‘We can win’: David Jolly officially announces bid for Florida Governor

David Jolly moves forward.

Former Republican U.S. Rep. David Jolly will run for Governor as a Democrat, he announced Thursday. 

The move has been anticipated since at least late March, when Jolly said he was mulling a run as a Democrat. It became clear that an announcement was imminent in late April when he registered as a Democrat.

But even as a Democrat, Jolly’s philosophy has changed little since his days unaffiliated with a party, a move he made in 2018 amid frustration with President Donald Trump’s MAGA conservatism. 

“We’ve got bold ideas that Republicans simply won’t do anything about,” Jolly told Florida Politics ahead of his announcement. 

Those bold ideas are the same as they were when Jolly was still an independent, saying several times in recent months that he considered himself “a proud member of the Democratic coalition for years.” Indeed, Jolly was a frequent political commentator on the left-leaning MSNBC network, where he was no stranger to criticizing Republican policies. 

Now, under the Democratic umbrella, he’s even more blunt in his critique.

“What I like about being a Democrat is, I get to accept math. Elected Republicans are never honest about math and the math never works out,” he said, referring to recent talks about reducing property taxes. 

Jolly’s platform aims to address aspects that Republican voters value, including property tax relief and reform, property insurance reforms, ongoing access to educational choice, and affordable healthcare. His platform addresses the pocketbook issues that are suffocating Floridians. “There’s only one party to blame” for that affordability crisis, Jolly said.

“Tallahassee Republicans have contributed to the crisis, but our coalition has a plan.” 

And that coalition is at the center of Jolly’s strategy. His path to victory is narrow, but to him, it’s clear. 

The challenge is steep. Democrats account for less than 32% of Florida voters, while Republicans account for more than 38%. In the middle are Jolly’s people, the non-partisan voters who comprise more than 27% of the state electorate, according to the most recent L2 voter data. 

Path to victory

On the surface, the math looks easy — win over the true non-partisans in the middle, as well as those Jolly refers to as “soft Republicans” — but it’s quickly complicated when considering the eventual existence of other candidates. 

State Sen. Jason Pizzo, a former Democrat who announced in the waning hours of the Regular Session last month that he was dumping his party and registering as an unaffiliated voter, has said he’ll run for Governor as an NPA. Pizzo, himself a true moderate, is likely to capture some of those middle-of-the-road voters, setting up a scenario that could spoil Jolly’s path or, conversely, see Jolly spoil his. 

And it’s that latter part that is key to Jolly’s strategy. 

“The environment is a critical piece of this,” Jolly said when asked what his path to victory looks like. 

“A cycle that’s not about change is a hard cycle for a Democrat to win in the state of Florida,” he acknowledged. But since that climate of change does exist, at least in Jolly’s analysis of the state of Florida politics, he plans to establish a coalition of supportive Democrats and political independents that removes Pizzo’s path and clears one for himself. 

Whether that happens is anyone’s guess, and Jolly admitted such a hypothesis can’t be proven until after the field is set next year. But Jolly will trudge forward in the meantime, meeting voters anywhere and everywhere, including in ruby red communities. 

“We need to focus on an economy that works for all,” he said, “and a government that serves its people and respects everyone.”

But he’ll also have to debunk the inevitable labels that will inevitably be slapped on his back — communist and socialist. 

Regardless of merit, Republicans have placed those labels on just about anyone with a D behind their name for several election cycles. Even Charlie Crist, the former U.S. Representative who served as a Republican Governor before unseating then-Republican Jolly as a Democrat, has been labeled by his detractors as both. 

Jolly said he’ll answer to it firmly. 

“Communism and socialism are wrong,” he said. “We’re going to denounce the dictators of the countries where people fled from, like Venezuela and Cuba.”

But more, his campaign will support capitalism.

“We can be the party that says capitalism is the best way to provide for opportunity, but we’re going to insist on fair capitalism,” he said, referring to growing wealth inequality.

It’s often discussed as a national problem, but it’s here in Florida, too, Jolly said. He’s banking on people wanting a new path forward, one that celebrates success and wealth, while also addressing disparities that are fueling the affordability crisis. 

And the devil is in the details. While Jolly plans to tout things Republican voters have historically supported, he’ll do so through an expanded lens. 

