Josh Weil, who provided a jolt of hope and excitement to Democrats in Florida — and around the country — during an ultimately unsuccessful congressional campaign earlier this year, is hoping to parlay that experience to victory in an even bigger contest: U.S. Senate.
Weil announced Wednesday that he’s seeking his party’s nomination to challenge the state’s appointed senator, Republican Ashley Moody.
In an interview, Weil said he’s the candidate and 2026 is the year to end the Democrats’ long losing streak in major statewide elections. The increasingly Republican leanings of Florida voters can be overcome, he said.
The public school math teacher’s formula for winning: harness what he said is voters’ dissatisfaction with policies from President Donald Trump and Gov. Ron DeSantis plus building on the fundraising strategy and donor database that fueled his candidacy in the April 1 special congressional election in northeastern Florida.
He plans to depict Moody as a senator whose only priority is complying with what Trump and the Republican Party leadership demands. Moody was twice elected statewide as attorney general, and was appointed by DeSantis to fill the vacancy left by Marco Rubio, when he resigned from the Senate to become Trump’s secretary of state.
“A lot of voters from across party lines are tired of feeling like the people in Washington are working for themselves, that they’re working for lobbyists, that they’re working for a big party machine, and that they’re not working for the people who elected them,” Weil said.
“I’m not a big fan of people who just act as rubber stamps for an administration,” Weil said. “I’ll give her credit if I see it, but I haven’t seen anything yet.”
Issues
Explaining why he wants to be a U.S. senator in Washington, D.C., Weil pointed to policies emanating from Tallahassee and cited DeSantis, but not Trump or Moody.
“The Republican supermajority in Tallahassee has not just been absent or negligent. They have been actively making the situation worse, and many of the issues are impacting Floridians, whether it’s housing, whether it’s insurance, whether it’s our public schools,” he said.
“Americans need relief. Americans need someone to fix this broken system, and Floridians more than anyone. It’s become nearly impossible for people to continue to afford to live and survive here in Florida under the DeSantis administration.”
In terms of national issues, he said the federal government needs to “raise the floor for all states, particularly Florida with housing regulation, with insurance regulation.” He said he would try to repeal an 80-year-old federal law that puts regulation of insurance companies in states’ hands.
And he expressed support for a government-run health program. Weil said people are “deeply concerned about cuts to Social Security, Medicaid, Medicare, and the VA program, and of those could be resolved by passing Medicare for All, ensuring there is obstacle-free and barrier-free access to health care for every American.”
Previous campaigns
Weil is best known for his candidacy in the April 1 special election in the Sixth Congressional District to replace Mike Waltz, who resigned to join the Trump administration.
Weil lost by 14 percentage points, but he and many other Democrats tout the results.
In the 2024 general election, Republican Waltz won by 33 points and Trump won the territory in the 6th District by 30 points.
There’s been extensive, often conflicting and inconclusive analysis of the meaning of the results.
The winner of the special election, Randy Fine, was polarizing and disliked by some Republicans, including by DeSantis. The governor said of Fine — a member of the Florida Legislature until he won the special election — that “he repels people.”
With little else on the election calendar in the early months of 2025, national Democrats devoted time, energy and money to the race, which received enormous publicity. Weil benefitted from Democrats who reacted to the early part of the Trump presidency by sending him campaign money.
“People saw the way we run our campaign. They saw (that) we knocked on over half a million doors. We got over 4 million phone calls made. They saw the type of grassroots efforts that went into driving that success and leaders and organizers across the state are excited for the Josh Weil show to come to town,” Weil said.
He’s already been campaigning, unofficially. He was a gold-level sponsor at the Broward Democratic Party’s annual fundraising dinner last month.
Weil pointed to the congressional campaign’s “incredible fundraising numbers,” more than $15 million in four months from around 400,000 individual donors.
He said a Senate race would cost $100 million.
That’s doable, Weil said, even though there will be many Democratic candidates across the country competing for financial support next year, unlike this year’s special election environment.
“We have what I comfortably believe is the largest donor list and data bank in the country right now and an infrastructure that can support it to reach out to people on a daily basis across this country to ensure consistent fundraising over the next 17 months. I don’t know any other candidate who has that,” Weil said.
Weil was for a time a candidate for U.S. Senate in 2022, but dropped out and didn’t qualify for the primary ballot.
The candidate
Weil, 40, hasn’t been a Democrat for long. He was a Republican in 2016, and said he voted against Trump in the presidential primary that year. By 2018, he said he became a Democrat so he could vote for gubernatorial candidate Andrew Gillum in that year’s primary.
Weil was born on Long Island in New York, but moved to Florida when he was “very, very small” and grew up in Orlando where he lives now. A single father, his two sons are with him every other week.
“I don’t think I’m the most exciting guy,” he said. “I’m a single father. I’ve got two boys. We play (the collectible card game) Magic: The Gathering. We watch sports…. They’re the biggest part of my life and my No. 1 job. Even when I’m elected to the U.S. Senate, my No. 1 job will still be father.”
When people see Weil, some are struck by the similarity in appearance — dark hair and a beard — to Donald Trump Jr., son of the president.
He doesn’t seem thrilled by the comparison. “I have heard that before. I find it greatly insulting, but you know, I have been asked by one or two people to find a less shiny hair product, so maybe that’ll help at some point.”
Anthony Man can be reached at aman@sunsentinel.com and can be found @browardpolitics on Bluesky, Threads, Facebook and Mastodon.