Jolly, the former Republican turned independent who became a registered Democrat less than a month ago, said he likely will announce his candidacy for governor in mid-June.
“I anticipate I will be getting into the governor’s race, and that announcement will be coming very soon,” he said at the conclusion of his 40-minute appearance as the headliner of the event, sponsored by the Largo Mid-Pinellas County Democratic Club.
One thing the former congressman and longtime MSNBC political analyst (whose contract with the cable network as an analyst has been paused, according to an MSNBC spokesperson) says he will bring to the race is a dash of enthusiasm — which has been lacking in Florida Democratic circles since last fall.
That’s when their top-of-ticket candidates (Kamala Harris for president and Debbie Mucarsel-Powell for Senate) both lost by 13 percentage points. In that same election, Democrats lost seats in the Florida House of Representatives and then two party members bolted to join the majority Republicans in the state House in December.
And with the Democrats’ popularity nationally hovering in some polls in the upper 20s, these haven’t been the best of times for the party. Still, Jolly insists there is a growing national revulsion to the actions the second Trump administration has undertaken during its first four months in office, and he believes it will bolster the party’s chances next year.
“There’s movement going on. A rare time in American political history where there is a movement, a coalition that is growing, that is saying, ‘We are concerned about the direction of the country and about the direction of our state,’” he said.
“People who have never been involved in politics, who are no longer worrying about their partisan registration or political identity, they just know we’re going in the wrong direction and they want to stand up and fix it.”
The country, in fact, is going through a “constitutional crisis.” Jolly said.
“When the president of the United States looks at Congress and says, ‘I don’t care about the budget you passed. I’m not going to spend the money as directed by law,’ that’s a crisis. When he looks at the courts and he says, ‘I’m not going to follow your orders,’ that’s a crisis. We cannot normalize that. It’s right that that we stand up at that moment, stand in the gap and say, ‘We’re going to do our part to stop this.’”
Crises
Jolly, 52, cautioned that Democrats shouldn’t be all about bashing Trump — and even mentioned at about 20 minutes into his speech that he hadn’t uttered the president’s name once.(Which was not exactly accurate — he used the president’s name when he said that Trump had elevated Elon Musk and U.S. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, and mentioned “the president” when discussing the “constitutional crisis.”)
Jolly talks often about the “affordability crisis” in Florida, and on Monday night referred to the GOP-controlled Legislature’s proclivities toward preemption of local governments on a variety of issues as a persistent problem. He also discussed expanding Medicaid, investing in affordable, renewable, clean energy, and being tough on crime.
“Whether you’re a native-born citizen, whether you came here, or whether you’re a Republican politician, if you break the law, you should be prosecuted,” Jolly said, eliciting one of the loudest cheers of the evening.
Gun safety is another major issue in Jolly’s platform — he advocated for universal background checks, including for transfers of guns between family members.
The Democratic Party needs to go to places where their candidates haven’t ventured in a long time, Jolly said, “and speak the language on the ground of a community just looking for answers.”
Close to his home in Pinellas County, Jolly didn’t encounter any dissenting voices when he took questions. But that won’t be the case once the self-described “Bush 41 Republican” gets called to account for some of his former more conservative political positions, such as opposition to abortion rights.
In retrospect, Jolly says, he wrongly conflated the idea of being “pro-life” with being “anti-Roe” in 2012. He reminded the audience that even when he had a different stance on abortion rights, he was the only Republican in the House who voted against a proposal to investigate Planned Parenthood (a statement verified by PolitFact).
And he says that post the 2022 U.S.Supreme Court Dobbs decision, which overturned a federal right to an abortion, he is now a “full proponent of codifying the Roe-Casey framework at the national and state level.” (“Casey” being the Supreme Court’s 1992 ruling Planned Parenthood V. Casey affirming a constitutional right to an abortion but allowing states more leeway to regulate abortion).
Unlike other famous party-switchers like Ronald Reagan or Charlie Crist, however, he’s not claiming that his former party left him.
“Folks, David Jolly left the Republican Party,” he declared, generating another healthy cheer from the partisan audience.
Now representing a party that lags more than 1 million voters behind the GOP in registrations across the state, Jolly said he hopes to build a coalition extending to independent voters and “common-sense Republican friends” who want reform, particularly of the property insurance situation.
At this early stage, no major Democrats have entered the gubernatorial contest for 2026. One Democrat who was expected to run for governor, state Sen. Jason Pizzo, recently announced that he will do so as a non-party-affiliated candidate, declaring the Florida Democratic Party “dead” in a speech on the Senate floor late last month.
Gov. Ron DeSantis, who is term-limited and thus will not be back on the ballot last year, said in Tampa on Tuesday that Pizzo is running as an independent “because people know if you have a ‘D’ next to your name in this state you are dead meat. Because this party is a disaster.”
“You’re seeing an effort for people to try to think that if they move the albatross around their neck, that somehow they’re going to be viable,” DeSantis said. “But here’s the thing: You can dress it up anyway that you want. If you put lipstick on a donkey, guess what? It’s still a donkey.”
Former CD 6 Democratic candidate Josh Weil speaking with an audience member in Clearwater on May 19, 2025. (Photo by Mitch Perry/Florida Phoenix)
Young voters
Jolly’s opening act, as it were, on Monday was Josh Weil, the 40-year-old Central Florida public middle school instructor who was the Democratic nominee in the Congressional District 6 special election in Northeast Florida that became vacant after Trump selected GOP incumbent Mike Waltz as his National Security Adviser.(Waltz subsequently has been transferred to serve as ambassador to the United Nations, pending Senate confirmation).
Although Weil lost to Republican Randy Fine by 14 percentage points in the April 1 special election, 57%-43%, the margin was 18 points closer than the previous Democratic candidate received in losing to Waltz in the same district just five months earlier.
Weil said the experience showed him that Democrats have too often written off congressional districts that they don’t believe they can win. And with Republicans holding 20 of the state’s 28 seats, that’s roughly 70% of the state that the party hasn’t competed for in recent election cycles.
That’s particularly hurt them with young voters, Weil said.
“That means that if you’re 25 or under, living in that 70% of the state, you have never had a Democrat knock on your door,” he said. “We have to get out there. We have to re-engage them, to go to where they are. They’re not coming to us. We have to get out to where they are.”
Weil was able to raise considerably more cash than Fine in that race, and he now appears emboldened to help fundraising efforts around the state. He said Monday that he and his “team” have a plan to raise $10 million for voter registration efforts across the state over the next 16 months, with a particular interest in Miami-Dade and Pinellas counties.
“We are committing to invest $1 million in the field, for every congressional district in this state, to make sure that we carry the message to voters where they are, in every district in every county, in ways that our party has been unable to cycle after cycle,” he said, adding that CD-13 is “up for grabs.”
That remains to be seen. Despite a focus by Democrats on flipping the seat last fall, Republican Anna Paulina Luna cruised to more than 9-point victory in November.
Regarding his own candidacy, Weil said he will announce on June 21.
Florida Phoenix is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Florida Phoenix maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Michael Moline for questions: info@floridaphoenix.com.
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Josh Weil is counting on Pinellas voters for his U.S. Senate bid
This article appears in May 15-21, 2025.