Florida elected Byron Donalds governor Tuesday night while voters across much of the country told Trump and the Republican agenda no. Democrats flipped the House and the Senate, picking up seven Senate seats in states as red as Texas, Kansas and South Carolina. Texas replaced Gov. Greg Abbott with Gina Hinojosa. Nevada replaced Gov. Joe Lombardo with Aaron Ford. Georgia elected a Democratic governor for the first time since 1998. People are tired of paying more for everything, tired of watching Medicaid and food assistance get cut, and tired of an administration that treats cruelty like a policy, and they used the one tool they have to demand that somebody answer for it.
Florida heard the same message and chose differently, though not by much. Donalds won 50.0 percent to David Jolly’s 48.7, roughly a 1.3 point margin, and he did it by spending $165.9 million to Jolly’s $24.7 million. More than 4 million Floridians voted for Jolly. They are the reason this state is not a lost cause, and they are the people who will live under what comes next.
What comes next is a governor who went on Fox News on January 19, 2025, talked about Americans thanking Trump for deportations, and added “Daddy’s back.” Donalds later called it a flippant joke. Then the polls tightened, his campaign website quietly dropped its photos of Trump, and Jolly pointed out that this was the same man who called Trump his daddy. That is not a leader. That is a lapdog hoping voters will not notice the leash.
Then there is what he has said about Black people. In June 2024, Donalds told a room in Philadelphia that during Jim Crow, the Black family was together, and the NAACP and the Congressional Black Caucus condemned it. In May 2026, he said Congress passed the Voting Rights Act because Southern Democrats were racially gerrymandering districts, and PolitiFact rated that False, with historians explaining that Black Southerners were blocked from even registering to vote. His CNN claim about Black wages under Trump was rated Mostly False. His governor’s race ads against Jolly drew a run of False and Mostly False ratings, including one that deceptively edited a clip.
Nobody can say why any individual voter chose him, but the polling before the election is hard to ignore. Mason-Dixon had white voters favoring Donalds 59 to 30 and Black voters favoring Jolly 76 to 10. St. Pete Polls had white voters at 53 to 37 for Donalds and Black voters at 65 to 14 for Jolly. The man who said Black families were together under Jim Crow wins with a coalition that Black Floridians overwhelmingly did not join. The people his comments were supposedly about said no, and they were outvoted.
The policies land on everyone. Donalds has said flatly that Florida is not going to expand Medicaid, so Floridians who earn too little for private insurance and too much for traditional Medicaid stay locked out. He backed the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which added Medicaid work requirements and, according to reporting, dropped 247,000 Florida kids from food stamps. The Florida Health Justice Project estimates the law will cost the state about $4 billion a year in federal Medicaid support and affect at least one million recipients. More than $1 billion sits unspent while thousands of Floridians wait for disability care, and Donalds had not said how he would fix it when asked. Floridians pay some of the highest homeowners insurance bills in the country, and his plan is to keep the lawsuit limits, keep Citizens small and cut average premiums 20 percent. He backed Amendment 3, a property tax cut for homeowners that passed with more than 60 percent, while local governments warn of multimillion dollar budget cuts. He supports building AI data centers without a moratorium, and PolitiFact rated Half True his claim that a state law ensures those centers will not raise your utility bill.
Donalds’ supporters see a different governor. They point out that property taxes in Florida nearly doubled in seven years, that Amendment 3 gives that money back to families, and that Medicaid expansion would saddle the state with costs it cannot sustain. They note he pushed back in 2023 when Florida’s Black history standards suggested slaves benefited from skills used in forced labor, and that he says he will represent the voters who chose Jolly too. Floridians are about to find out which version of him shows up.
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