Winner and Loser of the Week in Florida politics — Week of 5.24.26

The $114.5 billion spending plan for Fiscal Year 2026-27 finally cleared both chambers Friday after weeks of overtime negotiations during a Special Session.

After the Regular Session stalled out, prompting consecutive Special Sessions and weeks of extra work, those in The Process, including legislative staffers who did the actual technical work of assembling the budget document, earned whatever rest they planned to get this weekend.

Except they aren’t getting it.

Gov. Ron DeSantis announced Wednesday that he is calling another Special Session beginning Monday, this one dedicated to property taxes.

After months of teasing a potential cut, DeSantis finally fully previewed his plan. Senate President Ben Albritton is enthusiastic, writing in a memo to senators that he “can’t think of a more meaningful way to celebrate America’s 250th” than passing $250,000 in homestead relief.

So the Senate appears ready. The House is a different story.

Speaker Daniel Perez, who has spent this entire legislative year in a grinding cold war with the Governor responded to the Special Session announcement with a statement that read decidedly less enthusiastic: “We are pleased the Governor has finally gotten around to sharing an actual proposal. We look forward to reviewing it once we have received the language.”

The House already passed its own property tax elimination proposal during the Regular Session, only to watch the Senate ignore it entirely. Whether Perez sees this Special Session as vindication or as another round of being managed by a Governor he has openly clashed with is the central question heading into Monday.

DeSantis is betting he can get this on the November ballot and that Florida voters, squeezed by years of rising assessments on a property market that has outrun most household incomes, will approve it.

But he still has to get it through a House chamber that has made a habit this year of making him work for everything.

Now, it’s onto our weekly game of winners and losers.

Winners

Honorable mention: Groveland Four families. Justice in Florida has a way of arriving late. In this case, it took 77 years.

Both chambers of the Legislature agreed this week to include $4 million in the state budget to compensate the families of Charles Greenlee, Walter Irvin, Samuel Shepherd and Ernest Thomas. Each family would receive $1 million.

DeSantis has not yet signed the budget, and with line-item veto power, DeSantis can unilaterally strike any allocation he pleases. But DeSantis also issued full pardons for all four men in 2019, saying at the time that their history had been “wrongly written for crimes they did not commit” for 70 years.

That’s justified, as the story of what happened to these men is among the most documented acts of racial terror in Florida’s history.

The legislative path to this week’s agreement was itself a lesson in persistence. Sen. LaVon Bracy Davis, the Orlando Democrat who carried the compensation bill, watched it pass the Senate unanimously during the 2026 Regular Session only to see it die in the House, where it was never assigned a hearing.

Rather than accept that outcome, the Senate brought the proposal back during budget negotiations this month before both chambers reached a tentative deal. “This moment is about more than dollars,” Bracy Davis said afterward. “It’s about acknowledging the truth, honoring the pain these families have carried for generations, and taking a real step toward justice.”

During hearings in Tallahassee, family members described the shadow the case had cast across decades of their lives.. A million dollars per family is not restitution for what was taken. But it is the Legislature’s acknowledgment, however delayed, that a wrong was done here. Florida has not always been willing to say that clearly. This week, it did.

Almost (but not quite) the biggest winner: DeSantis. The congressional map DeSantis’ Office drew and has been defending in court since April survived its first major legal test this week.

Leon County Circuit Judge Joshua Hawkes — himself a DeSantis appointee — rejected a challenge from Common Cause, the Equal Ground Education Fund, and a coalition of voters who argued the map was drawn with partisan intent in violation of Florida’s Fair Districts Amendment, the anti-gerrymandering provision Florida voters passed overwhelmingly in 2010.

Hawkes ruled that blocking the map at this stage would create more harm than allowing it to proceed, noting that House qualifying opens June 8 and closes June 12, the Primary is less than three months away, and the General Election less than six months out. “The public interest,” he wrote, “weighs more in favor of certainty than a haphazard judicial mandate of discarded maps.”

Common Cause Florida Executive Director Amy Keith vowed to appeal, a move that could land in front of the Florida Supreme Court, where DeSantis appointed six of the seven sitting Justices.

The ruling is not a final constitutional verdict on the map. Hawkes himself acknowledged “potential partisan intent” in his eight-page decision, describing the tradeoff between Florida’s gerrymandering ban and federal equal protection guarantees as a choice between “the lesser of two evils” — not the kind of language that signals a ringing constitutional endorsement. He also said the challenge appeared “more geared toward the 2028 or 2030 election cycles than the 2026 election cycle,” a line that tells you exactly how narrow this win is in the long view.

