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Inside Washington
Florida’s gubernatorial race is heating up. In a sign that Republicans are eager to turn out their base and boost voting numbers, President Donald Trump plans to hold a rally on Friday with Republican candidate Byron Donalds in Fort Myers. Earlier this week, the Democratic Governors Association, or DGA, announced that it would funnel $1 million into Democratic candidate David Jolly, whom polls put within striking distance of his Republican opponent. Florida hasn’t elected a Democratic governor in 28 years. Can Jolly overcome major fundraising and voter disadvantages to break that streak? And does it help that he himself used to be a Republican House member, before leaving the party in 2018?
When I asked Fernand Amandi, the managing partner of public opinion firm Bendixen & Amandi, about the key issues in the race, his reply was simple: “There’s only one issue, and it is that Florida over the last 10 years has become totally unaffordable for Floridians.” Rising grocery costs and high gas prices due to the war with Iran have added to a long-brewing home insurance affordability crisis in the state. “All of these factors combined have created a Category 5 economic hurricane in Florida,” Amandi said. That’s likely why Jolly could beat Donalds, despite the plain numbers game that gives Republicans an advantage—there are 1.5 million more registered Republicans than Democrats in the state. Jolly used to be one of those Republicans, but he left the party in 2018 due to his opposition to Trump and his influence over the GOP. After identifying as an independent, Jolly officially joined the Democratic Party in April 2025, months before launching his campaign.
Donalds holds a two-point lead over Jolly in a recent poll from the University of North Florida’s Public Opinion Research Lab, which surveyed 1,471 likely voters. That’s well within the poll’s 2.8-point margin of error. The same poll also asked about the Senate race and found that GOP Senator Ashley Moody has a four-point lead over state Representative Angie Nixon, the Democratic nominee. Other polls show Donalds with a larger lead, including a poll from last week that found Donalds up by nine points. Though the candidates are different, both the gubernatorial race and the Senate race show the Democratic candidate closer than one might expect. Like Nixon, Jolly will need the support of no-party affiliation voters to overcome the state’s Democratic registration disadvantage.
Donalds has enjoyed a major lead in fundraising, which could help him overcome the unfavorable national environment for Republicans. “This whole year is sort of an interesting sort of experiment on how important money can be in overcoming deficiencies in campaigns,” explained Kevin Wagner, a professor of political science at Florida Atlantic University.
More than $170 million has poured into the race as of Tuesday. Donalds has $33.3 million more in cash on hand, with much of the money coming from special interest groups. His top donors are private prison corporations, sports betting groups, and the AI industry, according to an analysis from OpenSecrets. His third-largest donor is the Seminole Tribe, which holds a monopoly on sports betting in the state and earlier this month filed a lawsuit against online sports betting platform DraftKings. Meanwhile, the Sports Betting Alliance, which includes companies like DraftKings, gave Donalds nearly $1.3 million. Donalds’s fourth-largest donor is private prison company GEO Group, which is headquartered in the state and runs several immigration detention facilities. He has also received funding from NextEra Energy, the parent company of energy providers planning to construct data centers in the state. Donalds told voters in August that “there ain’t no bans coming” on data centers.
“There’s a huge loophole because Florida allows candidates to open affiliated PACs,” said Aubrey Jewett, a professor of political science at the University of Central Florida. These PACs can raise unlimited money, unlike campaigns, which can only receive $3,000 per donor. Billionaire hedge fund manager Ken Griffin, for example, gave $10 million to Donalds’s affiliated PAC in July. Though Jolly is behind in the cash game, he’s still been able to reach voters, especially with the help from the DGA. “He’s not competing on an even playing field in terms of money, but he’s gotten enough where he can at least get his message out,” Jewett said.
Voter frustration is the vital element keeping Jolly in the game. “If Democrats were ever going to have a year where they could compete,” Wagner said, “it would be a year that looks like this.”
—Emma Janssen
Outside Washington
The Trump administration is “again refusing” to cooperate with Minnesota law enforcement’s ongoing investigations into the killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti, the Minnesota Star-Tribune reported on Thursday. In July, the feds finally handed over “hard drives, body camera footage, and statements from immigration enforcement agents about the killings,” report Jeff Day and Sarah Nelson. But court filings last week, reviewed by the paper, indicate that state officials still don’t have “the cell phone of ICE agent Jonathan Ross, who shot Good” or “the firearms used [by Customs and Border Patrol officers] to shoot Pretti and a recording of a statement by one of the officers who shot him.” Minnesota U.S. Attorney Daniel Rosen apparently told Hennepin County Attorney Mary Moriarty last month that “challenges with D.C.” had halted all evidence sharing “indefinitely.”
