Politics
Harrison Fields: Florida isn’t looking for a do-over
David Jolly wants Floridians to believe the state is broken.
He’s wrong, and I suspect he knows it.
Jolly is not a new voice in Florida politics. He’s a former Republican Congressman who spent years building a national media career as one of the most reliable anti-Donald Trump commentators on MSNBC before switching his registration to Democrat and launching a bid for Governor.
His pitch, stripped of the campaign gloss, amounts to this: Florida has gone off the rails under Republican leadership, and the fix is to hand the keys to a party that hasn’t won a Governor’s race here since the last century.
That’s not a message rooted in where Florida actually is. It’s a message rooted in where Jolly is, which is still relitigating his break with Trump a decade after it happened.
Here’s the problem with running a campaign built on anti-Trump grievance in a state that has voted for Trump three times: It asks voters to see their own choices as mistakes.
Floridians don’t see it that way.
They see a state that has become a magnet for companies relocating from high-tax, high-regulation states, and a place where families who left New York, Illinois, and California came looking for exactly the kind of governance Jolly is running against.
None of this means Florida is problem-free.
Property insurance costs are a real burden. Housing affordability is a real concern in fast-growing counties. Those frustrations are legitimate, and voters are right to want leaders who take them seriously. But there’s a difference between wanting your insurance bill to come down and wanting to reverse three decades of the policies that built modern Florida.
Jolly is betting those are the same thing. They’re not.
For nearly 30 years, going back to Jeb Bush, Florida has been a testing ground for a fairly consistent brand of common sense conservative governance: cut taxes, shrink the size of government, put parents back in charge of their children’s education, and stay serious about public safety and border security even when Washington wasn’t. It has not been a perfect run, and no state’s has been.
But it is a run that turned Florida from a swing state into a state companies beg to move to, and it is a run voters have rewarded at the ballot box again and again.
And it’s worth asking what Jolly’s own party is actually offering. His ticket now shares a ballot with Angie Nixon, the Jacksonville state Representative who just won the Democratic nomination for U.S. Senate as a self-described member of the Democratic Socialists of America. Jolly says he “rejects socialism” and keeps his distance publicly, careful never to be photographed too close to the label.
But he’s also called Nixon a fighter and made clear he’ll be voting the ticket in November like every other loyal Democrat.
That matters in a state built in large part by Cuban, Venezuelan, Nicaraguan and Colombian families who fled socialism and know exactly what it costs. Floridians can see a straddle when they’re looking at one. Jolly wants credit for rejecting socialism in the interview and the votes of a party that just nominated it statewide.
That’s the backdrop against which Byron Donalds is running, and it’s why he’s the far more credible answer to the moment than Jolly is.
Donalds isn’t asking Florida to start over. He’s offering the next chapter of what’s already working.
On affordability, he’s focused on the property insurance crisis and housing costs directly, not as an afterthought but as a top-line commitment.
On the economy, he’s running on lower taxes, less regulation, and turning Florida into the nation’s financial capital, building on the wave of businesses and capital that have already relocated to the state over the past several years.
On education, he’s committed to keeping ideology out of the classroom and keeping parents in the driver’s seat over their children’s schooling.
On immigration, he’s aligned with the enforcement-first approach that has kept Florida communities safer than most, cutting off taxpayer support for those here illegally and working to stop drugs from flowing through the state.
And he’s doing it all with the direct backing of a President who understands, better than most, what actually wins in Florida.
Jolly wants this race to be a referendum on Trump. Donalds is making it a referendum on the last 30 years of results, and daring his opponent to argue Florida would be better off without them.
Floridians have real frustrations, plenty of them tied to national politics that feel out of their control. That’s fair. But wanting a Washington fight to go differently is not the same as wanting your own state to change course. Voters here know the difference, even when a campaign is built on the hope that they don’t.
Florida isn’t going backward. Donalds is betting the ranch that voters know it, and he’s right.
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Harrison Fields is a former senior adviser to Donalds, a former White House spokesperson, a Floridian and a graduate of Florida State University. He is a Partner at the CGCN Group.
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