But a win this election cycle is still significant. Trump urged GOP-led states to redraw their maps, and Virginia, Louisiana, Tennessee, and Texas have all moved in the same direction. Florida’s map is one of the largest prizes in that effort, and for now, it stands.

The biggest winner: Tina Polsky. Polsky, the Boca Raton Democrat who has represented southern Palm Beach and northern Broward counties in the Legislature for eight years, announced this week that she will not seek another term in Senate District 30 when her current term expires in November. 

Term limits weren’t pushing her out. She made the call herself, on her own timetable, with her agenda clearly articulated to whoever comes next.

Polsky arrived in Tallahassee in 2018 as a freshman House member, a University of Pennsylvania graduate and Columbia Law-trained lawyer. She won her first House race without opposition. Two years later she moved to the Senate, winning Senate District 29 in 2020 and shifting to the redrawn Senate District 30 in 2022.

Her policy priorities were consistent throughout: gun safety, abortion access, voting rights, women’s rights, and protections for LGBTQ Floridians at a moment when Tallahassee was rolling back rights on all of those fronts simultaneously. Fighting from the minority in a chamber the Republican Party controls by a wide margin is largely an exercise in, at best, slowing things down, drawing contrasts for future elections, and protecting what can be protected at the margins.

Polsky did that work without making it about herself.

She also handled the succession well. Within hours of her announcement, former Senate Democratic Leader Lauren Book launched a campaign for the seat with Polsky’s endorsement in hand. Polsky called Book “one of the most compassionate, relentless and effective advocates” she served alongside.

Regardless of how the succession shakes out, the seat will likely remain in capable Democratic hands, and Polsky walks out having done the job with dignity.

Losers

Dishonorable mention: Mayra Uribe. Uribe, a District 3 Orange County Commissioner running for county Mayor, submitted her resignation Tuesday with a Dec. 7 effective date — carefully timed to keep her in her $130,262-a-year seat through a series of consequential Summer commission votes.

But that date is also well past the threshold that would have forced a voter-decided Special Election. Under Florida’s resign-to-run law, an effective resignation date of Aug. 4 or earlier would have put her seat before voters this November. She blew past that window by four months.

The result: DeSantis picks her replacement in a solidly Democratic district covering a large swath of southeast Orlando, and that appointee likely holds the seat until Uribe’s term concludes in January 2028.

The blowback came from people who are supposed to be in her corner. The Central Florida AFL-CIO, whose roughly 70,000 members include tourism workers and teachers, passed a resolution pledging to withhold support from any mayoral candidate who missed the resignation deadline. Union President Eric Clinton was direct about the stakes: putting the appointment power in DeSantis’ hands was a mistake regardless of which seat was involved.

Genesis Reyes of Immigrants Are Welcome Here said District 3 residents had been deprived of the basic democratic choice of selecting their own representative.

Uribe’s counterargument is substantive, even if it ultimately didn’t carry the day. The Commission faces budget hearings, tourist tax allocation decisions and a vote on a homeless shelter initiative she spent more than three years developing. She argued her presence on the board through those decisions is a genuine service to the district, not a self-serving maneuver.

She also noted that a single DeSantis appointee on a majority-Democratic Commission has limited power to upend the board’s direction. “We’re a Democrat board. We’re the majority,” she told the crowd at last week’s party meeting.

But one detail that makes all of this harder to defend: Uribe said she didn’t learn about the resign-to-run deadline until two weeks before it arrived.

An elected official running for higher office has a basic responsibility to understand the legal mechanics of that decision before announcing the candidacy. And now that she did understand it, she made the decision anyway.

But missing that deadline through inattention or missing it through calculation produce the same outcome for District 3 — a DeSantis appointee, a Democratic seat in Republican hands, and a mayoral candidate whose opening argument about putting community first took a serious hit before the race has even fully begun.

Almost (but not quite) the biggest loser: VISIT FLORIDA. Two pieces of news arrived this week that, taken together, raise real questions about whether Florida’s $80 million tourism marketing engine is earning its keep.

Start with the tourism numbers. VISIT FLORIDA reported Tuesday that 39.89 million people traveled to Florida in the first quarter of 2026 — a 1% drop from the same period last year and the weakest first quarter the state has posted since 2022, when the country was still climbing out of pandemic-era travel disruptions.

