David Jolly Running for Governor and Away From His Record

Weeks after becoming a Democrat, ex-congressman seeks Florida’s highest office.

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 terroris...