Former Congressman David Jolly, who’s been traveling the state laying the groundwork for a 2026 run for governor, plans to announce his decision in the coming days.
“I expect a decision this week,” he said in a brief interview Saturday night at the Broward Democratic Party’s annual fundraising dinner. “I’ll make a final decision and make it public this week.”
A Jolly candidacy for the Democratic nomination seems all but certain. He’s been holding town halls throughout Florida and meeting with grassroots activists, elected officials and people who can help with fundraising.
Jolly said Broward, the county with the largest number of registered Democrats in the state, is essential to a statewide campaign.
“In many ways the governorship runs through Broward County. If we have (robust) turnout numbers among Broward Democrats but also among Black voters here in Broward and in South Florida, we win the governorship,” Jolly said. “And so I think what you’re seeing here is a coalition emerging that realizes we can win statewide in ’26, but we’ve got to do our work to turn voters out and to persuade voters who maybe haven’t been with us before to be with us.”
Jolly is from Pinellas County, but is familiar to many Democratic activists from his post-congressional time as a political commentator on MSNBC, a favorite cable news source for Democrats.
He was a Republican for most of his life. While he was still a Republican member of Congress, he urged Donald Trump to drop out of his first presidential race in 2015, after Trump said Muslims should be banned from entering the U.S.
In 2018, Jolly left the Republican Party and became a no-party affiliation/independent voter. In April, he registered as a Democrat and Florida 2026, which can be used for raising and spending political money.
The Florida 2026 website highlights a range of issues Jolly would highlight during a campaign, including the high cost of property insurance, inadequate public school funding, “restoring reproductive freedom,” — which means abortion rights — campaign finance and ethics reform, and reducing gun violence.
At the Democratic dinner, Jolly and his wife Laura sat at a table with Mitchell and Sharon Berger.
Mitchell Berger, a Fort Lauderdale lawyer who has decades of political experience as a major national fundraiser for Democratic presidential, gubernatorial and U.S. Senate candidates, was a close associate of former Vice President Al Gore, has previously said he’d be fully committed to a Jolly candidacy.
Anthony Man can be reached at aman@sunsentinel.com and can be found @browardpolitics on Bluesky, Threads, Facebook and Mastodon.
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