Byron Donalds won the Florida governor’s race on Tuesday, beating Democrat David Jolly roughly 50% to 48% to become the first Black governor in the state’s history. He is also the first Black Republican ever elected governor in the United States. Only three Black governors had been elected before him, and all three were Democrats.
The history is real. So is the record that came with it. Donalds built his name as one of Trump’s loudest defenders in Congress, made Trump’s short list for vice president in 2024 and ran for governor with Trump’s endorsement locked in before he even announced. At his victory party in Hollywood, Florida, he thanked Trump by name.
Here is what Florida’s next governor has said and how he has voted.
The political news that affects your wallet, your rights and your vote, broken down in plain language. Free in your inbox.
He called Trump “Daddy.” On January 19, 2025, the day before Trump’s second inauguration, Byron Donalds went on Fox & Friends Weekend to talk about what Americans would see from the new administration. He said that when Americans see “deportations or repatriations happen,” they would call it the stability they asked for. Then he added, “Daddy’s back!” A Black congressman cheering mass deportations and calling a 78 year old white man “Daddy” on national television lit up social media. Civil rights leader Ben Chavis answered him directly: “Donald Trump is not our daddy.”
He said the Black family was “together” under Jim Crow. In June 2024, at a Trump campaign event for Black voters in Philadelphia, Donalds said, “During Jim Crow, the Black family was together.” He added that more Black people voted conservatively in that era. Jim Crow was the system of laws and terror that kept Black Americans segregated, locked out of voting and exposed to lynching from the 1870s into the 1960s. In much of the South, Black people could not vote at all, conservatively or otherwise.
House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries responded by listing what Black families actually lived through, starting with the murder of Emmett Till. Rep. Steven Horsford, then chair of the Congressional Black Caucus, said Donalds knew Black people were not better off under Jim Crow. Donalds insisted he was only talking about marriage rates, blamed Democratic welfare policies for breaking up Black families and said his critics were lying about his words.
He voted against police reform. In March 2021, Byron Donalds voted against the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act, named for the man murdered by a Minneapolis police officer in 2020. The bill would have banned chokeholds and made it easier to sue officers for misconduct by limiting qualified immunity, the legal shield that often blocks those lawsuits. It passed the House 220 to 212 and died in the Senate. Donalds said he backed Sen. Tim Scott’s JUSTICE Act instead, a narrower Republican plan.
He voted against protecting the vote. Also in 2021, Donalds voted against the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, named for the civil rights icon beaten on the Edmund Pettus Bridge. The bill would have restored preclearance, the rule that required places with a history of voter discrimination to get federal approval before changing their voting laws. The Supreme Court knocked out the old preclearance formula in 2013. Donalds has said he opposed the bill because it would have applied preclearance across the whole country. He also voted against the For the People Act, which would have expanded voter registration and protected early and mail voting.
He made people pay before they could vote. Before Congress, Donalds served in the Florida House. In 2018, Florida voters approved Amendment 4 to restore voting rights to most people who had finished their felony sentences. The next year, the Republican legislature passed a law saying a sentence is not complete until every court fine, fee and restitution payment is paid off. Donalds voted for it. The law kept many Floridians who had served their time from voting simply because they could not pay.
He cheered the gutting of the Voting Rights Act and rewrote its history. When the Supreme Court weakened the Voting Rights Act this year, Byron Donalds hailed the decision as a major win for the Constitution. The ruling all but ended the practice of drawing congressional districts where Black voters are the majority.
In a May interview with conservative commentator Benny Johnson, Donalds claimed Congress passed the 1965 law because Southern Democrats were racially gerrymandering, meaning drawing district lines to weaken Black voting power. PolitiFact rated the claim False. Harvard historian Alex Keyssar told PolitiFact it was “not accurate, not even close,” since most Black Southerners could not even register to vote back then. The law was written to end poll taxes, literacy tests and the violence that kept Black people from the ballot box.
He ran on “Enact the Trump Agenda.” Two of the seven priorities on his campaign issues page were “Enact the Trump Agenda” and “Fight Illegal Immigration.” In June, Donalds called Florida’s immigration crackdown “mission accomplished” and defended the state’s costly enforcement buildout, including the Everglades detention center known as Alligator Alcatraz. In September, Florida Politics reported he said stopping Sharia law, meaning Islamic religious law, is the key to preventing another 9/11.
Then he hid Trump and brought him right back. As the race tightened this fall, the Miami Herald reported that the Donalds campaign had scrubbed Trump from its website. The endorsement banners came down, along with a donation button carrying Trump’s name. Campaign spokesperson Gates McGavick said the site reflected Byron’s focus on affordability, insurance costs and government transparency. Six weeks later, with the race won, Donalds was thanking Trump from the stage.
He will be sworn in as Florida’s first Black governor in January.
