Democrats haven’t won the governorships of Florida or Georgia in more than two decades. Two former Republicans want to change that, and they’re setting up a crucial test of the party’s identity in the process.
Former Florida Rep. David Jolly and former Georgia Lt. Gov. Geoff Duncan, both of whom spent their entire elected careers as Republicans, are now mounting bids for governor as Democrats. The circumstances of each race differ significantly, but each candidate is betting on a central idea: Opposition to Donald Trump is still the core of what being a Democrat means and, in 2026, it will be enough to win.
“This race is going to be a test on whether or not voters want Donald Trump to run their state,” Duncan told me recently. “They don’t want Donald Trump’s toxic policies to show up.”
Duncan has had a swift transformation. He was a mainstream conservative Republican until 2020, when Trump’s attempts to overturn the election opened a rift between Duncan and his party. He ended up becoming a prominent Republican surrogate in 2024, first for Joe Biden and then Kamala Harris, before officially joining the Democratic Party this year. He’s since renounced a litany of his former policy positions, including his support for abortion restrictions and opposition to Medicaid expansion. Many Georgia Democrats aren’t yet sold — he’s polling in the top tier of candidates but currently trails former Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms, the putative frontrunner.
But there’s precedent for what both men are trying to do. In recent years, Democrats have been far more likely than Republicans to nominate party switchers as candidates in top-tier races.
Interestingly, it’s still far more common in recent decades for state lawmakers to switch their affiliations from Democrat to Republican.
Ballotpedia data shows that, since 1994, the number of Democrats in statehouses joining the GOP has outpaced the number of Republicans becoming Democrats by more than 3 to 1.
There are some examples of the approach working in close races. In 2012, Patrick Murphy, a Republican until 2011, flipped a House seat in Florida by 2,000 votes. Kris Mayes, who had left the GOP in 2019, won the 2022 Arizona Attorney General race by just 280 votes.
At the same time, races for Senate or governor have proved far trickier for party switchers. In 2022, Oklahoma Democrats ran Joy Hofmeister for governor in the hopes that the former Republican could deliver a breakthrough. She ended up losing by more than the party’s nominee four years earlier. In 2020, Kansas Democrats nominated Barbara Bollier, who had served in the state Senate as a Republican, as their U.S. Senate candidate. She raised tens of millions of dollars from Democrats around the country, fueling hopes of a bank shot win, before underperforming polling and losing by double digits. Most prominent of all is Charlie Crist, who served as the Republican governor of Florida from 2007 to 2011. He tried to return to the office as a Democrat in both 2014 and 2022, losing first by 1 point and then by 19.
Crist’s losses are hard to ignore in this conversation, especially for Jolly. It’s a comparison he is acutely aware of — and rejects. “Charlie spent 10 years trying to convince people he hadn’t changed, and nobody believed him,” he told me. “I talk about my change, I’m proud of my change.”
Jolly and Duncan are also divided on how to frame their party switch. Asked how he thinks of pre-Trump Republicans, Duncan still speaks wistfully about the Republican Party he grew up in. “There was this ability to not demonize people that were in poverty or having challenges,” he recalled.
Jolly, on the other hand, makes a point to emphasize that he had “already begun to move” on policies around issues like abortion, guns, and climate before Trump came along. “The party didn’t leave me, I left the party,” he said.
In some ways, the two states are also on opposite political trajectories. Relative to the country overall, Florida has moved right in every presidential election since 2012, while Georgia has moved left in every cycle since 2008. And while Florida Democrats hold no statewide offices, Georgia Democrats hold both of the state’s U.S. Senate seats — and recently won their first constitutional office victories since 2000 in November.
What Democrats in the states share, though, is a losing streak in gubernatorial races — Florida hasn’t elected a Democratic governor since 1994, and Georgia hasn’t elected one since 1998. Only three states have gone longer without a Democrat in the governor’s mansion: Idaho, Texas, and Utah. Both Jolly and Duncan argue they are optimally positioned to change their new party’s fortunes. “I will give the Democrats the best possible chance to beat Burt Jones, I guarantee it,” Duncan said, referring to the Republicans’ likely nominee.
