With the registration deadline passing, let’s look at next month’s contests.
The post 30 days out, here are 7 questions framing Florida’s General Election appeared first on Florida Politics – Campaigns & Elections. Lobbying & Government..
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Just under 30 days out, mail ballots are on kitchen counters from Pensacola to Key West, early voting opens later this month, and a cycle Republicans expected to sleepwalk through has turned into a list of questions. Here are the seven I keep coming back to.
Which two numbers should frighten Republicans?
I poll a lot of congressional and legislative races, and two numbers keep showing up.
The first is Donald Trump‘s approval among Republicans, a number that usually sits in the 90s. Gallup had it at 84% last November, a second-term low at the time, and a Verasight survey last month put it at 71% among Republicans and leaners. In district after district I am looking at, it is below 80%. Republicans who sour on Trump mostly stay home. That is what Charlie Cook meant last month when he wrote that there is no blue wave coming, only a “red undertow” that “will pull many Republicans under and significantly trim the margins for many others.” If that number is still under 80% on Election Day, the undertow is real.
The second is how hard independents are breaking. A bad year for the party in the White House usually means losing them 55-45, maybe 60-40. I am seeing 2-to-1 in most races, 3-to-1 in some, and in one congressional district Republicans drew to flip, nearly 4-to-1 against them. Our September statewide poll had David Jolly up 12 with independents and Angie Nixon up 13. Nationally, YouGov has independents at 54-27 for Democrats.
Republicans hold a 1.5 million-voter registration edge in Florida. It is the main reason those two numbers have not already decided the election.
When does Byron Donalds go nuclear on David Jolly?
The Republican case against David Jolly has so far been about policy. Byron Donalds calls Jolly’s state catastrophe fund a “hurricane tax” that would cost families $1,000 a year, a number the Florida Phoenix’s Mitch Perry traced to a study of a different bill. The Republican Party of Florida ran digital ads on Jolly’s support for letting transgender kids play youth sports. Donalds built a spot around Jolly telling MSNBC, “You can say I don’t agree with the Second Amendment. Maybe I don’t. I don’t care.“
None of that is the nuclear option. That is Leo Govoni, the Clearwater businessman jailed on charges he stole more than $100 million from trusts for about 2,000 people with disabilities. His trial is set for May 2027. Govoni was finance co-chair of Jolly’s 2016 Senate campaign, gave $147,000 to his campaigns, paid him about $250,000 in consulting fees, and had a son on Jolly’s House staff. Jolly says the relationship ended more than a decade ago. He has not been accused of wrongdoing.
I wrote in April 2025 that the GOP would spend tens of millions connecting the two men. Eighteen months later, the closest thing was U.S. Rep. Anna Paulina Luna needling him on X in July. Donalds has raised $135 million. Mail ballots are out. If he is going to ‘swift boat’ Jolly, when?
Who is this cycle’s Matt Caldwell?
Republicans remember 2018 as a sweep. It was closer than that. Ron DeSantis beat Andrew Gillum by 32,463 votes. Rick Scott beat Bill Nelson by 10,033. Nikki Fried beat Matt Caldwell by 6,753 for Agriculture Commissioner. All three races went to recounts, the last two by hand, and Caldwell was the only Republican to lose statewide.
Five Republicans are on the statewide ballot this year, and I think one of them loses. Not Ashley Moody. Not Donalds. Not Agriculture Commissioner Wilton Simpson. That leaves Attorney General James Uthmeier and CFO Blaise Ingoglia.
Uthmeier has the bigger problem: Hope Florida. A Leon County grand jury found $10 million in Medicaid settlement money was “misappropriated” and routed into a political committee he chaired. It charged no one, but the IRS has since taken up a whistleblower complaint. He is also running the better campaign. His lawsuits against everyone from Starbucks to OpenAI generate millions in earned media, and St. Pete Polls had him up 43% to 42% on José Javier Rodríguez in September.
Ingoglia’s best asset is his opponent. Annette Taddeo has name ID. She also has losses for Congress in 2008 and 2022, Lieutenant Governor in 2014, Party Chair in 2023, and Miami-Dade Clerk in 2024. Two September polls had the race tied anyway, even with Ingoglia on TV since July. Taddeo has never crossed a finish line in a race this big. Then again, neither had Fried.
