Florida’s 2026 election presents voters with more than two separate contests for governor and the U.S. Senate. Taken together, the races offer a revealing test of which political coalition can actually turn its energy into votes.

Republicans have nominated two candidates who are closely aligned with each other, President Donald Trump and much of the governing philosophy Florida has followed under Gov. Ron DeSantis. Congressman Byron Donalds is running for governor, while incumbent U.S. Sen. Ashley Moody—appointed by DeSantis to replace Marco Rubio—is seeking voter approval to remain in the Senate.

Democrats, meanwhile, have nominated two candidates who agree on many social issues but come from strikingly different political traditions.

David Jolly, a former Republican congressman who only joined the Democratic Party in 2025, is running for governor as a centrist, pro-market Democrat. State Rep. Angie Nixon, a longtime Jacksonville community activist and labor organizer who joined the Democratic Socialists of America, is challenging Moody for the Senate on an unabashedly progressive economic platform.

That gives Florida voters two competing Republican and Democratic stories.

Republicans are offering ideological continuity and a largely unified MAGA ticket. Democrats are asking voters to support two different theories about how their party can become competitive again in a state that has moved decisively toward Republicans.

A unified Republican ticket

The philosophical connection between Donalds and Moody is clear.

Donalds’ campaign explicitly promises to implement Trump’s agenda in Florida. He supports lower taxes, fewer regulations, school choice, expanded immigration enforcement, gun rights and continuation of Florida’s six-week abortion restriction. He calls himself a “Second Amendment absolutist” and wants Florida to repeal the post-Parkland law that generally prevents people under 21 from purchasing firearms.

Moody brings a similar philosophy to the Senate. As Florida attorney general, she regularly aligned the state with DeSantis and Trump on immigration, abortion, education, policing and challenges to federal authority. In Washington, she has supported Trump’s nominees and tax agenda and opposed extending enhanced Affordable Care Act subsidies.

Conservative Heritage Action scores both Donalds and Moody at approximately 96 percent. Their political personalities differ—Donalds is more closely identified with MAGA economics and Trump’s political movement, while Moody’s identity is rooted more heavily in prosecution, policing and law enforcement—but their ideological direction is substantially the same.

Both support aggressive immigration enforcement. Donalds’ “Zero Tolerance, Zero Dollars” proposal would withdraw state funding from local governments, public agencies and nonprofits that refuse to cooperate with federal enforcement. Moody has similarly promoted expanded removals and greater federal-state cooperation.

Both emphasize free markets, lower taxes and regulatory restraint. Both oppose recreational marijuana legalization. Both support Florida’s existing abortion restrictions. Both favor preserving the state’s conservative education policies.

The Republican choice is therefore comparatively straightforward: elect Donalds to continue Florida’s conservative direction in Tallahassee and return Moody to Washington to reinforce the Trump agenda in the Senate.

It is less a coalition of competing Republican wings than a coordinated extension of the DeSantis-Trump era.

Two Democratic candidates—and two theories of change

Jolly and Nixon are much more complicated.

They broadly agree on restoring abortion rights, expanding healthcare access, increasing public-school funding, protecting LGBTQ Floridians, addressing climate change, reforming campaign finance and rejecting the harshest aspects of Trump-era immigration enforcement.

But agreement on those issues does not make them ideologically interchangeable.

Jolly explicitly rejects socialism and the Democratic Socialists of America. Nixon joined the DSA, although she has made clear that she does not accept every position in its platform and does not support defunding police, abolishing all prisons, open borders or noncitizen voting.

Their fundamental disagreement is over how extensively government should intervene in the economy.

Jolly wants to preserve capitalism as Florida’s economic engine while using state government to address market failures. He supports Medicaid expansion, greater public-school investment, stronger regulation of school vouchers, affordable-housing programs and a state catastrophic insurance fund that would remove hurricane risk from the private homeowners-insurance market.

At the same time, he talks about attracting financial, technology and creative industries to Florida. His approach is pro-growth, pro-business and institutionally reformist.

Nixon’s platform goes substantially further. She supports Medicare for All, universal childcare and prekindergarten, tuition-free public college and trade school, student-debt cancellation, federally guaranteed paid leave, stronger union rights, national rent stabilization and a 5 percent annual wealth tax on billionaires.