Both candidates have to get through primaries first, and their past records have proven to be an issue. Jolly has received criticism, including from Florida Democratic officials, over his anti-abortion record in Congress. Duncan faces persistent skepticism over his more recent political conversion and, from some corners, his focus on Trump.
“He hasn’t shown Democrats that he is anyone but a former Republican that hates Trump,” said former state Sen. Jason Esteves, a rival candidate in the Georgia race. Both Duncan and Bottoms featured the president prominently in their campaign announcement videos. Esteves’, on the other hand, barely mentioned him. “People want to make sure you’re gonna fight back against Trump,” Esteves told me. “But what they want to actually know is how you’re going to make their life better.”
My view
The two candidates are very different. In conversation and in media appearances, Jolly is extremely policy oriented, while Duncan talks more in terms of values. They also differ on how Trump drives their campaigns. Duncan places his opposition to the president at the center of his pitch to both primary and general election voters. For Jolly, Trump is more of a background character, emblematic of the rhetoric and policy shifts that prompted his broader political evolution.
But Trump is a major factor in both candidates’ political identities, and he’ll be even more of one if they win their nominations. Which raises real questions: More than 10 years after Trump first rode down the escalator, is opposition to Trump still the core of what being a Democrat is? And, at a time when both parties are beginning to ponder a post-Trump politics, how viable is a campaign explicitly organized around opposition to the president?
One reason Democrats have often run party switchers is pretty simple. The idea that the Republican Party has become extreme, even before Trump, has been core to Democrats’ pitch to voters since 2008 — and ex-Republicans are natural spokespeople for that message. Making that argument central to the party’s storyline has yielded positive results. Countless Democratic candidates have won races simply because of Republicans’ self-limitations. And being able to win while postponing deeper questions about the party’s identity has proved appealing.
But 2024 showed what happens when it doesn’t work. A party defined in the negative can only run so far. Even congressional Democrats, the elected officials with the most right to organize themselves around opposition to the president, seem to understand that the ground is shifting. They very conspicuously focused the recent shutdown battle not around the president’s conduct or executive actions but around healthcare policy.
In general, Trump is becoming more unpopular. But when it comes to his handling of certain issues, like immigration and crime, he remains either popular or only slightly underwater. And even if those approval numbers change, Trump himself will never be on the ballot again. The conversation about what and who Democrats want to be can only be postponed for so long.
Republicans’ polling decline also does not erase the lessons of 2024. In previous election cycles, political journalism treated one demographic subgroup as the country’s premier swing voter: the proverbial affluent, ancestrally Republican white woman who was abandoning the GOP out of distaste for Trump. In 2024, a new swing voter was minted: the working-class, traditionally Democratic nonwhite man drifting right because of Trump. While Republicans are now seeing significant erosion with that group, they are still in a noticeably better position with them than they were, say, 10 years ago. A chief test of Democrats’ strength in the 2026 midterms will be their ability to reclaim ground with these nonwhite and working-class voters. Seizing the mantle of outsider, anti-establishment, populism — whether from the left or the “angry center” — could be crucial to that task. And ex-Republicans who abandoned the GOP because of Trump are, in some ways, on the opposite trajectory from that.
There has been no shortage of words written about Zohran Mamdani’s, Abigail Spanberger’s, and Mikie Sherrill’s victories and what they represent. As many have pointed out, for all their differences, all three were able to move beyond opposition to Trump as their candidacy’s raison d’être. Yes, they used the president as a potent weapon against their opponents in TV ads and debates. But they all made a point to emphasize that the reason they wanted to hold office and the agenda that they would try to enact if they won had little to do with the president. In all three cases, voters responded.
Marjorie Taylor Greene has nothing to do with either race (so far — she has until March 2 to file to run in Georgia if she wants to). But her recent very public search for a post-Trump Republican identity is worth reflecting on. Trump is leaving, sooner than it might feel now, and when he does, candidates rooted in Trump-era politics may find themselves left behind.
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