Florida Elects Its First Black Governor. He’s a Trump Republican, and No State Has Ever Done That

Florida has never had a Black governor. In January it will, and he is a Republican endorsed by Donald Trump.

Rep. Byron Donalds won the governor’s race on Tuesday night, beating Democrat David Jolly to succeed Ron DeSantis. Decision Desk HQ projected the win a little after 8:30 p.m., and Fox News followed. When he takes the oath, Donalds becomes the first Black Republican ever elected governor of any state in American history.

Only three Black Americans had been elected governor before Tuesday: Douglas Wilder in Virginia, Deval Patrick in Massachusetts and Wes Moore in Maryland. All three are Democrats. The party that spends every election telling Black voters it is the only home they have has now been beaten to Florida’s first by a conservative from Naples.

“We are still red”

Donalds took the stage at his Fort Lauderdale watch party a little before 9:30 p.m., and his campaign streamed it live. He thanked God first, then told the room his 30 years in Florida had been “a story of redemption,” from college to coaching kids to “being in the Tea Party movement, finding my way to politics, and now I am your next governor.”

Then he told them about two phone calls. “The first phone call was from David Jolly,” he said. When the crowd started up, he cut it off: “No, no, no, hold on, hold on.” He said he congratulated Jolly “on running a hard fought race,” and added, “we win with class and dignity.”

The second call was from the president.

The count

The state’s own election-night results put the Donalds–Bryan Avila ticket at 4,071,372 votes, 50.02%, to 3,965,534 for Jolly and his running mate, former Rep. Gwen Graham, 48.72%. That is a margin of 105,838 votes, with the count still unofficial and still moving.

It was closer than Florida Republicans are used to. Six independent and minor-party tickets split the rest. But Florida Democrats have now lost every governor’s race since Lawton Chiles beat Jeb Bush in 1994, and Jolly, a former Republican congressman who switched parties to run, did not end the streak.

The rest of the ballot

Republicans held the top of the ticket. Sen. Ashley Moody, appointed in January 2025 after Marco Rubio left to become secretary of state, won her first full term over Angie Nixon, a Democratic Socialist state representative from Jacksonville. The state count had Moody at 4,146,230 votes, 50.88%, to Nixon’s 3,910,099, 47.98%.

Attorney General James Uthmeier was also ahead in the same count. And voters approved Amendment 3, a bigger homestead exemption with a lower cap on assessment increases for non-homestead property, with 61.98% of the vote. Florida amendments need 60% to pass.

How he got here

Donalds, 48, has represented Southwest Florida’s 19th District in Congress since 2021. Trump endorsed him early, and he won the August Republican primary by more than 20 points over Lt. Gov. Jay Collins.

He spent Election Day morning at a rally in Cape Canaveral, posting that supporters had turned out “even amid flash flooding.” By night he was on a stage under a banner reading “Defending the Florida Dream.”

Why it matters

For years the story has been that Black conservatives are a curiosity. Mark Robinson lost North Carolina in 2024. Tim Scott is a senator, not a governor. Tuesday, the third-largest state in the country handed its top job to a Black Republican who ran on school choice, law and order and keeping DeSantis’s Florida exactly what it has become.

He will be the only Black governor in the country besides Moore, and the only Republican one ever elected. Florida did it by more than 105,000 votes.