For decades, Florida was the archetypal presidential swing state — and as recently as 2016 and 2018, Democrats came close to winning statewide elections there.
Then things took a turn. After Ron DeSantis was elected governor in 2018, the Sunshine State moved solidly right of the country in 2020, and 2022 and 2024 brought double-digit drubbings for Democratic candidates — convincing many that Florida was just purely a red state now.
Could the blue wave building in 2026 change all that?
David Jolly thinks so. A former Republican congressman who quit the party back during Trump’s first term, Jolly officially became a Democrat last year — and is now the party’s likely gubernatorial nominee in the contest to succeed the term-limited DeSantis. (The Republican primary is still contested, but the Trump-endorsed Rep. Byron Donalds has a large lead in polls.)
Like other Democrats across the country, Jolly’s message is laser-focused on affordability. But as a former Republican trying to win a reddened state, his pitch is a bit different from what we’ve seen in blue territory. He’s also coming off years as a frequent MSNBC commentator, and has many thoughts on what ails our politics.
I sat down with Jolly on Monday for a conversation about the race, to ask him about the key issues ailing the state — and whether Democrats actually have a chance at winning Floridians back to their side. The interview has been condensed and edited.
Can a focus on affordability undo Florida’s rightward shift?
Let’s start with the political evolution of Florida. After being a swing state presidentially, it moved to the right of the country in 2020, and then there were these blowout, double-digit Republican wins in the past two cycles. Why did Florida tip so far right?
So, [journalist John] Heilemann always tells me to be a candidate, not an analyst. But I’ve been an analyst for a decade and I won’t shake it.
Voters always tell us what they want. In 2022, Florida Democrats — I became a Democrat because I believe in the values of the party, but — Democrats weren’t where voters were. Voters were embracing the Free State of Florida. They wanted the economy to keep sizzling a little bit. And coming out of Covid, freedom and less government meant one thing.
That feels different today. Today you have marginalized communities who are afraid that maybe their fundamental rights, voting rights, reproductive freedom, civil liberties are under attack, or they just feel marginalized as a community based on who they love, who they worship, the color of their skin, where they were born.
But the economy is also not working for everybody. And so, half the state doesn’t have enough savings to last two weeks. Homeowners are losing their homes because homeowners’ insurance has collapsed. Rents are out of control. People can’t live in the community in which they work. More people are going without healthcare than ever before, and we’ve created an education crisis where Florida’s families don’t know where to educate their kids.
A lot of Democrats realize that affordability is the best message. But when it comes to actually putting ideas on the table that would meaningfully move the needle — that’s a tougher challenge. So what have you got?
I’m a different type of Democrat. I want to encourage economic growth. I hope we steal the economies of other states. I hope South Florida becomes a financial capital of the world. But we can’t become the Hamptons. And half of our state is falling behind.
Housing, healthcare, and education are the three pillars of people’s personal economy. The greatest crisis in housing is among our renters in Florida, not our homeowners, but the crisis has been felt among both. For renters, we need a historic investment in workforce, affordable housing, and transportation.
For homeowners, it’s insurance that has collapsed in a natural disaster state. The only actuarially sound way to cover natural disasters anywhere in the world is to set up a state sovereign wealth fund. In Florida, I’ve proposed a state catastrophic fund, to fully remove hurricane coverage from the private market altogether.
Healthcare — we should expand Medicaid. But we can scale up the direct delivery of primary healthcare in all 67 counties using models that work.
In education, we’ve abandoned public education. Families like mine don’t know where to send their kids to school, and the local church school charges tuition on top of vouchers because we created [school] choice with no rules.
I talk about a 10-year funding renaissance in public education to lead the world. But immediately, what we can do is: Put administrative rules on our choice schools to say you have to provide the same services. You have to teach a kid to read, provide access to academics, the trades, the arts — currently, they don’t have to do any of that. And bring back means-testing or cap choice schools so that, if they charge tuition, or if they take a voucher, they can’t charge tuition on top of that.
On DeSantis, Trump, immigration, and the culture war
Clearly, there is an opportunity with affordability and economic issues. But so many of the headlines coming out of the DeSantis administration have been about the culture war.
Do you think a new opportunity exists there too? Are voters’ second thoughts about the GOP just about pocketbook issues, or is there also a sense that DeSantis overreached, went too hard on the culture war, and lost sight of what regular people want to hear about this stuff?
It sounds like you’ve been in my town halls. We’re exhausted by culture wars. We are preempting local communities from celebrating Black and brown communities, LGBT communities. We’re attacking our teachers for teaching history.
The constant culture wars have taken our eye off the ball, but also disrupted the traditional less-government conservatism. As a former Republican, I get to speak to that politics. In a state like Florida, I make the less-government argument. I say, “Look, whether you’re a less-government Republican that just thinks we should stay out of your bedroom and your doctor’s office, or whether you’re a classic progressive — we’re all exhausted by the culture wars.”
In the midst of an economic crisis, where corruption is careening out of control, culture wars aren’t fixing your life. They’re not helping you. I don’t know who the culture wars have helped. I know a lot of people they’ve hurt, but I don’t know who they’ve helped.
Talk to me about the role of Trump in this race, especially how it relates to the much-heralded Latino shift right in 2024, followed by what we’ve seen play out with immigration enforcement.
