David Jolly’s Purple Campaign for Florida Governor
He left the GOP and now wants to replace Ron DeSantis. Are Sunshine State voters ready for a reality-based candidacy?
LISTENING TO FORMER CONGRESSMAN David Jolly talk about his all but certain run for governor of Florida, you want to believe—in his prospects, in the state and national Democratic party, and in a turning point for America.
Jolly, 52, has been on a decade-long political journey. He was a Republican during his three years in the House of Representatives, then a disaffected Never Trump Republican, then (starting in 2018) an independent aligned with Democrats. Finally, last month, he became a registered Democrat.
And his words are a balm to a party in dire need of it.
“I am coming into the Democratic party right now because I believe in its strength,” Jolly told me Wednesday on the phone. Republicans, he said, have failed to provide an economy for all people, to ensure government is delivering services to those who need them, and to “lift up and embrace the diversity of our communities and culture.”
He called those fundamental Democratic values and the reasons he is excited to officially join the party. Anything else? “We get to accept science, and math, and public health. It’s pretty incredible, right?”
Florida under Gov. Ron DeSantis in many ways has pioneered the worst aspects of Donald Trump’s presidency, from hostility to immigrants and voting, abortion, and LGBTQ rights, to attacks on corporations like Disney; from policing libraries and colleges, to installing a discredited anti-vaxxer as Florida surgeon general.
DeSantis is term-limited and 2026 will be his final year in office, but Florida Democrats are not exactly greeting the opportunity with unity. Even as Jolly was signing on with them, the Democratic leader in the state Senate, Jason Pizzo, said the party was “dead” and became an unaffiliated voter—one who might run for governor next year as an independent.
One Democrat summed it up this way, Politico reported: “A goddamn shitshow.”
Hope amid a maelstrom
But the larger environment could be read as favorable for Jolly, or as favorable as it gets in Florida. There’s an open seat, it looks like he wouldn’t have intraparty competition for the nomination, and DeSantis and his wife, Casey, could be engulfed by scandal. The gist: $10 million that was meant for Medicaid ended up at Casey’s nonprofit, and then at two dark-money groups, and then at a group (run by DeSantis’s then chief-of-staff, now the state’s attorney general) trying to block legal recreational marijuana in the state. Legislators investigated, state prosecutors are investigating now, and a federal investigation is possible.
The general drift, Jolly says, has already percolated down to normal voters who are not political junkies. It should be noted here that Jolly absolutely is a political junkie. He’s a lawyer who worked on Capitol Hill, represented a Tampa Bay-area House district, consulted on dozens of races, and ran in a few himself.
So if it sounds like he knows how to frame an issue, he does. He sees Trump’s overreach, instability and damaging policies as creating a change environment that will be the backdrop for state races next year, allowing candidates to prioritize state concerns and connect them to the national picture when they want.
The top agenda items at Florida2026.com, Jolly’s pre-campaign testing ground, are addressing the unaffordability of property insurance and homes, saving underfunded public schools, and fixing an unsustainable school voucher program.
The rest, like those, strike me as ranging from unobjectionable to wildly popular from a Democratic standpoint—codifying the Roe v. Wade abortion framework, improving access to state universities, strengthening the economy and state ethics laws, accepting climate science, reducing gun violence, restoring veterans services, and creating “a Florida for all” where everyone is “valued, respected, and welcomed.”
These are not new positions for him, Jolly says. He left Congress after dropping out of a 2016 Senate race and then losing his House seat that year in a sharp-edged contest against then-former governor Charlie Crist, a Republican turned Democrat who previewed Jolly’s path.
Looking back, Jolly called himself “almost a man without a party while I was serving.” While in the House during the late Obama years, he supported marriage equality, climate science, gun control, “all those things.” He was always, he says, a George H.W. Bush Republican and celebrated when Bush left the National Rifle Association during the 1990s.
In December 2015, after Trump proposed a temporary ban on Muslim immigrants and visitors to the United States, Jolly called on Trump to withdraw from the 2016 presidential race. He said he was a born-again Christian and “the beautiful thing about this country is I can stand here on the House floor, among my peers and in front of the nation, and declare that faith without fear of any reprisal.” Trump’s proposed ban, Jolly said, was a “heartbreaking” affront to that founding principle.
‘Biblical thinking’ and rising farm costs
Jolly tried and failed to work across the aisle in Congress. Sometimes Republicans told him not to work with Democrats. Sometimes the parties switched places. When Republicans were clamoring for—wait for it—due process in a Democratic bill barring plane travel by people on no-fly lists, and Jolly was trying to add it, Democrats were told not to work with him.1
Now, in his own trial run for an executive job in his new party, Jolly is going where he wants and saying what he wants. He’s held a dozen town halls with a dozen more planned, in all parts of Florida, red and blue.
He’s explaining to evangelical and other faith communities why he thinks Democratic values are more in line with “biblical thinking.” He’s talking to North Florida agriculture communities about why DeSantis and Trump immigration policies are “tightening labor and driving up costs for them.”
And he is talking, a lot, about crime, especially the dishonest GOP conflation of immigration with crime. This serves a double purpose—to remind voters about that $10 million DeSantis family Medicaid scandal, and to drive home that they’ve been “told a lie about immigrant crime,” because research shows immigrants are much less likely than native-born Americans to commit violent and property crimes.
“I say if you’re native born, an immigrant or a Tallahassee politician, if you break the law, we’re coming for you. That means if you steal $10 million from the Medicaid program, we’re going to investigate you,” Jolly tells me. His listeners get it, no names needed.
The immigration-crime decoupling is a pillar of his probable run and, if it succeeds, a model for Democrats all over. “If we can take the crime issue back . . . not only have we reset the policy issues in a more accurate framing for voters, but we also shame Republicans for what they’ve done. These threads of xenophobia and true anti-immigrant sentiment, we expose,” Jolly says.
“Many Republicans might defend those sentiments, but we’ll let that contrast speak for itself,” he adds. “We’ll be the party that fights crime but not communities. And they can be the party that continues to fight communities. And I’m great with that contrast.”
Now Jolly just has to prove that most Floridians are great with it, too. That’s a steep climb, given the state’s recent political history and Republican imperviousness to shaming. But the premise is moral and reality-based, and I’d love to see it tested on voters who maybe, possibly, are ready for something new.
Republicans pushing for due process? The past really is a foreign country.
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