Florida Holds Against the Wave: Donalds and Moody Win as Texas Flips Blue

Written By B.J. Dichter, Posted on November 4, 2026

On a night when Democrats flipped Texas, Florida held. Republican Rep. Byron Donalds won the governor’s race, and Sen. Ashley Moody kept the U.S. Senate seat she was appointed to in January 2025.

The Florida Division of Elections shows Donalds with 4,132,112 votes (50.02%) to Democrat David Jolly’s 4,024,180 (48.71%), a margin of about 108,000 votes. In the Senate race, Moody took 50.87% to Democrat Angie Nixon’s 47.98%. Both counts are unofficial until the state certifies them.

Donalds will also make history. The Associated Press reports he is Florida’s first Black governor and will become the nation’s first elected Black Republican governor. Reconstruction-era Republican P.B.S. Pinchback briefly served as Louisiana’s acting governor in 1872-73, but he was never elected to the office. Every Black governor elected since, from Douglas Wilder in Virginia to Wes Moore in Maryland, has been a Democrat.

Texas went the other way

Next door on the Gulf, the story was different. AP counts with about 94% of the vote in show Democrat Gina Hinojosa beating Gov. Greg Abbott 52.8% to 45.7%, and AP calls her the first Democratic governor of Texas in more than 30 years. In the Senate race, James Talarico beat Attorney General Ken Paxton 55.1% to 43.0%.

AP summed up the mood as voters “frustrated over high prices and concerned about government corruption.” That same national climate hit Florida too. Donalds’ margin was about 1.3 points, far below Ron DeSantis’ roughly 19-point win in 2022 (59.4% to 40.0%, per the Florida Division of Elections). So why did one state bend and the other break?

What Florida got right

Candidates without baggage. Texas Republicans put Ken Paxton at the top of the ticket. The Texas House impeached him in 2023 on corruption-related articles, and although the state Senate acquitted him, the charge followed him into a year when, AP reported, voters were concerned about government corruption. Florida’s nominees carried no comparable cloud. Paxton ran nearly three points behind even a losing Abbott.

A ground game that showed up. Early tallies in Florida favored the Democrats. According to the Detroit Free Press/USA TODAY Network, Republicans outvoted Democrats by about 600,000 on Election Day itself, which erased the deficit. Vote-by-mail and early voting don’t win races on their own; turnout on the day still does.

A record to run on. Donalds promised to continue the DeSantis agenda on education, deregulation and immigration, the Free Press reported. A party that can point to a working record in the governor’s mansion gives voters something to vote for, not just against. Florida has not elected a Democratic governor since 1994.

Money, used early. NBC News reported Donalds raised about $130 million, a huge advantage over Jolly. Resources don’t buy elections, but they bought the time to define the race before the national wave hit.

The warning inside the win

Conservatives shouldn’t read Florida as a safe harbor. A 1.3-point margin in a state Republicans won by 19 points four years ago is a warning, not a mandate. The lesson for 2028 is the classical-liberal one: voters reward competence and clean government and punish arrogance, whichever party is in charge.

Florida passed that test by a narrow margin. Texas didn’t.

B.J. Dichter

B.J. Dichter is a contributor to The National Telegraph and the producer and creator of Not On Record, a weekly podcast on politics and culture. He produces Open College with philosopher Stephen Hicks and hosts Coffee with BJ, his live show. A former trucker, he was a spokesperson for the 2022 Freedom Convoy and wrote about it in Honking For Freedom. He writes from a classical liberal, libertarian conservative perspective on free speech, Canadian and US politics, Israel and Bitcoin.