Education 

Take K-12 education, for example. Jolly is fully on board with maintaining a robust school choice framework, but his platform applies fairness.

He told Florida Politics he wants to end universal school vouchers, which are available to any student regardless of household income, and return to a need-based system. And he wants to ensure that schools receiving vouchers are held to the same standards as traditional public schools.

Republicans, Jolly said, “have starved public education,” and they’re “moving money into private schools that don’t have to meet the same standards.”

Instead, he said private schools benefiting from taxpayer dollars should have to abide by things such as individual education plans and performance benchmarks. And those public schools should not be able to accept a voucher only to increase tuition above what the voucher covers, which has reportedly been happening under the universal voucher system. 

He also wants to return to a system where Floridians trust teachers to determine age-appropriate curriculum, with guidance from local school districts. 

“I think it is arrogant for Tallahassee politicians to say they know how a third-grade teacher should teach,” Jolly said. 

The icing on the cake, at least for teachers and their most ardent supporters: Jolly wants to work toward meaningful teacher pay raises. 

“Three percent is not enough,” he lamented, adding that insignificant raises are creating an “underclass” among educators.  

“I’ve been out of politics long enough to tell the truth,” he said, adding that his goal of getting to 30% teacher raises is a tall order, but one he is committed to working toward no less.

Property tax and insurance reform

Jolly’s plans for property tax and insurance reform are timely, and perhaps among the few top-tier issues unique to Florida. 

Even as Jolly announced his candidacy for Governor, Republicans in Tallahassee are considering ways to cut property taxes, and movement in this year’s Legislative Session to lower property insurance rates has been slow. 

On property taxes, Gov. Ron DeSantis wants to work toward eliminating them. Others in the GOP are looking at more modest cuts. But Jolly blasts all of the ideas being batted around as shortsighted, arguing they have “no replacement for revenue.” 

GOP lawmakers have discussed repurposing tourist development taxes — funds that are collected on hotel and motel stays and mainly paid by tourists and other visitors — to be used to offset property tax revenue losses. However, such a plan has received strong pushback, particularly from the state’s tourism marketing industry, which claims that this move would gut the state’s tourism-driven economy.

“We need property tax relief,” Jolly said, adding that it needs to be relief and reform, not just cuts. 

He wants to explore ways to provide property tax relief while also addressing the challenges faced by first-time homebuyers in becoming homeowners.

“Twenty years ago, the crisis was that long-time homeowners could afford to stay in their homes, and it led to the Save Our Homes cap,” he said, referring to a program that limits annual property tax increases on homesteaded properties. 

However, the challenge now is that people can’t afford to buy a home, and the crisis is causing rents to skyrocket. No one wins. 

Part of the issue stems from the high cost of insuring a home in hurricane-prone Florida. He criticized Republican leadership for inviting “under-capitalized” insurers into the state. The idea has been to increase insurance availability within the marketplace to increase competition and drive down prices, but if those insurers can’t cover the high cost of disaster when it strikes, what’s the point?

“If you like your affordability crisis, you get to keep it under Republican leadership,” Jolly quipped. But he said there’s another way. He hopes voters will recognize the ongoing crisis and welcome a new brand of leadership. 

But how would he get any of that done?

It’s one thing to have a platform, it’s another to be able to deliver on it. That’s another tall order for Jolly. Should he be elected, he would almost certainly serve alongside a Republican majority in the Legislature. And unless there’s a big change at the ballot box next year, he’d be faced with a Republican super-majority, as exists today. 

That’s an environment that would make it difficult to accomplish some of Jolly’s priorities. Legislative action would be needed to enact school choice, property tax and insurance reforms. It would also be required by another of Jolly’s priorities, expanding Medicaid, which Republicans in Tallahassee have rejected since the passage of the Affordable Care Act early in the Obama Era.

“If Florida voters elect a Democratic Governor in 2026, they will do so because the demand for change is there,” Jolly said, arguing that at that point, Republicans would likely need to have a conversation with their voters, or risk losing their seats. 

He asserted that a statewide Democratic victory in Florida would make national headlines as a major GOP upset and “the story will be about voters demanding change,” a demand Republicans might feel compelled to heed. 

“We can win this,” he said. “We can win this.”