Politics
Tiffany Moore Russell, the front-runner for Orange County Mayor, charts her own path
Tiffany Moore Russell has broken the glass ceiling repeatedly amid her political rise.
In 2006, she became the youngest person ever elected to the Orange County Commission, at 32. She was also the first Commissioner to have a baby in office. While recovering from a C-section, she cast a tie-breaking vote during a County Commission meeting over the phone long before the days of Zoom.
Now, Moore Russell is the favorite to be elected Orange County Mayor and is poised to become the first Black woman to hold the office.
“Anyone who breaks norms or shatters the glass ceiling does so with a cacophony of voices — either actual or in their heads — saying, ‘This has never been done. Are you sure this is for you?’” said her friend Derek Bruce. “And Tiffany has never been one to acquiesce to those sounds or those voices very easily. She has blazed trails and charted her own course.”
Moore Russell, a Democrat, faces Republican Chris Messina, a technology entrepreneur who has never held public office, in the nonpartisan Nov. 3 runoff to succeed term-limited County Mayor Jerry Demings. The job’s 2027 salary is budgeted at $271,657.
“I’ve been faced with how to make tough decisions during tough fiscal times, and that experience equips me to be the next Mayor of Orange County,” Moore Russell said. “I’m the most qualified compared to my opponent.”
Moore Russell heads into Election Day with the advantage because Democrats and voters with no party affiliation outnumber Republicans in Orange County.
Her supporters describe her as genuine, hardworking and energetic. That grit helped her win as an underdog when she was elected Clerk of Courts in 2014, and again this past August, when she beat better-funded former U.S. Rep. Stephanie Murphy to advance to the runoff with Messina.
“She is an amazing candidate because she does what she needs to do. She stays focused,” said her ally, Orange County Property Appraiser Amy Mercado, who did field work on Moore Russell’s Clerk campaign.
Mercado said Moore Russell’s temperament will make her a good Mayor. She doesn’t get angry and hardly ever raises her voice, but she’s steadfast.
“She doesn’t bow down to anything or anyone. She will stand her ground and her position,” Mercado said. “Her temperament is even-keel. … She will listen to every vantage point and understand your positioning and where you are, why you’re there.”
After that, Moore Russell makes her decision and isn’t afraid to stand behind it.
‘A go-getter’
Derek Bruce, managing shareholder at Gunster’s Orlando office, has known Moore Russell for decades. Bruce and his sister both went to Dr. Phillips High School, which Moore Russell graduated from.
“She was one of those that got tapped and designated as someone with a lot of leadership potential even back then,” Bruce said. “She was absolutely a go-getter in high school. She was motivated.”
Moore Russell played flute and piccolo in the band until she was promoted to drum major as an upperclassman, and she was active in student government. Her goal was to be a lawyer.
Her biological father wasn’t in her life. Her mother worked as a compensation analyst in human resources for the city of Orlando and married Moore Russell’s stepfather.
Moore Russell earned a political science degree from the University of South Florida and a law degree from Florida State University.
While working as a lawyer for a technology company, she ran for the House twice, in 2002 and 2004. Both times she lost in the Democratic Primary to Bruce Antone, who would become a familiar political foe. Antone had been Orlando Mayor Buddy Dyer’s former Chief of Staff from his time in the Senate.
Moore Russell learned from the losses how to get by without a big war chest and how to lean on her support network.
“You learn to be very strategic, which, interestingly, has helped in all of my races because I’ve never been the most funded candidate in any of my races,” Moore Russell said.
In 2006, she ran for County Commission and faced Antone again. He seemed like “the chosen one,” with Dyer’s support and more resources. But Moore Russell knocked on doors, made appearances at churches and attended neighborhood meetings at night.
She quipped that she was GRITS (“girl raised in the South”) and told the Orlando Weekly, “I don’t think he took me serious, to be honest. I don’t know why he didn’t. The word on the street is, I work hard. You’re not going to outwork me. He assumed name recognition was all he needed, and he was wrong.”
She pulled off the upset and made history.
Antone, now a Representative in House District 41, said he supports her for County Mayor.
As a County Commissioner, Moore Russell said she helped improve infrastructure to deal with flooding in the Little Egypt neighborhood and built a cricket field at Silver Star Recreation Center for the Caribbean community.
Some of her most important votes were also her most controversial.
“I wasn’t always the most popular Commissioner,” she said.
Voting in the minority, she opposed a $1.1 billion deal in 2007 to build what is now the Dr. Phillips Center for the Performing Arts and the Kia Center, where the Orlando Magic play, and to upgrade Camping World Stadium, which hosts large concerts and college football bowl games.
Years later, she said, “I thought that the Camping World should have went to I-Drive, and I thought we shouldn’t have tried to force all three at one time just because we were hearing signs that we might go into a recession. … I still stand on that vote.”
The vote showed who she was, Moore Russell said.
“It solidified that I was a leader who thinks for herself, a leader who looks at the facts and will make some tough votes even if it’s unpopular,” Moore Russell said.
In 2008, with the county facing shortfalls in a bad economy, she paid her top aide a $7,000 year-end bonus, the highest given by any Commissioner, the Orlando Sentinel reported. The County Commission is once again discussing cuts ahead of next month’s Amendment 3 statewide ballot initiative to reduce local property tax funding.