She would prohibit private-equity firms from buying single-family homes, abolish ICE and reconstruct immigration enforcement, end for-profit prisons, place stricter limits on police surveillance and end unconditional military assistance to Israel.

Jolly proposes correcting capitalism’s failures. Nixon proposes redistributing significantly more economic power from corporations and billionaires to workers, tenants and publicly funded institutions.

Where Jolly departs from the Democratic mainstream

Jolly is not simply a less outspoken progressive.

His candidacy challenges parts of the modern Democratic coalition because he came to the party from the center-right rather than through its traditional labor, civil-rights or progressive organizations.

He served in Congress as a Republican from 2014 through 2017. During that period, he opposed the Affordable Care Act, identified as pro-life and compiled a lifetime environmental score of only 13 percent from the League of Conservation Voters. The organization placed him on its “Dirty Dozen” list in 2016 and accused him of voting against important clean-air and clean-water protections.

That record deserves particular scrutiny because Jolly now campaigns on a much different environmental platform.

He says Florida must accept climate science, expand renewable energy, protect beaches and state parks, improve water quality and make sustained investments in coastal resilience. He connects climate change directly to hurricane risk, sea-level rise and Florida’s homeowners-insurance crisis.

The current platform is much closer to mainstream Democratic environmental policy than his congressional record was. The unanswered question is whether voters view that change as credible political evolution or a campaign-year repositioning.

Jolly’s approach to hyperscale AI data centers also deserves clarification. He is not promoting their unrestricted expansion. He has called for a statewide moratorium on new data-center construction until Florida establishes protections for its water supply, electrical grid and surrounding communities.

That places him closer to progressive concerns than his technology-oriented economic message might otherwise suggest. But unlike Nixon, who frames concentrated technology power as a broader threat requiring antitrust enforcement, strong labor protections and potentially a halt to construction until federal guardrails are adopted, Jolly continues to speak favorably about Florida becoming a leading technology economy.

His position is therefore not anti-technology. It is that Florida should pause hyperscale development until the state can accommodate it responsibly.

Donalds, by contrast, supports allowing data centers to expand under rules requiring developers to absorb their own electricity and water costs and avoid locating hyperscale facilities next to residential neighborhoods.

Nixon and the energetic progressive wing

Nixon represents a different political gamble.

Her primary victory demonstrated that Florida’s progressive wing has organization, enthusiasm and the ability to overcome a major financial disadvantage. She defeated Alexander Vindman despite his enormous fundraising advantage by emphasizing affordability, healthcare, childcare, education and the lived experiences of working families.

Her campaign also draws energy from organized labor, democratic-socialist activists, younger voters, racial-justice organizations and Black community networks developed through years of work in Jacksonville.

That support should not be reduced to the assumption that Black voters are ideologically uniform. They are not. Nixon’s strength comes more specifically from combining a working-class economic message with representation, community organizing and a willingness to confront institutions that many voters believe have ignored them.

Her candidacy reflects an increasingly visible progressive argument: Democrats will not rebuild enthusiasm by moderating their policies or pursuing disaffected Republicans. They must instead give working-class people—especially younger, Black, Latino and economically marginalized voters—something large enough to vote for.

The difficulty is that Florida is not a Democratic primary electorate.

Republicans have accumulated a major voter-registration advantage. Florida has not elected a Democratic governor since 1994, and Democrats have not won a statewide race since 2018. Nixon’s proposals may produce exceptional enthusiasm inside the progressive base while simultaneously making it more difficult to attract independents, moderate Democrats and Republican defectors.

That tension is visible in the polling.

Jolly is outperforming Nixon

The broader polling average currently places Donalds at approximately 44.2 percent and Jolly at 40.3 percent, giving Donalds an advantage of roughly four points. Individual surveys vary considerably.

A Democratic Governors Association poll conducted by Hart Research found Jolly ahead 46 percent to 45 percent—a statistical tie within its four-point margin of error. The University of North Florida found Donalds ahead 46 percent to 41 percent, while the James Madison Institute placed him ahead 45 percent to 38 percent.

The governor’s race remains Republican-leaning, but it is competitive enough that the Cook Political Report recently moved it from Solid Republican to Likely Republican.

The Senate polling tells a different story.

