Byron Donalds wins Florida governor race, becoming the state’s first Black governor
Republican congressman Byron Donalds has narrowly defeated Democrat David Jolly to become Florida’s next governor, the state’s first Black governor and the first Black Republican ever elected governor of any US state.
Republican congressman Byron Donalds has won Florida’s governor race, defeating Democrat David Jolly in a far closer contest than many in his party expected. The Associated Press called the race for Donalds on Tuesday night, with returns putting him on about 50% of the vote to Jolly’s roughly 49%, a gap of around 115,000 votes with the overwhelming majority of ballots counted.
The victory makes Donalds Florida’s first Black governor, and the first Black Republican ever elected governor of any US state. He will succeed Ron DeSantis, who was term-limited after two terms, and he extends the Republican grip on the Florida governor’s mansion to an eighth consecutive election, a run stretching back to 1998.
Donalds, 48, has represented a deep-red seat based in Fort Myers and Naples in Congress since 2021, after two terms in the Florida House. He won a contested Republican primary in August with the backing of President Donald Trump, and he celebrated his victory on Tuesday night in Hollywood, Florida, promising to continue DeSantis’s policies on education, deregulation and immigration.
The closeness of the result is what will dominate the analysis. Just two years earlier, Trump had carried Florida by 13 percentage points, and four years earlier DeSantis had won re-election by nearly 20 points. On Tuesday, Donalds’s margin was barely one point, and for much of the evening Jolly led on the strength of early votes before Donalds overhauled him on Election Day, when Republican voters outnumbered Democrats by about 600,000.
Jolly, a former Republican congressman who switched parties, had run as a centrist Democrat, and his campaign drew hope from Democratic victories elsewhere on the night, including in Georgia and North Carolina. In the end, Florida’s Republican registration advantage — about 1.5 million voters — held, but only just, raising fresh questions about whether the state is quite as solidly Republican as the last two cycles suggested.
Money was a major feature of the race. Donalds amassed about $176 million in campaign donations, fuelled by billionaires and powerful industries including energy, private prisons and real estate, according to local reporting. Trump endorsed him early and held two late-October rallies in Florida for the Republican ticket, though Donalds’s campaign had in the closing weeks softened the prominence of that endorsement on its website as it courted more moderate voters.
The result also matters for what it says about the Republican Party’s future. Donalds is a prominent conservative voice in Congress and a close Trump ally, and his win gives the party a history-making standard-bearer in the country’s third-largest state. His running mate, former state senator Bryan Avila of Miami-Dade, will serve as lieutenant governor.
For Democrats, the narrow defeat will sting precisely because it was so close. Florida has not elected a Democratic governor in nearly 30 years, and the party had hoped that an unpopular incumbent president in Washington and a strong national night would finally break that run. Instead, they fell short by a single point in a state where they once believed they could compete again.
Attention now turns to the transition and the formal certification of the results, which remain unofficial until the state completes its canvass. Donalds is set to take the oath as Florida’s 47th governor on 5 January 2027, when he will take charge of a state government built over eight years of DeSantis’s leadership.
His first tests will come quickly: setting out a budget, deciding how far to press the deregulation and education agenda he campaigned on, and managing a state where Tuesday’s result showed that the Republican majority, while intact, is narrower than the party had assumed.
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