, a Democrat from Lake Worth Beach, said she found Jolly “excellent.”
“I have admired him on MSNBC for a long time. And he has, (and) we need, charisma. And he’s smart, and he’s got a lot of energy. He wasn’t reading a teleprompter. He was speaking from his mind, and I think his heart,” Beach said. “I think he’s a very viable candidate.”
Susan Steinhauser, of Coconut Creek, who is registered with no party affiliation, was also impressed.
“I’m a proud NPA and I am thrilled to be here, and I will bring every NPA with me,” she announced to Jolly and the audience. “Please run.”
But Ilene Sztorc, a Democrat from Coral Springs, said she wasn’t ready to commit, preferring to see who else emerges as a candidate. “Right now, I feel comfortable,” she said. “I stand right now on the sideline.”
Anthony Man can be reached at [email protected] and can be found @browardpolitics on Bluesky, Threads, Facebook and Mastodon.