David Jolly gave a crowd of a couple of hundred Democrats something to cheer about in a town hall-style appearance Wednesday evening at Palm Coast United Methodist Church.
“I have proudly shared my affiliation with the Democratic coalition and my alliance with the Democratic Party for the last eight years or so,” the former Republican member of Congress and long-time political analyst for MSNBC told the audience. “It gets better. Ready for this? Because as of about two weeks ago, I’m a proud registered Florida Democrat.”
Two weeks ago he also launched an electoral committee, Florida 2026, and now says he’s “actively considering running for governor.” Based on his polished, carefully calibrated and stump-like appearance in Palm Coast–and based on the rousing response he received–his announcement appears to be a matter of when, not if. His delivery was flawless, confident, and clearly rehearsed. But he was in front of a friendly, at times adoring crowd desperate for a knight. Jolly only happens to be a white one.
He’s is an attorney, a former lobbyist and a former aide to U.S. Rep. C.W. Bill Young, the Republican who died in 2013. Jolly won the special election to replace Young, beating Democrat Alex Sink in a close contest. He described himself as a “Bush 41 Republican” by then who, “by the time I was coming up, the Tea Party wave was already kind of upon us, and I was pushing back against the attack on government.”
In other words he had the misfortune of being a centrist in an increasingly uncentrist party that rewards shrillness over policy or compromise. He entered the race for U.S. Senate two years later, thinking he’d face Ron DeSantis and others, only to withdraw before the filing deadline when Marco Rubio chose to run again.
Jolly contested his congressional seat instead, losing it to Charlie Crist–himself a former Republican. Jolly returned to private practice, quit the Republican Party in 2018, joined MSNBC as an analyst, and this year signaled he was interested in a run for governor in 2026.
He gained national prominence in Congress in December 2015 when, six months after Donald Trump’s elevator descent to his first electoral run, Jolly asked for Trump to withdraw from the race. Days earlier Trump had called for a blanket ban on Muslims’ entry into the United States following a mass shooting in San Bernadino, Calif., even though the shooting was perpetrated by an American citizen who happened to be Muslim, along with his wife (a green card holder from Pakistan).
When an American citizen and his wife, both of Pakistani descent, killed 14 people at a local government Christmas party in San Bernadino, Calif.
“I stood on the House floor and said, Mr. Speaker, I stand here today as a born again Christian, believing in the saving grace of the God that I call my Christ,” Jolly told the crowd at the Methodist church, recalling that signature moment. “And the reason I get to do that today among the Congress and among the country is because of the fundamental freedom and personal protections to people’s religion, to their speech, to their association, to their assembly. And if we start having a litmus test on people’s faith, we’ve abandoned some basic constitutional protections.”
Actually his five-minute speech that day had been a two-pronged attack, one on then-President Barack Obama’s foreign policy and his “forgettable” pledge to take on ISIS, and one on Trump’s proposed Muslim ban.
Of course Jolly did not mention the attack on Obama, which in that crowd would have been taken as an offense greater than if he’d blasphemed the crucifix behind him.
His intention with that congressional moment was also two-pronged (there’s always a bit of studied strategy behind Jolly’s speeches): attacking Trump was the crowd’s red meat. But he was intent on defining himself as an evangelical, born-again Christian in spite of his adopted party affiliation, just as he would later throw markers as a gun-friendly centrist (“responsible gun owners are not the problem”) who wants to “provide for law enforcement.” .
In a state where Republican registrations have surged to a 1.5 million-voter advantage, perhaps only a praying blue dog Democrat has a chance.
“I think it’s okay for Democrats to talk about faith. You’re going to hear me talk about it a little bit,” he said. He talked about it a lot, speaking the word “faith” 20 times in 90 minutes and as if cautioning the Democratic crowd to leave off liberals’ perceived hostility to professed Christianity.
“I’m a preacher’s kid. I’m a person of deep and abiding Christian faith,” Jolly said. “I’m not here to evangelize my personal faith in the public square, but we are in a church, and so I want to say I am not a candidate. I’m not here to advance any partisan agenda, but we’re going to talk about some hard truths about our politics and our political parties, and that’s okay, because we have to talk about that.”
