By Kristoffer Ealy
Yesterday I was watching ▶Brian Tyler Cohen’s interview with G. Elliott Morris, and for most of it I was in a genuinely good mood. Morris had a lot of positive news for Democrats heading into Election Day, the kind of conversation that makes you want to text your group chat a screenshot and a row of fire emojis. Then they got to Florida, and one tidbit gave me cause to pause. Morris explained that Florida tends to buck the national trends, that even with the early-voting enthusiasm Democrats are seeing elsewhere, the state has become increasingly difficult for them over the past decade. Then came the part that stuck with me: the polling he has seen does not show Angie Nixon running a competitive race against Ashley Moody, and he is much less optimistic about Florida than he is about a state like North Carolina.
For those of you who don’t know Morris, he is a very credible pollster, and I take his forecasts seriously. He spent five years as a data journalist at The Economist, where he was the lead developer of the paper’s election forecasting models. Back in 2018, Vox profiled him as a 21-year-old college senior who had become the breakout star of that year’s election forecasting. In 2023, ABC News hired him to run FiveThirtyEight’s data operation after Nate Silver left, and he stayed until the network shut the site down in 2025. Today he writes Strength In Numbers, helps run the polling aggregator FiftyPlusOne, wrote a book on how polls work and why we need them, and has lectured on election forecasting at MIT and Harvard. This is not some random hater talking out of his ass. When a man with that résumé tells you something you don’t want to hear, you listen.
And although I don’t like the news, I am glad he said it, because it gives me an opportunity to talk directly to Florida.
So, Florida, I am telling you right now: you should not be discouraged by what Morris said. If anything, it should motivate you to get out to the polls and vote for Angie Nixon. Don’t let any negative poll take the wind out of you, because the polls in this race are all over the map. NBC 6 and Telemundo had Moody up ten. St. Pete Polls had Moody at 45.2 percent and Nixon at 44.8, Change Research had Moody ahead by a single point, and YouGov had it at 49 to 44. The governor’s race looks exactly the same: Change Research has David Jolly and Byron Donalds tied at 47, while Stetson has Donalds up 52 to 41. Nobody looks at that spread and calls Jolly’s race over, so nobody should look at Nixon’s and do it either. Her race is still winnable, just like his, and they BOTH need to win. Not one of them. Both.
To be fair, I was a little nervous about Jolly in the beginning. Right after the primary, reporters kept asking him whether he and Nixon could both win on the same ballot, and for a stretch it almost seemed like he was trying to put enough distance between himself and the top of his ticket to qualify for the Olympics. Like a broken record on an infinite loop, he kept stuttering: I’m not a socialist, I’m a capitalist. He told anyone who would listen that he likes Nixon, but please, please note that he rejects socialism and the DSA. Every interview felt like watching a guy anxiously fill out a federal background check for a job nobody even asked him to apply for.
In recent weeks, though, he’s finally come to Jesus and gotten behind her, mostly because he realized his political survival depends on her voters. Earlier this month, the two of them actually sat down for a live fireside chat at Florida Memorial University in Miami Gardens. The math tells the whole story: in the governor’s primary, Jolly’s support climbed as precincts got whiter and older, while Nixon’s coalition roared in the exact opposite direction, netting her over 705,000 votes to crush a primary opponent who outraised her sixteen to one. Those are two completely different combustion engines, and a Democrat does not win statewide in Florida running on a single cylinder. Besides, these two have been grinding side by side since before the cameras showed up—Jolly himself has talked about those miserable “chicken lunches” with fifteen loyalists where he and Nixon were often the only statewide candidates who even bothered to show their faces.
Nixon, for her part, has done a masterclass in tuning out background noise, though she’s more than happy to check a fool when necessary—especially when that fool is on her own side. Take Bakari Sellers—someone I genuinely respect, but holy hell, did he earn a trip to the woodshed for this. Bakari waltzed onto CNN right after the primary and essentially looked the country in the eye to declare that Democrats shouldn’t bother spending a dime in Florida. My brother in Christ, what a mind-bogglingly smooth-brained thing to say about your own party’s newly minted nominee literally twenty-four hours after she won! Naturally, Nixon didn’t just take it on the chin; she promptly checked him for the friendly fire before keeping her head down and going right back to knocking on doors.
I have sung Nixon’s praises since day one, but now we need to shine a very harsh, unblinking spotlight on her opponent, because Ashley Moody is a walking political dumpster fire who doesn’t deserve to hold anything more powerful than a TV remote.
Let’s start with how she even got her current gig: nobody in Florida actually voted to send Ashley Moody to the United States Senate. She inherited the seat like an aristocratic title when Ron DeSantis appointed her to finish Marco Rubio’s term after Rubio skipped town to become Secretary of State.
And oh, what a parting gift she left behind on her way out of the Attorney General’s office. A state grand jury straight-up caught her red-handed, concluding that the DeSantis administration “misappropriated” $10 million from a Medicaid settlement by funneling it directly into the Hope Florida slush fund. The grand jury explicitly found that Moody knew about the scheme and authorized her chief deputy to sign off on it. And what was her airtight legal defense? She went on television and called the state grand jury’s findings a “hoax” and a “smear.” Ten million dollars earmarked to keep sick people alive got hijacked to feed a political operation, her signature was stamped right on the paperwork, and she had the unadulterated audacity to cry wolf. Based on what that grand jury laid out, she shouldn’t be running for the Senate—she should be consulting a white-collar defense attorney from a federal holding cell.