Former Michigan Senator Debbie Stabenow has penned an op-ed backing Callie Barr in the state’s 1st district. “For the first time in nearly two decades, a Democrat has a shot at winning the 1st District,” wrote Stabenow in the Detroit Free Press on Thursday. There hasn’t been any public polling on this race since the primaries, and the idea that Barr could win is pretty striking, given that the Cook Political Report rates the district as “solidly Republican” (GOP +11), and Jack Bergman has held the seat since 2017. Stabenow, however, highlights Republican lawmakers’ disavowal of Bergman earlier this year after he endorsed someone in a state race that he’d allegedly promised to stay out of. Also on Thursday, The Detroit News reported that Bergman has for years been renting a D.C. home from one of his campaign donors, before the donor sold the home to Bergman’s daughter “in a favorable seller-financed deal this year.” In her op-ed, Stabenow praised Barr’s “life of public service” as an advocate for veterans.
—Heather Souvaine Horn
The Ideas Factory
On Thursday, more than 100 environmental and other advocacy groups signed a letter opposing a recent permitting bill introduced by Democratic Senators Sheldon Whitehouse and Martin Heinrich and Republican Senators Shelley Moore Capito and Mike Lee. While many climate advocates have expressed at least theoretical support for so-called permitting reform if it could help speed up renewable energy development, these groups say the current bill’s attempt to streamline the permitting process will instead “eviscerate public lands protections, prevent the public’s ability to protect themselves from harmful projects, cede management decisions to fossil fuel polluters, restrict Tribal consultation and cultural resource protections, limit judicial review, and further enable foreign-owned mining companies to seize public lands and contaminate our precious streams and rivers.” The Center for Biological Diversity issued a press release on Thursday with statements from three of the signatories. Said Olivia Juarez, the public land program director at GreenLatinos: “Here in Utah, where 73 percent of voters oppose fast-tracking oil, gas, and mining projects on public land, we say America’s worst ideas come from the desk of Sen. Mike Lee.” (If you want to read further about Whitehouse’s position in all this mess, try this or this.)
At the Roosevelt Institute, Charlie Eaton, Albina Gibadullina, Adam Goldstein, and Marie-Lou Laprise pen a report on the “four interconnected roles” that private equity now plays in the economy: “corporate raider, Main Street invader, monopoly builder, and shadow owner.” Write the authors: “Private equity is often misperceived as a check against corporate concentration. This may flow from lingering memories of hostile takeovers by corporate raiders in the 1980s.” In reality, they argue, “private equity has maintained a long-standing role in monopoly building through mergers and acquisitions (M&A) exit sales to other nonfinancial firms.”
—Heather Souvaine Horn
In Closing
Good Week: Hakeem Jeffries
This week brought lots of evidence that Democrats could win the House by an unexpectedly large margin. That would, of course, make Jeffries House speaker, but the details here are important. The gold-standard New York Times poll just found the Democratic generic ballot lead to be 11 percentage points. Forecasters just shifted numerous districts that Trump carried comfortably (NC-11, WI-03, IA-02, PA-10) from “toss up” to “leans Democratic.” And GOP super PACS are pulling money out of some of these Trumpy districts, suggesting surrender in them. The critical point here: The broadening battlefield suggests not just a Democratic takeover, but a potentially sizable Democratic majority, which would be easier for Jeffries to manage.
Bad Week: JD Vance
The vice president foolishly rushed to defend that loathsome ad from Ohio GOP gubernatorial candidate Vivek Ramaswamy, which smeared Democrat Amy Acton by using comments from her estranged mother, who stayed together with the stepfather who sexually abused her as a child. Many Republicans have now run from the ad. Vance’s bizarre decision to double down may prove to be a more consequential blunder than he realizes. If this saga contributes to a Democratic victory in the Ohio gubernatorial and Senate races—in Vance’s home state—it will raise further questions about his political judgment and staying power heading into 2028.
—Greg Sargent
Political Trivia Question of the Day
If both Amy Acton and Sherrod Brown win, it will be the first time that Ohio has simultaneously elected a Democratic governor and senator since what year? (Sign up for The TNR Blue Book to find the answer in tomorrow’s newsletter.)
—Michael Tomasky