NAPLES, Fla. – David Jolly’s long-shot plan to win the keys to the governor’s mansion rests on a basic premise: that after seven years of Gov. Ron DeSantis and the return of President Donald Trump, Floridians have had it.
“I would not be in this race, I pledge to you, if we did not believe that in this moment, we’ve got the best shot we’ve had in 30 years to change the direction of the state,” he told more than 200 attendees who filled a meeting room at Collier County’s south regional library Monday.
“This is a moment when Florida voters are saying: ‘We have had enough,’” he’d told 400 Lee County Democrats in Fort Myers a day earlier.
Whether the recent Democratic convert and former Republican lawmaker’s analysis is correct will not be known for another year, when voters choose a successor to term-limited DeSantis. Until then, Jolly — who at this point does not have a well-known Democratic opponent for the nomination — said he plans to campaign for votes in all 67 Florida counties, a strategy that has largely fallen out of favor with Democrats since the 1980s, when they had near-total control of state government.
Jolly told his town hall audience that the event was his 81st since he began running early this year, with a half dozen held over the Columbus Day weekend in one of the most Republican corners of an increasingly Republican state: southwest Florida, counties that have not voted Democratic in decades. Naples, the site of his Monday afternoon visit, is the home of Republican lawmaker Byron Donalds, who with Trump’s endorsement is likely to win the GOP nomination next August.