So let’s talk about what that absolute disaster of an agenda has done to Florida during Trump’s second non-consecutive term, because the state is currently footing a brutally expensive bill for its residents’ blind loyalty. When the enhanced Affordable Care Act subsidies expired and Trump flat-out ruled out reviving them, Florida lost roughly 443,000 marketplace enrollees—the single largest drop of any state in the entire country. In a state that stubbornly refused to expand Medicaid out of pure political spite, the marketplace is the only lifeline left for working people, and subsidized enrollees were projected to see their monthly payments more than double. Meanwhile, Canadian snowbirds—who have propped up Florida’s winter economy for generations—started staying home after Trump spent an entire year calling their country the 51st state and slapping arbitrary tariffs on it; Canadian visits plummeted 13.9 percent in the first half of this year alone, dragging state tourism down for two consecutive quarters. Gas hit $4.19 a gallon in April, a cool $1.30 more than on the day U.S. and Israeli strikes on Iran kicked off. And down in Central Florida’s strawberry fields, farmers have been forced to scale back their crops because a reckless deportation crackdown drove away the very hands that pick them. Every single one of those self-inflicted economic wounds runs straight through the agenda that Ashley Moody and Byron Donalds signed up to rubber-stamp with a giddy smile.
Which brings me to the core, undeniable reality of this election: Byron Donalds is not an independent actor; he is a card-carrying, headline-chasing MAGA sycophant performing backup choreography for the Trump administration. Donalds can move Daddy to a quiet little corner of his campaign website all he wants, but the man is still sprinting on Trump’s economic wreckage, with Trump’s own Vice President flying into Lakeland to hold his hand on stage. It is an absolute joke to pretend Donalds represents a fresh direction when he’s just a megaphone for the same tired, culture-war theatrics that are crushing working families. As for Ashley Moody, she’s running right alongside him as a charter member of the same political fan club—completely joined at the hip to an agenda that treats Florida like a personal testing ground for corporate giveaways and authoritarian grievance.
This is precisely why splitting your ticket is an act of pure political self-sabotage. It makes zero logical sense for a rational voter to back David Jolly to clean up the governor’s mansion and then turn around and hand a Senate seat back to a politician implicated in a $10 million Medicaid settlement scandal who rubber-stamps Trump’s agenda, nor does it make sense to pair Nixon with a MAGA enabler like Donalds. Republicans certainly aren’t treating these contests as separate dimensions; their entire operation is a coordinated ecosystem of Trump enablers desperately trying to preserve their grip on the state.
If you want to actually fix the structural bleeding in Florida, Nixon and Jolly offer a pragmatic roadmap to rescue the state from the brink. First, on the healthcare and cost-of-living front, Nixon’s fierce advocacy for re-establishing federal health protections and expanding care can directly reverse the devastating marketplace dropouts that left half a million Floridians stranded. Coupled with Jolly’s laser focus on tackling the historic property insurance crisis and reining in runaway housing costs, a unified executive and legislative front can finally stop punishing working families for the crime of renting or owning a home in the Sunshine State. Second, regarding economic diversification and tourism, while Trumpian trade wars and xenophobic crackdowns alienate vital international partners like Canada and gut our agricultural workforce, Jolly and Nixon champion policies that respect immigrant labor, stabilize local farming, and restore Florida’s reputation as a welcoming, open economy rather than a closed-circuit culture war. Third, they represent a clean break from institutional corruption: instead of steering millions in Medicaid settlements into political slush funds like Moody did, a Nixon-Jolly administration would restore basic governmental accountability, ensuring public funds actually protect public health.
As soon as I got that sobering news from Morris about Nixon’s uphill climb in the polls, I didn’t curl up in a ball—I went straight to her campaign page and dropped a crisp $100 bill, because putting skin in the game is how we change the math.
And one final favor: if you live in Florida, or if you know someone in Florida who is tired of the MAGA nonsense, please share this article with them. I want people to understand that there is still hope in Florida, regardless of what the polls or the political pundits are saying. Both races are winnable, and neither should be written off before a single vote is counted. Florida has millions of voters, and their voices deserve to be heard. There is hope in the Sunshine State, and every Floridian deserves the opportunity to examine the candidates, understand what is at stake, and decide what kind of future they want for their state.
So do not let the noise break your stride. If you want to eradicate as much MAGA dysfunction from your state as humanly possible, the answer is an uncompromising, unified front: Jolly for governor and Nixon for Senate. A vote for Moody and Donalds is just a vote for more institutional rot and economic self-destruction, and Florida’s ledger is already drowning in red ink. Early voting runs October 24 through October 31, and some counties have already swung open their doors. Bring a friend, drag your cousin, and grab that neighbor who keeps whining that Florida is a lost cause. Fill in both ovals, and do not leave any room for error: Nixon AND Jolly.
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