(Video) David Jolly - Democratic Candidate for Florida Governor
- Indivisible Boca Raton
- 4 days ago
- 5 min read
Updated: 3 days ago
Indivisible Boca Raton Hosts The Democratic Frontrunner For Governor, Making His Case To 400 Palm Beach County Voters
David Jolly is running for Governor of Florida, and heading into this forum, he is the frontrunner for the Democratic nomination in a state Democrats have not carried at the gubernatorial level in more than two decades.
The forum drew roughly 400 people to the Dr. Andre Fladell Civic Center in Delray Beach.
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From the 13th District to the ballot for Governor
Jolly represented Florida's 13th Congressional District as a Republican from 2014 to 2017. He left the party in 2018 to register as an independent, and registered as a Democrat in 2025 before launching his campaign for governor. In between, he built a national following as an anti-Trump commentator on MSNBC.
He is a fifth-generation Floridian, born in Pinellas County, who also lived in Miami-Dade, graduated high school in Pasco County, and spent time in Pensacola. He and his wife, Laura, are raising two young children in Pinellas County. His running mate is Gwen Graham, who represented Florida’s 2nd Congressional District and served alongside Jolly in Congress before either of them changed parties.
Jolly is the frontrunner in the Democratic primary; the winner is expected to face Republican Congressman Byron Donalds, the frontrunner on the GOP side, in November.
Jolly’s central argument is that his own positions have stayed largely fixed while the Republican Party moved away from them. “I used to be one,” he told the room, framing his years inside the party as the reason he believes he can reach voters a lifelong Democrat cannot. On immigration specifically, he said his views track closely with where George W. Bush, Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush once stood, and argued it is the party that has since moved, not him.
The Pitch: Three Values, One Broken System
Jolly organized his remarks around three values he returned to again and again: the economy should work for everyone, government can do its part to improve people’s lives, particularly on housing, health care and education, and everyone’s rights should be protected and their dignity celebrated.
On housing and insurance, he proposed a state catastrophic fund that would move hurricane and wind coverage out of the private insurance market and into a state sovereign wealth fund, a step he said could cut premiums by 60 to 70 percent. He noted he had introduced comparable legislation at the federal level while still a Republican member of Congress, and said his old colleagues now call the idea “catastrophic fund socialism.” His response: “I just call it cheaper insurance.”
On health care, he called for Florida to join the 40 states that have already expanded Medicaid, while also pushing to scale up direct-delivery primary care clinics in underserved communities regardless of a patient’s ability to pay.
On education, he criticized Florida’s voucher program as a system with almost no accountability, arguing that most recipients were already enrolled in private schools before the program existed and did not need the financial help it claims to provide. He called for capping voucher-funded tuition at the value of the voucher itself, eliminating for-profit charter schools outright, and requiring any school that takes public money to meet the same standards public schools are held to.
To illustrate what he meant by government doing its part, Jolly described a meeting with a utility company representative who, by his account, arrived expecting an adversary and instead heard him say plainly that he wanted a shift to clean and renewable energy and a fight for ratepayers. The representative agreed it was exactly what the company wanted to do too, Jolly said, but told him the governor and the president would come down on the company if it moved on that publicly. “Why? Because we have the most corrupt system in Tallahassee of any state in the country,” Jolly told the room.
What The Audience Wanted To Know
The Indivisible Boca Raton forum was a real question and answer session, not a stump speech with softball questions, and the audience used it that way.
Asked how he would compete with a Republican opponent he said has raised over $100 million, much of it from private equity, utility, casino and school-choice interests, Jolly pointed to a base of roughly 42,000 individual donors spread across all 50 states and all 67 Florida counties, and said the campaign is scaling up a field operation built on person-to-person contact rather than television advertising.
Asked about immigration enforcement, Jolly said he would suspend the state’s 287(g) agreements with federal immigration authorities pending stronger due process protections, and said that if the Alligator Alcatraz detention facility is still operating when he takes office, he would move to close it on his first day.
Asked directly whether he would sign a death warrant as governor, Jolly did not give a simple answer. “I don’t know,” he said, citing well-documented disparities in the criminal justice system, and said his first act on the issue would be ordering a comprehensive review of existing death penalty cases before making any final decision.
Boynton Beach resident Share Ross asked about the data centers and Flock camera networks spreading across Palm Beach County, and told Jolly bluntly that her family’s backup plan, if he loses, is to leave the country. Jolly said he has called for a moratorium on new data center construction until the state addresses water use, labor impact and privacy concerns, and separately called for a judicial-warrant requirement before law enforcement could pull footage from Flock cameras.
Asked how he intends to reach younger voters given how much of the room skewed older, Jolly did not pretend the answer was simple. He pointed to more than 100 campus organizers and Gen Z volunteers already working with the campaign, but acknowledged that just putting a 53-year-old with salt-and-pepper hair on TikTok was not, on its own, a strategy.
One of the people who stood to ask a question was Luis Garcia, the retired firefighter and paramedic running for Florida House District 91, whom Indivisible Boca Raton has hosted for his own candidate forum. Garcia asked Jolly whether he would back freshman legislators willing to challenge what Garcia called the Democratic Party's own old guard. Jolly's answer was a pledge to meet individually with every legislator from both parties after taking office, rather than governing around the ones already in power.
The Bet Jolly Is Making
Florida last elected a Democratic governor in 1994. Jolly's case rests less on any single issue than on a wager that enough independents and disaffected Republicans are ready to cross over on affordability, insurance, education and government accountability that a former Republican congressman can credibly ask them to do it, and that he is the one who can ask. He pointed to Andy Beshear's win in Kentucky and Steve Bullock's in Montana as proof the model has worked elsewhere in red states.
South Florida Sun Sentinel columnist Steve Bousquet, covering this same Delray Beach forum wrote that the longer Jolly spoke, the louder and more animated he became, and that the crowd responded in kind.
What Indivisible Boca Raton's members got, was an hour of direct, unscripted answers from the current frontrunner for the Democratic nomination for governor, on the record, to the questions they chose to ask him.
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