Politics | We Don’t Color on the Dog
Political strategist Ryan Wiggins says the governor’s race was closer than anyone expected, the legislative supermajority is gone and Escambia County showed it is ready for a new kind of politics.
A week after Election Day, Florida Democrats are still sorting out what happened. The national blue wave washed over much of the country but stopped short of the top of the ballot in Florida. Ryan Wiggins, co-founder of Black Pearl Strategies, a national political consulting and media firm, says that’s the wrong way to read the results.
- “America didn’t just suddenly decide they wanted to all be Democrats,” Wiggins told me on We Don’t Color on the Dog. “They’re wanting accountability. They’re wanting to see affordability.”
Wiggins, a Pensacola native and former Inweekly intern, worked on David Jolly’s gubernatorial campaign in Northwest Florida. Her takeaway: Florida came within striking distance, and it did it largely on its own.
A Stadium’s Worth of Votes
The margin: According to Wiggins, Jolly lost by fewer than 100,000 votes, roughly the crowd that fills Ben Hill Griffin Stadium for a Florida Gators game on a Saturday.
The shift: She described a state that moved from double-digit Republican margins in recent cycles to about Republican plus one this year.
The legislature: Wiggins said the Republican supermajority in the Florida Legislature is no more, which changes what can pass in Tallahassee and what can be stopped.
“Florida would have been the crown jewel of election night, not Texas, if the parties had invested and paid attention to our races here.”
Outspent Six to One
Wiggins said the national party money never arrived. Jolly received about $1 million from the Democratic Governors Association roughly two weeks before Election Day, too late to make a difference.
- Byron Donalds raised about $174 million, much of it from out-of-state special interests, Wiggins said, including big tech, utilities, pharmaceutical and insurance companies.
- Jolly finished with about $28 million.
- Despite the gap, the race came down to a stadium’s worth of voters.
“That should inspire everyone in this state,” she said.
Escambia County Showed Up
Jolly spent a lot of time in Northwest Florida, and it showed. Inside the Pensacola city limits, he won handily. Wiggins credits a coalition that brought together her own network of Fiesta-and-cocktail-party Democrats with the communities organized by Lumon May, Hailey Morrissette and a new generation of local organizers.
When Jolly first came to town in September 2025, the campaign made a point of skipping the postcard version of Pensacola. “We made a conscious effort to show him where the need was, where people were struggling,” Wiggins said.
That meant time in Brownsville, a neighborhood the Cordova Park banker’s daughter admits she rarely visited before this campaign.
“I was welcomed, and I was welcomed warmly, and I was fed and I was loved on by a community that has so little.”
The campaign’s final Pensacola rally drew about 600 people to Phineas Phogg’s at Seville Quarter, a crowd Wiggins said cut across income, race, religion and background. “In this time in politics in our country, you don’t get to see that very often,” she said.
What Comes Next
For Wiggins, the governor’s race is over, but the coalition isn’t. She said the relationships built in Brownsville and across the county will drive her work into 2028, 2030 and 2032.
“We are stepping into a new time in our country, and we have a chance to change the world,” she said. “And if you have the chance to change the world, you take it.”
