Florida Republicans made their choice Tuesday night: Rep. Byron Donalds will be the GOP nominee for governor. He won with roughly 49 percent of the vote in a crowded eleven-candidate field, with Lt. Gov. Jay Collins finishing a distant second at 25 percent. Trump endorsed Donalds five days before Donalds even officially announced his candidacy back in February 2025. The endorsement held.
On the Democratic side, former Republican congressman David Jolly won his party’s nomination — setting up a Donalds-Jolly general election in November that could not be a starker contrast on almost every dimension.
Jolly represented Florida’s 13th Congressional District as a Republican from 2014 to 2017 before leaving the GOP and eventually joining the Democratic Party in vocal opposition to Trump. He’s running as the Democrat in a state that hasn’t elected a Democratic governor since Lawton Chiles narrowly beat Jeb Bush back in 1994. Florida hasn’t elected a Democrat to any statewide office since 2018. It hasn’t given its presidential electoral votes to a Democrat since Barack Obama in 2012.
The trend line is moving the wrong direction for Jolly, not the right one.
Byron Donalds is a different kind of candidate than Florida Republicans have fielded for governor in recent cycles. He’s Black, working-class in background, MAGA-aligned in politics, and a communicator whose national profile — built through years of sharp floor speeches and television appearances — translates directly into the kind of earned media that matters in a statewide race. DeSantis was a fighter. Donalds is a fighter who can also deliver the argument with the kind of precision and accessibility that turns persuadable voters into Republican voters.
The general election picture is straightforward. Florida is a red state. The governor’s mansion hasn’t been held by a Democrat in over 30 years. The Republican registration advantage has been growing, not shrinking — a trend that accelerated dramatically during the Biden years and hasn’t reversed. And Donalds has Trump’s endorsement, the national name recognition that comes with it, and the institutional resources of a state Republican Party that has dominated Florida politics for three decades.
Jolly’s theory of the case is presumably some combination of Trump fatigue, anti-MAGA suburban swing, and the hope that his bipartisan biography softens the “radical Democrat” framing that will come his way the moment the general election campaign begins in earnest.
That’s a tough theory to execute in a state where the GOP has been running the table for years, the registration advantage is enormous, and the generic environment is moving toward Republicans nationally.
Byron Donalds is heading into November as the Republican nominee in a state that is as favorable to his party as any major swing state in the country. Florida just got more interesting. The safe money knows where it’s going.
