After Lawton Chiles died suddenly in the Florida’s governor mansion shortly before Christmas 1998, his funeral ceremony included a 300km procession that mirrored the famous 1,600km walk he had embarked from Century to Key West as a young senator in 1970. The idea was to connect with voters, and it worked.
“Walkin’ Lawton” was not just a two-term governor of Florida, he remains the last Democratic governor elected to office in the Sunshine State. Buddy Mackay served out the last 24 days of Chiles’s term before Jeb Bush was sworn in. On Tuesday night, though, David Jolly, the winner of Florida’s Democratic primary for the governor’s race, was adamant his campaign would return a Democrat to the mansion in Tallahassee.
“Voters know right now that our politics are broken,” Jolly said in an interview after the election count saw him surge ahead of opponents in the Democrat field, “and screaming for change.
“I do think there is a new coalition emerging in American politics. We are more divided than ever before. Our politicians tell us they hate each other and it’s wrong. And I think what’s emerging in the midst of an economic crisis where we are watching outright corruption, are exhausted by culture wars, is more similar to 1974 post-Watergate moment.”
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If Jolly is to cause a sensation in November, he will have to topple the momentum of Byron Donalds, the chosen candidate of Florida’s most famous resident, president Donald Trump. Donalds, as widely anticipated, swept to victory in the Republican primary race, hoovering up 50 per cent of the vote. The 47-year-old from Naples, Florida, has been a Trump loyalist since progressing from the state legislative body to Congress in 2020, and even before Tuesday night’s vote he had begun to cast Jolly, his putative opponent, as “a Trojan horse for the Democrat socialists of United States”.
“This is a guy who says it’s still okay to transgender our kids and to steal their puberty,” he told supporters at a recent rally, offering an early preview of his likely attack lines for Jolly. According to Florida Politics website, Donalds already has $58 million (€50 million) banked in advance of his campaign to succeed Ron de Santis, the exiting two-term governor. But one Republican who won’t be campaigning for Donalds is De Santis himself, who declined to follow up on Trump’s endorsement.
The decision by Donalds to back Trump rather than De Santis during the initial stages of the 2024 Republican presidential primary campaign is thought to be the chief source of De Santis’s ire. Shortly after Trump’s endorsement, De Santis made a point of stating that Donalds had contributed little to his efforts to deepen Florida’s reputation as a bastion of new Republicanism.
“He’s just not been a part of it,” said DeSantis. “He’s been in other states campaigning, doing that, and that’s fine, but okay, well, then deliver results up there. That’s what I want to see. I want to see them delivering results for the people of Florida. We deliver it here all the time for the people of Florida, and that’s what we need to be doing.”
Florida’s hue of GOP-red has turned livid crimson through the eight years in which DeSantis pushed through his heavily conservative agenda. Chastening as his tilt at the Republican presidential primary was, with his campaign basically ruined after Trump branded him “Ron DeSantimonios”, he remains a highly popular figure among Floridian Republicans. When De Santis took office, Democrat voters had a slender numerical advantage in the state. Now, Republicans have 1.5 million more voters and De Santis’s redistricting, or gerrymandering, efforts on the electoral map could, if November’s elections go as Republicans hope, reduce the Democrat congressional delegation from the 13 seats the party held in 2020 to just four next year.
But Trump’s approval rating has plummeted in recent months and Jolly, who was elected to Congress in 2014 as a Florida Republican before quitting the party in 2017, has become a strident critic of the president – and of the ideological trajectory of his state since Trump made Mar-a-Lago his political lair.
“The Free State of Florida is an absolute lie,” Jolly said in a recent interview, an allusion to the state-line road signs erected to reflect De Santis’s vision for the state.
“In pure economic terms, the state of Florida is now out of reach for too many people. But it is also a state that probably more than any other has attacked people’s personal freedoms – attacked their liberty, attacked their dignity, marginalised communities. It is true in terms of attacking people’s voting rights, their franchise, their suffrage, diluting their impact in making voting harder when it shouldn’t be. But it is also true in attacking people’s personal identity- marginalising people based on the colour of their skin, where they were born, who they love or who they worship. The free state of Florida is an absolute lie. It is a view of freedom that is limited to only one walk of life. The culture wars have gone too far.”
If Donalds wins in November, he will become Florida’s first black governor – and just the fourth elected in the history of the United States. But early polls suggest a close-run race. And with the emergence of Democratic Senate candidate Angie Nixon, a progressive and a member of the Democratic Socialists of United States, who registered an upset win in her primary election for the right to compete against sitting Republican senator Ashley Moody, the national talking points are beginning to descend on Trump’s back yard.
