Former Pinellas County Republican Congressman David Jolly says he is considering running for governor in Florida next year — as a Democrat.

“We’re very close to a decision,” said the 52-year-old former legislator, who has been a pundit on MSNBC for the past six years, while speaking to the Phoenix during a visit to Tallahassee Tuesday morning.

“I’ve done a fair amount of meeting with Democratic clubs, meeting with Democratic leadership, meeting with Democratic grassroots, and my wife and I have made the personal decision to do it,” he said.

Still registered as a political independent, he said he will make a firm decision by Memorial Day.

Jolly worked as a top aide and general counsel for Pinellas area Republican U.S. Bill Young for more than a decade beginning in the mid-1990s before parlaying that experience into a career as a Washington, D.C., lobbyist.

After Young died in late 2013, Jolly entered a special congressional election to succeed him and defeated Democrat Alex Sink in early 2014. The race at the time was considered one of the most expensive congressional races ever (More than $12 million was spent in the race, with more than two-thirds of that amount generated by third-party groups).

He won re-election that fall, but lost to Democrat Charlie Crist in 2016 after the district was redrawn, making it more favorable for a Democrat, and has been out of electoral politics ever since. But he says that his work in television over the past several years potentially opens up campaign dollars that have been absent from Florida Democrats recently.

“Some of the largest donors in Democratic circles have indicated to me personally that if you get into this race, we’ll now reconsider coming into Florida,” Jolly said, adding that he believes “several national politicians” will move off the sidelines to support him and open their donor base if he gets into the race.

As a Republican, Jolly was part of the Never-Trump wing of the GOP. In 2018, he announced on the HBO show Real Time with Bill Maher that he had left the party and become a political independent, saying, “I don’t think the future is between the two parties.”

This is not the first time Jolly has flirted with running for governor of Florida, or serving on a gubernatorial ticket. In the spring of 2018, he began a national tour with former South Florida Democratic U.S. Rep. Patrick Murphy, and the two publicly discussed running as a hybrid Democratic-Republican gubernatorial fusion ticket.

It was almost exactly four years ago that he told this reporter he was “likely” to run for governor of Florida as a political independent. In neither case did those events happen.

In looking back, Jolly said such a “unity ticket” in 2018 was not with the times, as the Democrats in the first national election after the election of Donald Trump took back the U.S. House of Representatives and Andrew Gillum, with backing from Bernie Sanders, became the Florida Democratic gubernatorial nominee coming out of a contested five-person primary, before losing in a narrow race to Ron DeSantis that fall.

Four years ago, Jolly was involved in efforts to launch a national third party. He still believes multiparty democracies produce better voter turnout, voter participation, and results, he said, but acknowledged that’s not the political system in the United States. “We made the right decision not to do it,” he added about staying out of that race.

And while he has been thinking about running for a while, Jolly found it discouraging to see both Donald Trump and U.S. Sen. Rick Scott win by 13-percentage point margins in Florida in November. Still, he said, the first two months of the Trump administration shows the political winds can change quickly in these times.

“I know there’s an appetite for change in Florida. There’s a frustration over the affordability crisis. The insurance crisis. There is a growing school voucher crisis. Not just the defunding of public schools, but the fact that vouchers don’t keep up with the rate of inflation,” Jolly said.

“Republicans’ only answer is to double down on vouchers, and they are not going to be able to meet the issue on this. And, in many ways, my wife and I are living through all of those crises with other Floridians. The insurance crisis. The schools crisis. Fundamentally, I’m a reform person and I think that the corruption in Tallahassee is disgusting. It’s worse than Washington, D.C., and I think a good dose of ethics and finance reform put in front of voters, and hopefully implemented in Tallahassee, is something that also is important.”

Former USF-St. Petersburg government professor Darryl Paulson, who says he has known Jolly for more than 15 years, wrote an op-ed defending him for his work as a lobbyist when he ran for Congress more than a decade ago. He believes there is a chance Jolly could win as a Democrat but “he could also lose, and lose badly.”

“If I were David, I would ask myself if I had a realistic chance of winning,” Paulson said. “I would also ask myself if running as a Democrat could do irreparable harm to my image and the ideas I have traditionally supported.”

If Jolly does run for governor, his trajectory could be similar to the man who knocked him out of his congressional seat in 2016, Charlie Crist.

Crist was a popular longtime Republican who flipped independent in 2010 when Marco Rubio thwarted his path to the Republican nomination for U.S. Senate that year. After losing that race, Crist became a Democrat, losing for governor in 2014 to Rick Scott before winning the Pinellas congressional seat in 2016. After serving six years there, he ended up losing to Ron DeSantis in another race for governor in 2022 by 19 points.

Jolly acknowledges that Florida is a red state in 2025, so there’s no guarantee he would be more successful than any of the other Democrats who have run statewide in recent years.

“We all know the numbers,” he said. “But I know there’s a coalition out there, and if the macro political environment next summer is one in which people are desperately looking for a change, then I think that we’ve got a shot to change leadership in Tallahassee.”

The only declared candidate in the race for Florida governor in 2026 so far is Republican U.S. Rep. Byron Donalds, who received an endorsement from President Trump before he officially entered the contest last month.