I don’t talk about Trump in the race. Trump’s not part of the governor’s race. I don’t mean that as some robotic disciplined candidate to whom the consultants said, “Don’t do this.” Very authentically, I can tell you our approach, and I believe it’s the right one, and it’s also politically beneficial.
I recognize that Trump is the scene-setter every day for the chaos and division that people feel. We wake up with it every day. We’re more divided than ever, and he pisses people off, or he pisses us off against each other.
But a governor’s race is very different. The governor’s race is about the responsible administration of government. Can you stay in your home? Can you get healthcare? Do you know where you’re gonna educate your kids? Do you feel safe in your community? Is it clean air and clean water?
So we don’t have to draw the contrast. It draws the contrast intuitively for voters, right? Trump is the scene-setter of the chaos. We are offering to do the basics in government better than you currently see them.
But on immigration — as governor, you’d have to juggle how to deal with enforcement demands from Washington. And that’s an issue where Trump and DeSantis have really changed the state and made it a much more tenuous place for a lot of immigrants. Even communities like Cuban Americans, many of whom may have felt they had a free pass from the GOP, are getting rocked by this.
I recognize the economic and cultural contributions of our immigrant communities; I think they should be celebrated. And I think if someone is here without so much as a speeding ticket, but they’re just pursuing the American dream to put food on the table for their kids, they deserve a pathway to legal status — not to be rounded up and put in Alligator Alcatraz.
That’s not a change for me. That’s where Marco Rubio was 10 years ago, and George Bush and Ronald Reagan. And so, I approach conversations with some old school Republican language on that.
Democrats, I think, in ’22, though, were on the right side of history. But we were using — I was using — language like “racism,” “xenophobia,” “anti-immigrant,” as we were prosecuting the case against Republicans. And it didn’t work. Even immigrant communities don’t see it that way, in many cases.
’26 is different. ’26 is about broken promises and cruelty. When you take a child from a mom, when you lock up someone in Alligator Alcatraz, or when they say, “I didn’t think you meant my TPS, right? I thought you meant somebody else’s TPS.” [The Trump administration revoked the Temporary Protected Statusthat Joe Biden had used to protect many Cuban and Haitian migrants from deportation.]
Trump has lost, completely lost, all the ground. We’re at pre-’16 numbers when it comes to immigrant communities, particularly first-generation immigrant communities.
We’re gonna make sure if you’re here without having committed a crime, you’re gonna get to stay here. And when it comes to working with the federal government, unless we finally get the reforms from ICE of “show us your badge, show us your face, show us the judicial warrant that ensures due process,” then I’m gonna suspend the 287(g) agreements [about state and local government cooperation with federal immigration enforcement]. I’m also gonna shut down the Alligator Alcatraz. I think it’s a blight in Florida history.
That doesn’t mean we won’t have detention facilities for people who need to be held. But we’re not gonna celebrate it. And we’re not going to lock up people who are here simply because they’ve shown up every day on the job site without so much as a speeding ticket. That’s not somebody we’re going to target for enforcement.
David Jolly’s background and political evolution
Let’s talk about your background. You were a top aide to the chair of the House Appropriations Committee for many years. You’ve been a lobbyist. But you’ve also been a longtime critic of money in politics and the way our campaign finance system works.
I think we have the most corrupt campaign finances in the entire world — outside of just the Third World countries that deal in straight corruption. And I think Florida’s the real swamp, I think our laws are even worse than Washington’s. We have unlimited PCs [political committees] that allow us to launder money from special interests into the pockets of candidates with no accountability.
When I was in Congress, I introduced legislation to prohibit a member of Congress from directly asking for money. The idea was actually to eliminate call time and get people back to work. It landed me on 60 Minutes and everybody hated me.
I have proposed outlawing the unlimited political committees in Florida. My goal would be full public financing of campaigns, but let’s take it one step at a time.
Talk to me about your political evolution from being a longtime Republican to a Never Trumper MSNBC commentator to now the presumptive Democratic nominee for governor.
The evolution is not a sexy one, and it didn’t happen overnight. I was a Bush 41 Republican. I was generally the less government, personal liberty kind of person. The Tea Party emerges and I fought the Tea Party hard — I was working for [then-Rep.] Bill Young at the time, and I had to fight back against his Tea Party guy. Everyone wanted to shut the government down, and we were the chief appropriator who had to keep it open. So I called myself a governing conservative.
To the extent we had a wing in the party, we lost to the Tea Party. We fought the Freedom Caucus, won a few rounds, but ultimately lost. And then for me, the final battle was Trumpism. In December 2015 after [Trump’s proposal of] the “Muslim ban,” I went to the floor and called on him to drop out.
Then I spent five or six years as an independent, and I loved it. Unfettered from major party dogma, thinking about what are the big solutions to the big problems?
But now, I’m a proud Florida Democrat, not a reluctant one. I don’t care about the left-right spectrum, and I don’t care about the dogma. It’s fascinating because progressives have yet to celebrate my platform, but Republicans are saying that makes good business sense. For a few months, I tried to fix that. I tried to figure out, why are the progressives not coming on board?
And then I realized, maybe we don’t need them to celebrate us. My Republican friends are the ones that want to paint me as the progressive, like, “Mamdani solutions from Jolly,” right?
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