Moody leads Nixon by approximately 9.5 points in the polling average. The most recent University of North Florida survey found Moody ahead 50 percent to 42 percent. Earlier public polls placed Moody’s advantage between eight and 13 points.

No published general-election survey currently shows Nixon tied with or ahead of Moody.

The comparison suggests that Jolly is presently outperforming Nixon statewide by approximately five to seven points. It does not prove that centrism is always a superior Democratic strategy, but it provides evidence that Jolly’s positioning may fit Florida’s current electorate better.

His background potentially allows him to hold most Democratic voters while competing for independents, moderate Republicans and voters who once supported the GOP but no longer identify with Trump or the direction of the state party.

Nixon’s path depends more heavily on transforming the electorate: increasing turnout among younger, working-class, Black and progressive voters who frequently do not participate at the same rate in midterm elections.

Will Florida Democrats split their tickets?

Florida voters are not required to accept either party’s candidates as a package.

A voter could support Jolly for governor and Moody for Senate. Another could vote for Donalds and Nixon. But the most politically plausible split-ticket bloc may be voters who see Jolly as an acceptable centrist alternative to MAGA governance while viewing Nixon’s economic and foreign-policy platform as too far left.

That group could include independents, moderate Democrats and disaffected Republicans who remain unwilling to support a democratic-socialist-aligned Senate candidate.

The opposite risk exists within the Democratic coalition. Progressive voters energized by Nixon may see Jolly as too cautious, too pro-business or insufficiently trustworthy because of his Republican record. If they do not believe Jolly represents meaningful change, some may support Nixon but leave the governor’s race blank—or not vote at all.

More moderate voters could do the reverse.

That makes Democratic unity considerably more fragile than Republican unity. Donalds and Moody are asking substantially the same voters to support substantially the same governing philosophy. Jolly and Nixon must persuade voters that two very different Democratic philosophies can coexist on the same ballot.

Trump’s uncertain coattails

Republicans nevertheless face their own turnout question.

Donalds and Moody have tied themselves closely to Trump at a time when his national standing is weak. A Reuters/Ipsos poll released in late August placed Trump’s approval at 33 percent, matching the lowest point of his presidency in that series. Nate Silver’s national average placed Trump’s net approval near minus 19.5 points as of August 28.

Those are national numbers, not a Florida forecast. Florida remains more Republican than the country overall, and Trump retains strong loyalty among MAGA voters.

But low presidential approval creates two risks for Donalds and Moody.

First, voters dissatisfied with Trump’s handling of the economy, inflation, gasoline prices or foreign policy may treat the midterm election as an opportunity to check his power. Second, Trump’s name will not be on the ballot. MAGA voters who reliably turn out for him may not automatically participate with the same intensity for candidates seeking to continue his agenda.

Democrats face the inverse opportunity. Opposition to Trump may energize voters who otherwise would not participate in a midterm election. Jolly may also benefit from voters who oppose Trump but remain uncomfortable with the progressive wing represented by Nixon.

Yet Democratic anger alone is not a turnout operation. Younger voters, infrequent voters and economically disaffected residents must register, remain engaged and actually cast ballots. Energy expressed at rallies, on social media or during a surprising primary victory does not count unless it reaches the voting booth.

Two races that could produce two different verdicts

Florida could ultimately deliver a unified decision by electing Donalds and Moody. It could produce a Democratic upset by electing Jolly and Nixon. Or it could split its ticket and send a more complicated message.

A Jolly victory alongside a Moody victory would suggest that Florida voters were willing to reject MAGA-style governance in Tallahassee without embracing the progressive economic movement nationally.

A Donalds victory alongside a Nixon upset would be more ideologically unusual, but it would suggest that populist energy can cross traditional assumptions about Florida’s electorate.

Victories by both Republicans would confirm that Florida’s Republican registration advantage and ideological transformation remain decisive.

Victories by both Democrats would represent one of the most significant political reversals in modern Florida history.

The central question is whether Jolly’s coalition of Democrats, independents and disaffected Republicans can outperform the state’s Republican baseline—and whether Nixon’s progressive energy can expand the electorate enough to overcome it.

Polls measure the electorate pollsters expect. Voters determine the electorate that actually appears.

Regardless of ideology, party or preferred candidate, Florida’s future should be decided by the people who participate. Study the candidates, examine both their current promises and their previous records, and then get to the polls and vote.