David Jolly’s very good (and unexpected) day

David Jolly moves forward.

What a difference a day makes. 

On Wednesday, former Republican Congressman-turned-NPA David Jolly was a whisper in Florida politics. Sure, everyone knew he might, maybe, possibly be mulling a run for Governor. And people outside of his Pinellas County home base knew who he was, less because of his time serving as the Representative for Florida’s 13th Congressional District and more because of his time as a pundit on MSNBC and various other outlets where he provided, largely, anti-Donald Trump commentary. 

By Thursday morning Jolly was a Democrat and had a political committee and a website that read an awful lot like a campaign page.

By Thursday afternoon he had a much clearer path to the Democratic nomination for Governor in 2026 than he could have imagined just a few days ago. At least for now.

While some level of what Will Ferrell’s version of former President George W. Bush might call “strategery” was no doubt in play for the party swap, political committee and website, the other was a gift from the political Gods of partisan frustration: 

Jason Pizzo. 

In the waning days of the 2025 Florida Legislative Session, Pizzo dropped a figurative bomb — he was resigning his leadership role as Senate Democratic Leader and removing himself from the Democratic Party in general, opting instead to be registered with no party affiliation. 

Until that moment, Pizzo was, by and large, considered the clear frontrunner for Democrats’ gubernatorial ambitions, and the one political insiders believed might actually be able to give U.S. Rep. Byron Donalds, the likely GOP pick for Governor who already has support from Trump, a run for his money. 

And so just like that, Jolly has no current formidable opposition. 

To be clear, someone will emerge. Democrats with rising stars across the state might look to Jolly and think, “well, we’ve seen this movie before!” And it’s true — the last Democratic nominee for Governor, Charlie Crist, was, like Jolly, a former Republican. He lost to Gov. Ron DeSantis in 2022 by 19 percentage points. But it’s low-hanging fruit to assume Jolly’s fate would be any different. 

And let us not forget, sometimes the low-hanging fruit is rotten. 

Jolly has spent the past decade criticizing extremist policies, and Trump in particular. He’s been a known ally to Democrats, even if he didn’t make his allegiance to the party official until this week. He was a welcomed voice on MSNBC, the broadcast haven for leftists looking to channel their outrage.

For the past more than six years, he’s been a political independent, but with plenty of left-of-center bonafides.

When Jolly left the Republican Party in 2018, he struck a much different tone than Crist, who claimed it wasn’t he who left the GOP, but the GOP who left him. He even wrote a book about it. Jolly’s reason seems now much more sincere — he and his wife, who also left the GOP, decided to make the switch after they found out they were expecting … a daughter no less. It doesn’t take a political science expert to read between those lines. 

It’s also foolhardy to assume that Crist’s embarrassing loss was about the man rather than the campaign and the timing. Crist ran in 2022, which was an across the board bloodbath in Florida for Democrats. Joe Biden was President and anyone who knows anything about politics understands that the party in power in the White House doesn’t tend to fare very well in the midterms. That’s already a strike. Pair it with the fact that Crist made some, let’s just say, unwise decisions in his campaign, and there’s plenty of evidence to suggest that his political annihilation in that race wasn’t primarily a result of his party swapping. 

None of that analysis will stop a progressive from jumping in the race, or even another moderate. And none of it suggests that Jolly would have an easy path to victory in a Primary that will no doubt be competitive and expensive. 

It is to say that, for now, he’s got nothing but open road ahead of him, and he’d be wise to take as much advantage, and gain as much ground, as possible. 

He’s not officially running, yet. But if he does, Jolly said his hope would be “to unify the Democratic Primary with NPAs,” which now includes Pizzo. 

“I can say that as an NPA for six years, I have spent enough time in that space — and as sympathetic as I am to the cause, NPA candidates, whether Jason or John Morgan or anybody, really just hand the state to Byron Donalds,” Jolly said. 

And in the spirit of unity, he had nothing negative to say about Pizzo either. 

“I respect anyone who follows their conscience in their politics. I bear the bruises from doing that,” Jolly said. “I hope whatever he does, it is a unity position.”