Domestic travelers, who account for nearly 92% of all Florida visitors, came in at 36.54 million for the quarter — down 1.2% year over year. Canadian visitors fell even harder, dropping 12.1% to 1.05 million, a decline almost certainly tied to the deteriorating U.S.-Canada relationship under Trump’s tariff regime and the resulting wave of Canadian travel boycotts that have dominated headlines for months.

VISIT FLORIDA CEO Bryan Griffin noted an uptick in people driving to Florida rather than flying, suggesting some visitors are rerouting to avoid high airfare costs.

The overseas numbers were genuinely strong — 2.29 million international visitors, a record for any quarter, with the United Kingdom up 17.2% and Ireland up 14.5%. Those are real gains. But overseas visitors represent about 6% of Florida’s total tourism traffic. The state lives and dies by the domestic traveler, and that number is moving in the wrong direction.

The Michelin situation compounds the picture. The 2026 Guide Florida — unveiled Wednesday as the first statewide edition after four years of gradually expanding coverage — recognized exactly two new starred restaurants across the entire state of Florida: Emelina in West Palm Beach and Mutra in Miami, both earning one star.

That brings Florida’s total starred restaurant count to 26, including just two 2-star establishments. The state has never produced a 3-star restaurant.

For context, Florida has roughly 22 million residents, draws 143 million visitors annually, and has been actively paying Michelin for this partnership since 2022, when the guide launched in Miami, Orlando and Tampa. Visit Orlando alone paid $800,100 for the first three years of coverage and held an option for two more years for another $533,400.

In 2026, the guide expanded its footprint to cover the entire state for the first time, dispatching anonymous inspectors from the Panhandle to Key West. The result of evaluating every corner of Florida: two new starred restaurants. A Tampa bakery received a Green Star, Michelin’s eco-conscious designation, which is a genuine honor but is not the culinary excellence recognition that moves the needle on tourism.

None of this is immediately catastrophic. Florida’s tourism industry remains enormous, and a 1% quarterly decline is not a crisis.

But when a state agency running an $80 million budget reports its weakest domestic quarter in four years while the marketing partnership it has funded for half a decade produces thin results on a statewide debut, it at least gets our attention.

The biggest loser: Debbie Wasserman Schultz. As we wrote last week, Wasserman Schultz had a choice when DeSantis’ new congressional map eliminated her seat: take on a competitive race in the newly drawn CD 22, where Democrats actually need a seasoned candidate, or retreat to the safety of CD 20, a plurality-Black district where a Democrat is essentially guaranteed to win in November.

She chose the safe seat. The criticism that followed for parachuting into a plurality Black seat was swift, but this week it got louder.

Ten of Florida’s 15 Democratic National Committee members — two-thirds of the state’s DNC delegation — issued a formal joint statement condemning the move. “Our party cannot credibly denounce the dismantling of Black political power by Republicans while treating one of Florida’s few remaining majority-Black districts as a political opportunity for an incumbent seeking a safer seat,” the statement read.

The Democratic Black Caucus of Florida separately released a three-page statement appealing to Wasserman Schultz’s history as an ally of Black communities, urging her to demonstrate that history means something by running in CD 22 instead. State Sen. Rosalind Osgood of Tamarac told Florida Politics she had personally discouraged Wasserman Schultz from running in CD 20 and called the party’s post-redistricting position “really unfortunate.”

Rudolph Moise, a Haitian American physician and Air Force veteran who had been running in CD 20, dropped out this week and endorsed former Broward County Mayor Dale Holness and rapper-turned-activist Luther Campbell. Moise called CD 20 “a seat that should never become a political fallback plan or a vehicle for political survival while the very communities it was created to empower risk being pushed aside.”

Wasserman Schultz’s campaign, meanwhile, released polling this week from EMC Research showing her leading the field with 52% support, a level no other candidate in the race approaches.

That it’s an internal poll deserves some skepticism. But, if accurate, it sort of proves the point: She will very possible emerge from the Democratic Primary due to Black voters splitting support among the other Black candidates, leading to a loss of Black representation despite Democrats decrying Republican efforts to accomplish the same end.

And none of that resolves the underlying problem, which is one of political character rather than political math. Wasserman Schultz lives in CD 22 — the competitive district she chose not to run in. She framed her decision entirely around preserving Broward County’s clout in Washington. The institutional infrastructure of her own party — its DNC delegation, its Black caucus, its civic organizations — has now publicly broken with her over it.

Her poll may ultimately prove prophetic. She may win this race. But winning a race you chose for the wrong reasons, over the objections of your party’s own representatives, in a district where you don’t live, is not vindication.