MIAMI / TALLAHASSEE — August 23, 2026
Florida’s political map is being redrawn just as decisively at the ballot box as it was on paper. The state’s August 18 primaries — the first held under newly redrawn congressional districts that observers say favor Republicans — set up a November governor’s race, and a parallel U.S. Senate race, that together offer a preview of exactly how the Republican Party of Florida intends to run against Democrats for the rest of the decade: by defining every Democratic nominee, regardless of how centrist, by the party’s most progressive figures nationally.
With term-limited Gov. Ron DeSantis stepping aside after eight years, the GOP nomination was Rep. Byron Donalds’ to lose from the moment President Donald Trump endorsed him in May. Even so, Donalds faced a genuinely bruising primary. Lt. Gov. Jay Collins, backed quietly by DeSantis himself, ran ads highlighting “youthful indiscretions” from Donalds’ past and warned donors that nominating him risked a “General Election Nightmare.” Right-wing provocateur James Fishback and former House Speaker Paul Renner piled on from other directions. Donalds ultimately won with 47.8% of the vote — a comfortable plurality, but one that required weathering nearly $100 million in spending and months of attacks from within his own party. David Jolly, the Democratic nominee, has been happy to point out the irony. “I say it’s like four snakes in a bag,” Jolly told a Tampa radio station before the primary. “They’re destroying each other. I don’t have to do any opposition research because they’ve done it all on each other.”
Jolly himself represents a calculated bet by Florida Democrats, who have lost every governor’s race since 1994 and control no statewide office. A former Republican member of Congress from the Tampa Bay area who left the GOP in 2018 and became one of Trump’s most visible conservative critics, Jolly ran largely unopposed after Orange County Mayor Jerry Demings suspended his campaign following a cancer diagnosis; former state Rep. Dotie Joseph never gained traction. He won the nomination with 61% of the vote and picked Gwen Graham, daughter of the late Gov. and Sen. Bob Graham, as his running mate, an explicit signal that the party is betting on a moderate, old-school message rather than a progressive one. “I still believe in the old-school republican libertarian policy that government should simply stay out of your life,” Jolly said in his victory speech, promising to focus on public education, healthcare, housing, and returning decision-making to local governments.
That positioning was designed, in part, to inoculate Jolly against exactly the attack Donalds opened with on primary night: branding him “Liberal David Jolly” and warning that he is “out of his mind.” Within days, Donalds had already made opposition to transgender rights a central plank, telling a rally that “David Jolly is somebody who thinks it’s still okay for boys to be in girl sports. It’s only him and the WNBA who thinks this,” a message he insists is “common sense,” not a culture war. Donalds has also signaled his preferred framing for the fall campaign, telling reporters he’s eager to press Jolly on whether his party is willing to support a progressive Democratic Party or a Democratic Socialist Party, a question aimed less at Jolly personally than at tying him to the rest of his party’s ticket.
That ticket includes the single biggest surprise of Florida’s primary night: state Rep. Angie Nixon’s double-digit upset of former National Security Council aide Alexander Vindman in the Democratic Senate primary, despite being outspent roughly 16-to-1. Nixon, a Jacksonville legislator and former union organizer who joined the Democratic Socialists of America during the campaign, becomes the first DSA member ever to win a major-party statewide nomination in Florida. She now faces Republican Sen. Ashley Moody, who was appointed to the seat after Marco Rubio became Secretary of State and is favored by most forecasters.
Nixon’s win handed Florida Republicans a gift they moved on almost instantly. Moody labeled Nixon a member of the “I hate America DSA Party” within a day of the results, and the National Republican Senatorial Committee declared flatly that “socialism has no place in the Sunshine State.” The Republican National Committee went further nationally, with spokeswoman Emma Hall calling Nixon a “socialist lunatic” who wants to empty prisons, open borders, and raise taxes, and framing every word out of Nixon’s mouth as an in-kind contribution to Republicans in Florida and across the country. Byron Donalds, asked about the DSA on the same night, offered a more clinical version of the same argument: “I think it divides Democrats… I think you have a lot of conservative-leaning Democratic voters,” he said, explicitly framing Nixon’s nomination as a wedge to drive between the party’s moderate and progressive wings.
Independent fact-checkers have complicated that narrative. PolitiFact found that while Nixon is a genuine DSA member, she does not align with several of the group’s signature positions; she has explicitly rejected defunding the police, abolishing the U.S. Senate, and extending voting rights to non-citizens, distancing herself from planks Moody’s attacks implied she held. Nixon herself has pushed back hard, telling the Florida Phoenix that Ashley Moody needs to “stick to the facts” instead of continuing to demonize her, and insisting on national television that she joined DSA over its positions on public housing, healthcare, and homeless veterans, not its more sweeping structural proposals. The nuance hasn’t slowed the attacks, and it has exposed real friction inside Florida’s Democratic Party: Nixon and state party chair Nikki Fried reportedly had a heated, raised-voices call this past week over how aggressively the party should defend her, according to people familiar with the conversation.
That internal tension is precisely what Republicans are counting on. Cook Political Report and Sabato’s Crystal Ball both currently rate the governor’s race solid or safe Republican, and Florida Republicans control every statewide office, both U.S. Senate seats, and supermajorities in both chambers of the Legislature. But the GOP’s own primary chaos, with Trump-endorsed Donalds surviving a three-front assault from his own party, combined with Nixon’s grassroots upset, suggests neither party is fully unified heading into November. For Republicans, the strategy is now unmistakable regardless of which Democrat is on the ballot: link the moderate at the top of the ticket to the most progressive Democrat down-ballot, and let swing voters decide whether they’re voting for David Jolly or for Angie Nixon’s Democratic Socialists of America. Whether that strategy holds in a state Trump carried by 13 points, or whether Jolly’s explicitly centrist, Republican-turned-independent-turned-Democrat profile is enough to insulate him from it, will be the defining question of Florida’s 2026 general election.
Florida Republicans have run this template before. In 2018, national Republicans defined Andrew Gillum’s progressive gubernatorial bid as radical, and Gillum narrowly lost. In 2022, Democrats deliberately nominated the more moderate Charlie Crist over Agriculture Commissioner Nikki Fried, hoping a centrist profile would blunt the same attack; Crist lost to DeSantis by nearly 20 points anyway. The lesson national Democratic strategists have drawn is that moderating the top of the ticket does little to change the fundamentals of a state Republicans now dominate at every level of government, and that the “socialist” line gets deployed against Democratic nominees in Florida virtually regardless of how they actually govern.
That history is what makes Jolly’s and Nixon’s parallel nominations this cycle a genuine test case. Jolly is, by any conventional measure, one of the more conservative Democratic gubernatorial nominees Florida has fielded in a decade; Nixon, whatever her actual record on policing or immigration, is now a national name for the Democratic Socialists of America regardless of how she defines herself. Republicans plan to run against both as a package, betting most Florida voters won’t parse the difference between a state legislator’s platform and a gubernatorial nominee’s once national money floods the state’s airwaves. Florida Democrats are wagering that Trump’s continued dominance of the state’s political conversation, not any one nominee’s ideology, will be the more durable factor shaping how the state’s shrinking bloc of persuadable voters actually breaks.
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