Florida gubernatorial candidate makes his pitch in Sarasota

U.S. Rep. Byron Donalds, R-Naples, who announced three months ago he is running for governor of Florida in 2026, says the Sunshine State is already pretty great. His goal, he told a crowd of business leaders Friday at Michael’s on East in Sarasota, is to make it even better. 

“We have to continue to build from what Governor Scott and Governor DeSantis have done in making this a great state,” Donalds said. “We have the opportunity to become the financial capital of the world. When I’m done being governor of Florida, I want people to say you cannot do business in the western hemisphere without coming through Florida.” 

Donalds was the featured speaker at a Meet the Minds luncheon put on by the Argus Foundation, a Sarasota-based pro-business civic organization. In what was part stump speech, part life biography, Donalds said despite his time in Congress and before that the Florida House, he considers himself a businessperson more than a politician. 

In both his speech and an interview with the Business Observer before it, Donalds said when looking to solve problems, he considers the long-term implications, not just what’s best for now. He said he brought the same approach to his time in insurance and banking, where he was a credit analyst and financial advisor for Wells Fargo, among other roles. (He started his banking career as a teller, he told the audience Friday, and worked his way up.)

“When you talk about policies it has to not only make sense today, it has to make sense in five years, in 10 years and into the future,” he said. 

Talking about Florida specifically, Donalds said some of the issues that need strong policies are the obvious ones: transportation, insurance and affordability, in housing, cost of living, taxes and more. “These are important problems,” he said. “They can be solved by somebody being intentional about solving them.” 

On insurance, for example, Donalds suggested one possibility would be to create a statewide business litigation court that could handle cases and dispose of them quicker. “They do it in Texas. They do it in North Carolina. We can do it here,” he said.

Photo by Lori Sax

The Florida gubernatorial election will be held Nov. 3, 2026. Donalds, who served in the Florida House from 2016 to 2020 before being elected to Congress, announced his candidacy Feb. 25. Soon after that he received an official social media endorsement from Pres. Trump. No other Republican has filed candidate paperwork, though speculation has been heavy that Florida First Lady Casey DeSantis will run for the Republican nomination, too. 

Outside the Republican party, the only notable name to officially announce a gubernatorial run is Jason Pizzo, a former Democrat who resigned as senate minority leader in April and left the Democratic Party. Pizzo is now registered as No Party Affiliation. On the Democrat side, one possible candidate is David Jolly, who, as a Republican Congressman from Pinellas County from 2014-2017, was a vocal Trump critic. Jolly, according to a story in Politico, switched his voter registration from NPA to Democrat April 24 and formed a political committee dubbed Florida 2026. 

Donalds, meanwhile, at the Argus event, delivered some other nuggets on his candidacy, including: 

• He grew up in Brooklyn, New York, raised by a single mom. He moved to Tallahassee when he was 17 to attend Florida A&M University. He left New York on a Greyhound bus, with just a trunk of clothes, and, not knowing much about Florida geography, he quips, he was surprised when he didn’t see palm trees in Tallahassee. He later worked multiple jobs, including at a Cracker Barrel before becoming a bank teller. He graduated from Florida State University in 2002. 
• He credits his mom for many life lessons, including following his own political path. “She always told me, ‘don’t listen to what people say. Find it out on your own, and if you have to go it alone go it alone.”
• He said he’s a small government conservative, who found his political footing in the 2010 Tea Party movement, with its budget priorities. 
• On economic development, asked about the practice of giving funds and/or tax breaks to woo businesses to come to Florida, he said “the best incentive ever is to have a safe state that gets you what you need and then gets out of the way.” New York, he says, has “all these (tax) incentives, but nobody wants to be in New York.”