Jolly says FL Dems can’t presume they’ve won ‘hearts and minds’ after recent wins

WEST TAMPA — The two upset legislative victories by Democrats in Hillsborough and Palm Beach counties last week came in part because the candidates received considerable support from independents and Republicans who crossed party lines.

Democratic gubernatorial candidate David Jolly says that’s the only way he can win in November, so he’s actively courting those voters in his bid to become the first Democrat to sit in the governor’s mansion in Tallahassee in nearly three decades.

“Let’s not fool ourselves. As Democrats, we need to lead a coalition strong enough to bring in independents and Republicans in a moment when people are screaming for change and begging for change,” Jolly said in front of several hundred enthusiastic supporters at La Teresita restaurant in West Tampa on Thursday night.

“Let’s not overthink what’s happening in this moment. We are more enthused than ever to turn out and win elections, but let’s not presume that we have already won hearts and minds. We have won votes. We have to demonstrate we’re worthy of the public trust that is heading our way.”

With Donald Trump’s net approval rating dropping to new lows this week, Democrats are reaping the benefits of that voter malaise. Brian Nathan’s victory in Senate District 14 and Emily Gregory’s in House District 87 last week now make 30 Republican-held legislative seats around the country that Democrats have flipped since Trump was inaugurated for his second term on Jan, 20, 2025. That’s according to the Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee.

However, public opinion surveys have consistently shown since the 2024 presidential election that Democrats continue to struggle with their own approval rankings. An Economist/YouGov poll released this week shows that just 34% of Americans view congressional Democrats very or somewhat favorably and 55% view them unfavorably.

Illustrating the fact that Democrats are benefitting from voter anger at Trump, Jolly said he recently spoke with a nearly 90-year-old retired (and unidentified) Republican U.S. senator who told him that while he could never leave the GOP, he intends to vote for every Democrat on the ballot “unless you give me reason not to.”

Message to GOP voters: We need you.

The former MSNBC political analyst and GOP U.S. representative began his nearly 45-minute address by thanking any Republicans or independent voters who were in the building with a succinct message: “We need you.”

With a voter-registration deficit of nearly 1.5 million voters, Democrats absolutely do need Republicans to cross over to vote for the opposition party in statewide elections and in a majority of legislative and congressional districts throughout the state. That’s what Nathan and Gregory managed last week.

A survey of 1,125 likely voters by Emerson College released this week shows Jolly trailing Republican gubernatorial front-runner Byron Donalds by just 5 points, 44%-39%, with 17% undecided (the poll showed Orange County Mayor Jerry Demings, the other major Democrat in the race, trailing Donalds by 9 points, 45%-36%, with 19% undecided).

The survey showed that Jolly and Donalds are essentially tied among Hispanic voters. It’s the closest Jolly has been to Donalds in a presumptive one-on-one race, and he maintains — as he has since he entered the contest last June — that “we can win this race.”

Policy proposals

Jolly laid out a series of policy proposals Thursday night.

Addressing property taxes, he has pushed for months a plan to create a state catastrophic fund and a state sovereign wealth fund to fully pay for hurricane and wind coverage, removing the private market from those responsibilities. “I know there are some people in the room who are going to say some of what my Republican friends in Tallahassee say — ‘That’s socialism!” he said. “I just call it cheaper insurance.”

Regarding property insurance, he didn’t dismiss the need to provide relief to some homeowners. But he said the state needs to do an “inversion” of the 1992 Save Our Homes constitutional amendment and portability provision by providing targeted homestead exemptions for first-time home buyers, allowing more people, especially younger people, to receive financial relief in purchasing a home.

Jolly wants to raise revenue for public education to give public school teachers a 30% raise through the state’s Tourist Development Tax. State law targets those funds for tourism promotion and related purposes, such as convention centers, beach facilities, museums, sports stadiums, and arenas.

Jolly says that makes “intuitive sense” but not economic sense, “because we don’t have a crisis of convention centers in the state of Florida. We have a crisis in public education.”

He said he could save homeowners and renters money by capping profits for the investor-owned utilities in the state to “the national average.” A report by the Energy & Policy Institute released last month showed that electric utilities around the country kept about 15 cents of every dollar they collected as profit last year. However, Florida Power & Light, which serves around 12 million customers through 6 million accounts, had a profit margin last year of 27.44%.

Jolly was introduced to the stage by former Hillsborough County Democratic State Attorney Andrew Warren, who remains popular with Hillsborough Democrats — perhaps even more so since Gov. Ron DeSantis removed him from office in 2022 for alleged neglect of duty and incompetence for pledging not to prosecute abortion-related or gender-affirming care cases (Warren lost his bid for re-election in 2024).

Warren argued that, “after nearly a decade of Tallahassee’s dysfunction,” Florida deserves a change.

“For eight years, there has been a cancer in Tallahassee,” he said. “David Jolly is the cure.”

Whether Jolly will get a chance to prove that to the entire state won’t be known until August, when he matches up against Jerry Demings in the Democratic gubernatorial primary. In that Emerson College poll of likely Florida voters, Jolly leads Demings, 21%-10%. A majority, however — 53% — say they haven’t made up their mind.