David Jolly Running for Governor and Away From His Record » The American Spectator | USA News and PoliticsThe American Spectator

David Jolly was elected as a Republican to represent Florida’s 13th Congressional District in a 2014 special election before serving an additional one full term. His brief tenure in Congress ended after the 2016 election, when he lost to Charlie Crist. Crist, who had served as Florida’s Republican governor before running for Senate as an independent in 2010, later became a Democrat and went on to beat Republican Jolly. Crist also later lost the 2022 governor’s race in a landslide to incumbent Gov. Ron DeSantis.

Jolly has now repeated a partisan and ideological shift just as dramatic as that of his 2016 opponent. He has disowned his Republican past and the platform he once ran on.

Jolly began parlaying his party affiliation into a prominent role in liberal media, including a position at MSNBC. He once remarked, “I say this as a Republican, Republicans will never do anything.” In April of 2025, Jolly changed his party registration to become a Democrat. Several weeks later, he announced that he was running for governor with this new affiliation.

“I am still not sure I am a politician,” remarked Jolly at his campaign announcement in an attempt to cast himself as an outsider. He followed up on his supposed outsider credentials by emphasizing that he has decades of experience in politics: “I was a long-time staffer, I was an attorney on Capitol Hill, I was a political consultant.”

David Jolly’s social media accounts, including another X account with over 200,000 followers, are no longer available. Jolly’s new X account has no content prior to the announcement of his gubernatorial campaign on June 5. 

Ironically, the web page he used for his Republican campaigns a decade ago is now being used for his gubernatorial run. Comparing the page’s older and newer versions, as well as Jolly’s wider public record, reveals the depth of the disparity between the Jolly of then and the Jolly of now.

During the 2016 election cycle, Jolly focused on defending the existence of the terrorist prison Guantanamo Bay against a plan for the closure of the detention facility by President Barack Obama. His gubernatorial website headlines a subsection “Treating Everyone with Kindness, Dignity and Respect.”

Jolly’s campaign website states that “Florida should ban the sale of assault weapons, require universal and comprehensive background checks, explore licensing, and preserve and expand the red flag laws enacted following the tragedy at Parkland.” Twelve years ago, he accepted the endorsement of the NRA with open arms.

The David Jolly who ran for office as a Republican believed “life begins at conception.” As a member of the House, Jolly co-sponsored a bill that would formally extend the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment to the unborn. His gubernatorial website now maintains a section on “restoring reproductive freedom,” which holds that “Roe v. Wade and Casey v. Planned Parenthood provided a responsible, balanced framework” that must be codified into Florida law. 

Jolly’s old campaign website reflected an immigration position particularly hardline among Republicans of 2014, stating, “[I]mmigration reform while we continue to have a porous border where more people can continue to enter our country illegally ultimately ignores the very basic principle that people in our country illegally should not be given special treatment.” In a 2016 debate for his House seat, Jolly said, “I don’t support a pathway to citizenship for people who came here illegally.”

The Jolly 2026 campaign aims to relax anti-illegal immigration efforts taken by DeSantis. In a recent interview with local media, Jolly even said that he “does not consider crossing the border without legal status a crime.” 

In the same interview, Jolly emphasized his wish to tighten Florida campaign finance laws. In his last run for public office, 95.44 percent of the over $2 million he raised originated from large individual donors or PACs.

Jolly recently joined other Florida Democrats for a “Save Social Security” townhall to oppose any attempts at entitlement reform. In 2014, the Florida Democratic Party itself accused Jolly of seeking to “privatize Social Security.” The party was lying, according to the fact-checker PolitiFact, but Jolly recognized that “we have to have long-term entitlement reform.”

Jolly voted to support school choice via voucher programs to empower students to pursue private education regardless of their financial capability. Soon after his campaign announcement, Jolly claimed another change in position and said that he now wants to “end universal school vouchers.”

In response, Jolly denies any comparison of his shifts in loyalty to those of his former opponent, Crist. He claims that while Crist’s journey “took about 10 months” and “was very transactional,” Jolly “changed [his] mind … over the course of 15 years.”

David Jolly’s official campaign biography still lauds his “bipartisan approach.” As the man himself quipped in 2016, “[J]ust because you’ve been a member of both parties doesn’t make you bipartisan.”

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