Moore Russell said the 2008 bonus reflects her priority of being a good employer and paying public employees fairly. Her aides often work late nights at community meetings and shouldn’t have to struggle financially, she said.
She brought the same philosophy to the Clerk’s Office, where she raised deputy clerks’ pay after the Office lost employees to private law firms. Some of her employees had been receiving government food assistance before the raises, she said. Starting wages rose from $12 an hour to eventually $21 an hour.
“We’re never going to be like the private sector, but can we get as close (as we can) to make sure we value the work that they bring today?” Moore Russell said. “I value the employee’s well-being. … That includes making sure they’re making a good wage.”
Love and death
Moore Russell won the Clerk’s job in 2014 by beating an incumbent appointed by Gov. Rick Scott. Early in her tenure, she became part of a historic moment for LGBTQ+ Floridians.
A federal Judge struck down the state’s same-sex marriage ban as unconstitutional in 2014, but placed a stay, so gay couples could not immediately get married. The Florida Association of Court Clerks and Comptrollers warned Moore Russell and other Clerks not to issue licenses yet. Caught in the middle and unsure what to do, she petitioned the courts to weigh in.
She told Florida Politics she supported gay couples getting the same rights as heterosexual couples, but she also had to follow the law. She was a lawyer, after all.
“How do I do this by still upholding the commitment that I made as an elected official?” Moore Russell said, calling it a defining moment in “how you stay with your principles but also comply with the law.”
An Orange County circuit Judge’s order cleared her to issue the licenses soon after her petition. Couples lined up at the downtown Orlando courthouse before dawn to get their marriage licenses, and she opened early, at 6 a.m., to welcome them.
On Jan. 6, 2015, Dyer held a mass wedding outside Orlando City Hall for more than 40 couples, who sipped champagne and ate rainbow-frosted wedding cake to celebrate.
“You saw love. You saw just so much joy,” said Moore Russell, who watched many gay and lesbian couples who had been together for decades get married. “This is human rights, and people have the right to marry who they want to marry. And to me, that was actually very fulfilling and just warmed my heart.”
Another highly publicized moment in her tenure was much darker.
In 2019, Navy veteran Steven Stryker died in a Tampa hospital because staff members weren’t allowed to resuscitate him. He didn’t want to die, but his court-appointed guardian, Rebecca Fierle, had filed a “do not resuscitate” order against his wishes and without his family’s knowledge, the Orlando Sentinel reported.
After his death, an Orange County Circuit judge canceled Fierle’s “do not resuscitate” orders on about 100 cases. Fierle had held unchecked power for years in Central Florida as a guardian for seniors no longer capable of handling their own affairs, according to an investigation that raised alarms about Florida’s broken guardianship program. Fierle never went to prison. She received probation in 2023 after pleading no contest to neglect of an elderly person.
The controversy raised questions about Moore Russell’s oversight. Orange County Comptroller Phil Diamond’s 2021 audit found that the Clerk of Courts “needs to improve controls over their administration of the guardianship program.”
“The Clerk cannot identify the number of active cases in the system or systematically identify the cases that should be monitored. As a result of the current limitations in the system, numerous open cases were not monitored for years,” the 86-page audit said.
“In addition, one professional guardian still had five active cases when they were suspended and a replacement was not timely appointed. In one case, a replacement was not assigned for 16 months after the guardian was suspended. In another case, we notified the Clerk that the ward had died 33 months prior. The Clerk was unaware the ward had died almost three years earlier.”
At the time, Moore Russell disputed Diamond’s audit results. In a recent interview, she said the guardianship system went beyond her Office’s administration and involved statewide agencies and the courts.
“We weren’t going to take ownership of those things that they called out that was our responsibility because they were not,” she said.
Moore Russell said she took it upon herself to push for statewide improvements, which led to a state-funded guardianship database that lets judges track “those bad actors, those Rebecca Fierles across the state.”
“I saw it as a way to make lemonade and make some changes statewide that has helped the system overall,” she said.
Under Moore Russell, the Clerk of Courts also launched an in-person and online help desk to assist people without lawyers as they file for divorce, deal with evictions and other court matters. Since it began in 2015, the help desk has assisted thousands of people and is now a model for other counties to replicate, Moore Russell said.
The race to be top executive in Orange County
Moore Russell’s Clerk of Courts days are officially behind her. She resigned to run for County Mayor, as state law requires. Her time is now spent putting miles on her car, traveling to events and knocking on doors.
At public forums, she campaigns on her priorities, which include improving public transportation (Moore Russell says Orange County needs a dedicated funding source) and improving the county’s permitting process, which she criticizes for being too slow and cumbersome.
Moore Russell, 52, lives in Horizon West with her husband, Wekiva High School Principal Anthony Russell Jr., and their two high-school-aged sons.
Is she ready to lead Orange County?
“Yes. Hands down,” Mercado said unequivocally.
Moore Russell, who has long eyed the County Mayor’s job, would know how to take charge in an emergency like a hurricane and how to fight to improve the community, Mercado said.
“Behind the scenes and in front of the scene,” Mercado said, Moore Russell is “the person with the mic and the person with the broom.”
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