Politics
How Charlie Crist won St. Petersburg, by the numbers
Ken Welch carried 18 of St. Petersburg’s 84 precincts on Tuesday. Charlie Crist carried the other 66, and the election.
The unofficial count from the Pinellas County Supervisor of Elections puts Crist at 64,858 votes to Welch’s 39,758, 62% to 38%, a margin of 25,100. The city’s precincts cast 111,021 ballots, a 66% turnout of 169,272 registered voters. Provisional and overseas ballots are still out, so these numbers will move a little before they are certified.
Welch took 21% in the six-way August Primary. He took 38% on Tuesday, when nearly twice as many people voted.
Our team spent Wednesday and Thursday with the precinct file. Five things stand out.
Charlie Crist won every way a vote could be cast.
Crist took 64% of the 45,973 mail ballots, 61% of the 35,248 votes cast on Election Day, and 58% of the 23,395 early votes. Welch’s best method was early voting, and he lost it by 17 points.
Mail was 44% of all votes cast in the race, 46% of Crist’s vote, and 41% of Welch’s. Election Day was a third of the vote and broke the way the whole city did, 61 to 39.
Mail delivered more than half of Charlie Crist’s margin.
Of Crist’s 25,100-vote margin, 13,257 came in by mail. Election Day added 7,982. Early voting added 3,861.
Under the 2021 election law Ron DeSantis signed, a mail ballot request expires at the end of every General Election year, so a voter who voted by mail in 2024 and did nothing after that had no request on file in 2026. Every request in the state expired on Dec. 31, 2024. In Pinellas, one of the heaviest mail-voting counties in Florida for a generation, that meant starting over for the second time in two years. The first reset, after 2022, left the county with 99,900 fewer mail ballots to send ahead of the 2024 Primary than it had sent two years earlier.
Crist, St. Pete Shines, the political committee that backed him, and Michelle Todd Schorsch, who chaired the committee and ran his campaign, decided to rebuild that file themselves. St. Pete Shines spent at least $200,000 on direct mail and other voter outreach asking St. Petersburg residents to request a mail ballot.
That was the gamble. In the August Primary, a voter who requested a ballot because St. Pete Shines asked could vote for any of the six names on it, Welch included.
It paid off. Pinellas sent out more mail ballots for the Aug. 18 Primary than any county in Florida, more than 100,000. Crist led the Primary 35% to 21%. In the General Election, the 45,973 St. Petersburg voters who used a mail ballot broke 64% to 36% for him, 2.4 points better than he ran with the city as a whole.
Charlie Crist ran strongest where Byron Donalds did.
In the seven precincts Byron Donalds carried, Crist took 79%, 7,466 votes to 2,012. In the 24 precincts where David Jolly took 50% to 60%, Crist took 67%. Where Jolly took 60% to 70%, Crist took 65%. Where Jolly took 70% to 80%, Crist took 56%. In the 18 precincts where Jolly took 80% or more, Welch won, 9,744 to 8,463, 54% to 46%. For every 10 points of Jolly’s share, Crist gave up about 6.6 points of his.
Crist’s widest wins were precincts 144, 143, and 138 on the northeast bayfront, by 67 points or more. Donalds carried all three. His widest losses were 113, 115, and 226 in the south-central cluster, by 19 to 23 points.
The Tampa Bay Times’ Colleen Wright and Langston Taylor matched the precincts to their neighborhoods. By their count, Crist took 85% in Shore Acres, the low-lying neighborhood the Times says turned on Welch after the 2024 hurricanes, and 73% in Yacht Club Estates.
The August map held, with seven exceptions.
Crist finished first or second in every precinct in the Primary, and the Times found seven precincts that changed hands between August and Tuesday. He took all three that the eliminated candidates had won: Historic Kenwood and Central Oak Park, which went for Brandi Gabbard in August, gave Crist about 54%, and Yacht Club Estates, which went for Jim Large, gave him 73%.
Crist also flipped three precincts Welch won in August: Harbordale, Lakewood Terrace, and part of Greater Pinellas Point, three neighboring precincts in south St. Petersburg. The Times puts the Black share of registered voters in those three at about 50%.
Welch flipped one precinct that Crist led in August, the shoreline neighborhoods between the Gandy and Howard Frankland bridges. He won it by four votes.
Everything else stayed where it was. Welch’s 18 precincts cast 17% of the city vote and went 81% for Jolly. They gave Welch a 1,549-vote edge. The other 66 gave Crist 26,649.
Charlie Crist ran three points under the Democratic ticket, on a different map.
On the same 84 precincts, Jolly took 65.1% of the Governor vote, the Democratic Cabinet nominees took 64.4% to 64.7%, and Angie Nixon took 63.5% in the U.S. Senate race. Crist took 62.0%.
The two maps ran in opposite directions, a correlation of -0.83. Crist’s share beat Jolly’s in 39 of the 84 precincts. Precinct 113, where Jolly took 88%, gave Crist 39%. Precinct 144, where Donalds won 54 to 45, gave him 85%.
The Mayor’s race was left blank on 6,405 city ballots, 5.8% of the 111,021 cast. The Governor’s race was left blank on 770, 0.7%.
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Ed. note: Michelle Todd Schorsch is the Chair of St. Pete Shines, a political committee that backed Crist for St. Petersburg Mayor. Todd Schorsch is married to Schorsch, the publisher of Florida Politics.
Ed. note: This story was drafted with assistance from AI. Editorial judgment, sourcing, and final review were performed by Peter Schorsch and the Florida Politics editorial team.
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