To the crowd’s delight, he then talked as if he were a candidate. He occasionally verged but never quite slipped into Jimmy Carter-style sanctimony as he balanced seriousness with affability. In contrast with the wooden, compulsively hectoring DeSantis, Jolly was almost Reaganesque but for the missing one-liners. He’d immediately made an easy connection with the audience. It never sagged in a town hall that stretched past the 90-minute mark.
“Will not regain authority in government, either in Washington or in Tallahassee or our local communities, by simply being a coalition that is known for what we are against,” he said. It’s important to be against what he called “malfeasance” in leadership and the “wrong direction of the country.”
In cadences and rhetorical thrusts indistinguishable from a political rally, he laid out his idea of a centrist Democratic Party that could regain power by making its values and purpose clearer to the electorate, without going to extremes and by embracing certain values typically associated with–or co-opted by–the Republican Party: “We are the party that believes in an economy for all people,” he said. “We are the party that believes that government can work and serve our veterans and our seniors and our marginalized communities and those in need. We are the party that believes in standing up and restoring dignity to all people, regardless of who they worship or who they love or where they came from.”
He was interrupted by applause.
“We are the party that can be tough on crime regardless if the person is a US citizen, an immigrant or a Tallahassee politician,” he continued. More applause. “But we can also be the party that lifts up and embraces everybody from every walk of life, wherever you came from, and recognizes and celebrates your contribution to our economy and to our culture. We can do both.” Applause. “We can be a coalition that says we believe in science and vaccines and medicine.” Applause. “We believe there is a role of government in providing for the public health. And here’s a crazy one. We believe in public education.” Rousing applause. “It sounds crazy. We trust teachers.”
In parry after parry against the Legislature’s and DeSantis’s recent assaults on Black history, LGBTQ rights, gender rights and the freedom to read, Jolly got his loudest applause as his speech turned full stump: “We want to empower teachers to teach our children. We want to pay teachers more. We want more funding for more public schools and more neighborhoods with more teachers working more. It is not a threat to our 6-year-old and 4-year-old children to be exposed to a diversity, a rich diversity of thought and academia.” (He and his wife, Laura Donoahoe, have two children, 6 and 4.
The event was organized by local Democrats led by Heather Beavan, herself a former congressional candidate, as part of Jolly’s frequent town halls around the state as he gauges a run for governor. Barbara Goss, the retired CIA analyst and long-time affiliate of the NAACP, was the moderator.
“My friends, you are the secret sauce to a healthy, functioning democracy,” Beavan told the audience. “And tonight, we have gathered not to talk about politics, but to talk about policy,” Beavan said. She is writing a book about her friendship with George McGovern, the 1972 Democratic Party presidential nominee. “It is shocking to me how many issues and talking points have remained unchanged. I regret to inform you, politics is about sound bites. But here’s the good news for us here tonight: policy is about substance.”
There were more speeches than substance, even when almost two dozen people asked questions, but substance occasionally broke through, as when Colleen Conklin, Flagler County’s former school board member, gave Jolly a verbal policy manual to draw back what she described as the state’s $4 billion private-education voucher system at public expense (he asked her to be on his policy committee), or when a couple of rare young people in the crowd wanted to know how Jolly would bring back younger generations into a party that hemorrhaged in Trump’s favor in the last election.
“Dropping any one of us in front of a podcast isn’t going to do it,” Jolly said, but town halls like the one he was holding then and there might. Organizing would, and, most of all, starting a campaign now, rather than a few months before an election, would.
“The only way we bring back a coalition that can truly win is by starting early, starting now, as though the campaign is only two weeks away,” Jolly said. “We can’t wait until next time. We have to build a coalition that is broad and deep, that has stakeholders and evangelists in every community across the state, geographically, socio-economically, demographically, every subject matter space that says: I believe that there’s a coalition willing to fight for me, whether I’m a young person, a retiree, whatever my age, whatever my walk of life. I see in this coalition a set of values where I know we’re going to be fighting together to lift everybody up, and that includes me, even if I’m 18 years old.”
That’s why Jolly’s claim that he was merely exploring a run for governor was just a technicality. He’s campaigning.