What do you call a gerrymander worse than a dummymander?
Political scientists Bernard Grofman and Thomas Brunell coined “dummymander” in 2005 for a map that spreads a party’s voters so thin that a modest shift flips the seats it was drawn to win. We asked in July whether that is what DeSantis drew. The word may not be strong enough.
The map he signed was built to turn a 20-8 delegation into 24-4 by putting Kathy Castor, Darren Soto, and two South Florida seats in districts Trump carried by 9 to 18 points. I do not see Castor losing Florida’s 14th Congressional District to a lump like Mike Beltran. I think Jared Moskowitz holds off Scott Singer in CD 25 and Pia Dandiya slips past Casey Askar in CD 22. Soto’s own polling has him tied with Dan Green in a CD 9 Trump carried by 18. Cook Political Report now says it is “possible Republicans net no seats.”
Then it gets worse. Four raters moved Luna’s CD 13 toward Democrat Leela Gray in nine days. María Elvira Salazar told Trump in a TV ad that his immigration enforcement has “gone too far,” and the President amplified calls to replace her. On Monday, the DCCC added her opponent, former CBS Miami anchor Eliott Rodriguez, to its Red to Blue program, the list of challengers it intends to fund. In a real wave, even with Republicans’ 1.5-million-voter registration edge, you start looking at Neal Dunn‘s open CD 2 and Mike Haridopolos‘ CD 8, which Trump won by 23.
A map drawn to gain four seats that loses two needs its own word.
Can the Globetrotters hold off the Generals?
The Washington Generals have lost more than 16,000 games to the Harlem Globetrotters since Red Klotz founded them in 1952. They have won somewhere between three and six, the last in 1971, 100-99, in Martin, Tennessee. Klotz said the crowd looked at his team “like we killed Santa Claus.”
Florida Democrats know the feeling. Republicans hold the House 85-34 and the Senate 26-12 with one independent, and the Florida House Republican Campaign Committee and the Florida Republican Senatorial Campaign Committee have run the table for a generation. What is different this year is that the Globetrotters know the arena is hostile. Every Saturday since the first ballots went out has been a Super Saturday, with House candidates walking precincts across the state. RPOF Chair Evan Power says the turnout operation “is the best in the Country.”
The Generals have already won two this year. In March, Brian Nathan took a Hillsborough Senate seat Trump carried by 7 and Emily Gregory took a Palm Beach House seat he carried by 10, the Florida Phoenix’s Mitch Perry reported. Democrats need six House seats and a flip in the Senate to break the supermajorities.
The usual question is how much a weak top of the ticket drags on legislative candidates. I would argue it runs the other way. In a Midterm, the candidate knocking on your door in October is a House candidate, and that knock is what gets the Governor his vote. Still, with majorities this large, Republicans can absorb a controlled burn of a few seats. The question is whether it stops short of the supermajority line.
Who wins the mayoral races nobody expected to see?
In a cycle where the top of the ticket will be decided by gas prices and a war, two of the most interesting contests in Florida are for jobs that come with a parking space at City Hall.
In St. Petersburg, Charlie Crist is 70 and running for the job he was probably built for. After DeSantis beat him by 19 points in 2022, nobody expected a comeback, let alone this one. He took 36% in a six-way August Primary to Ken Welch‘s 21%, has raised a record $2.3 million to the incumbent’s $550,000, and has the endorsement of every living former Mayor. Welch is on his third political committee of the cycle.
In Tallahassee, the fight is inside the Democratic Party. City Commissioner Jeremy Matlow, the progressive who has spent years at war with Mayor John Dailey, finished first in August with 36% and faces centrist former state Sen. Loranne Ausley, at 34%, in a runoff. Two Commission seats are on the same ballot, and a progressive sweep would turn Matlow’s two-vote minority into control of the five-member Commission. The outgoing majority saw it coming. In September it handed new City Manager Karen Jumonville a five-year contract with a clause requiring four votes to fire her. Matlow called it a “political stunt” by a “lame-duck mayor.” The Tallahassee Democrat ran a piece Sunday that argued that the contract could be what tips the runoff to the progressives.
Neither race will turn on the Strait of Hormuz.
What is the October surprise?
Start with the one Florida can set a clock by. Hurricane Michael hit the Panhandle 27 days before the 2018 election. Mil
