Florida primaries favor moderate Democrats; Donalds leads GOP governor's race

Florida Democrats reject progressive playbook that won elsewhere this summer

Florida voters cast ballots Tuesday in primaries that will set the major-party nominees for governor and the unexpired portion of Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s U.S. Senate term. On the Democratic side, retired Army Lt. Col. Alex Vindman, a witness during President Donald Trump’s first impeachment, leads state Rep. Angie Nixon in polls for the Senate primary to challenge Republican Sen. Ashley Moody. In the Democratic gubernatorial field, former Republican congressman David Jolly, who switched parties last year, is the most prominent name in a crowded race. Republicans appear headed toward nominating U.S. Rep. Byron Donalds to succeed term-limited Gov. Ron DeSantis, with The Guardian reporting Donalds polling near 50 percent against three rivals struggling to break 15 percent.

The Democratic frontrunners have built their campaigns around moderation rather than the progressive liberalism that powered Democratic primary wins this summer in New York, Michigan and Minnesota. In a March interview cited by The Guardian, Vindman cast himself as a “different kind of Democrat” who carries concealed firearms and holds a permit, and said his general-election path runs through “pre-Trump-era Republicans that feel homeless.” Vindman’s Senate primary messaging has run under a “Florida First” banner emphasizing the economy, Social Security stability for seniors and an anti-corruption message in Washington. “My race is entirely focused on my opponent. I’m not focused on anything besides Ashley Moody,” Vindman said. “I feel a huge amount of support and kind of a new hope for a balanced politics in this state.” DeSantis appointed Moody in January 2025 to fill Rubio’s seat after Rubio’s elevation to Secretary of State.

Jolly’s moderation has produced explicit departures from national Democratic positions on cultural issues. In an Associated Press interview last week, Jolly said he had no plans to seek the reversal of DeSantis’s ban on transgender girls and women playing on female teams at Florida’s public schools and universities. “I don’t think we should have biologically born men playing in competitive sports,” Jolly said — comments The Guardian noted are at odds with positions taken by progressive primary winners elsewhere, including Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed’s pledge to be “a lion” for LGBTQ+ rights. The likely Republican nominee, Donalds, has nonetheless labeled Jolly a “radical liberal” in advertisements saturating Florida television, a framing Jolly has deflected by redirecting attention to “soaring costs for property, insurance, gas and groceries.”

The Republican governor’s primary is the other marquee contest on Tuesday’s ballot, and Donalds’s lead is being contested most prominently by Lt. Gov. Jay Collins, a former Green Beret who has pitched himself as a working-class alternative to the congressman. “I mow my own yard. I gas up my own truck. I live the same Florida life that working families live,” Collins told reporters at a Thursday news conference that cast Donalds as “an absentee Washington elite.” Collins’s framing echoed Jolly’s on the Democratic side: “We won’t win with vibes. We’re certainly not going to win with celebrity.” The other Republicans in the race are James Fishback, a far-right candidate whose primary campaign has been rocky, and former Florida House Speaker Paul Renner, a DeSantis ally who has declined to make an endorsement in the primary. The Collins-Donalds split mirrors a tension inside Florida Republicanism between DeSantis’s localist governing style and Trump’s national-movement approach.

The Democratic calculus rests heavily on Florida’s political composition. Aubrey Jewett, a political scientist at the University of Central Florida, told The Guardian that Florida’s ideological mix — roughly 40 percent moderate, 40 percent conservative and 20 percent liberal — has held steady for decades, undercutting any attempt to transplant the progressive playbook that worked elsewhere. The “progressive” or “socialist” label, Jewett said, still carries a “negative connotation” with many Florida voters, even on specific issues — such as the state’s passage of a $15-an-hour minimum wage increase and medical marijuana legalization — that Democrats elsewhere describe as progressive. “Unlike some of the big battles we’ve seen nationwide between the progressive socialist wing of the Democratic party and the moderate wing, I don’t think that’s going to be the case in Florida,” Jewett said. “The voters will sort it out but from a Democratic perspective it would be good for them if they got the more moderate candidates, and I think that’s what most Democrats feel.”

Nikki Fried, the Florida Democratic Party chair and the party’s most recent statewide winner — she won the agriculture commissioner race in 2018 — argued that the Florida electorate is more conservative inside the Democratic coalition than outside it, and that Democratic candidates must assemble a coalition of “first responders to veterans, Teach for America alumni, and just everyday Floridians who are frustrated with the state affairs here.” She pointed to DeSantis’s mid-cycle partisan congressional redistricting, which reduced Democratic-held seats among Florida’s 28 congressional districts from eight to four, as a potential long-term liability for Republicans. “Right now, the Republicans have a nasty primary for governor that is going to decrease their motivation to turn out in November,” Fried said. She added that roughly one-third of Florida voters are independents and “have been breaking for Democrats in record numbers” since Trump’s second term began, estimating that independents were breaking for Democratic candidates by 60 to 70 percent in recent contests.

Florida’s closed-primary rules confine Democratic and Republican voters to their own ballots Tuesday, but both Vindman and Jolly are already positioning themselves for the independent and disaffected-Republican voters they will need to attract in November. The fall general election will test whether moderation — from both parties — can overcome Florida’s documented shift in recent years from a swing state to reliably Republican territory.

Tuesday’s Florida primaries follow preview coverage MSI published a day earlier laying out the major-party fields and the broader contest to succeed Gov. DeSantis.