With Election Day less than 48 hours away, Republican gubernatorial nominee Byron Donalds packed a standing-room-only crowd into the Cuban Civic Club in Town ‘N’ Country on Sunday, part of a final sprint through Tampa Bay as Florida’s governor’s race remained a true toss-up. The stop capped a weekend swing through his statewide Defending the Florida Dream bus tour, with early voting having just closed across the state.
The rally, reported by 10 Tampa Bay (WTSP), drew supporters from across the region who cited everything from military service to classroom frustrations as reasons to show up. Minerva Diaz, a Pasco County veteran, said Donalds’s military background and his record representing Florida’s 19th Congressional District drew her to the event. Helen Rodriguez, a first-generation Cuban American teacher from Safety Harbor, said concerns about education and a desire to represent her Cuban immigrant parents shaped her vote.
Collins Fires Up the Crowd With a Buccaneers Nod
Florida Lieutenant Governor Jay Collins spoke at the rally and opened with a nod to the Tampa Bay Buccaneers’ 16-0 win over the Atlanta Falcons before turning serious, urging Floridians to vote as if their lives and their children’s lives depended on it. Collins warned that Republicans could not afford to go backward, framing the election as a test of the state’s direction heading into Tuesday.
At a separate stop earlier in the week, Donalds said insurance premiums and the cost of building new housing needed to come down for Floridians, according to miamiherald.com.
A Statewide Tour Built for the Final Stretch
The Tampa Bay stop fit into a packed closing schedule for Donalds, who planned rallies across Hillsborough, Manatee, Sarasota, Seminole and Sumter counties over the weekend and into Monday, each featuring special guests meant to help turn out voters in the campaign’s final days, per Florida Politics. DeSantis himself was scheduled to join Donalds later Sunday at the Cuban Civic Club event, the outlet reported. Donalds launched the Defending the Florida Dream tour back in April, and Sunday’s rally was folded into that same statewide effort.
Donalds has also staked out a position on data centers, saying he supports them in principle but believes local communities should decide whether to allow them — a contrast with Jolly’s call for a one-year statewide moratorium on new data centers, according to tallahassee.com. President Trump endorsed Donalds for the race, while former President Bill Clinton backed Jolly, the Orlando Sentinel reported. If elected, Donalds would become Florida’s first Black governor, per the same report.
Jolly Makes His Closing Case in South Florida
Donalds’s Democratic opponent, David Jolly, spent the closing days of early voting addressing crowds in Miami, focusing on economic affordability and a call for greater political cooperation in Tallahassee. Jolly has said the midterms carry stakes beyond the governor’s race itself, and he held a rally near Daytona Beach alongside his lieutenant governor pick, Gwen Graham, according to a report from wsvn.com. The Orlando Sentinel noted that Jolly has leaned heavily into the state’s affordability crisis, pointing to spiraling housing costs, high property insurance rates and inflated food and gas prices as central to his pitch.
Both campaigns crisscrossed the state with parallel bus tours in the final stretch, pouring millions of dollars into last-minute TV ads, mailers and social media, the Orlando Sentinel reported. The financial gap between the two camps has been stark: the Donalds campaign has outspent Jolly’s operation by nearly seven to one, according to miamiherald.com. Despite that imbalance, Jolly’s turnout at an Oct. 27 evening event in Tallahassee reportedly doubled the size of Donalds’s rally earlier that same day, per the same Miami Herald report.
Polls Show a Race Inside the Margin of Error
Multiple surveys in the race’s closing days pointed to a genuine toss-up. A St. Pete Polls survey of 916 likely voters taken Oct. 25-27 found Donalds leading Jolly 48% to 46%, within the poll’s margin of error of plus or minus 3.2 percentage points, Florida Politics reported. An earlier University of North Florida poll of 1,471 midterm voters, taken Oct. 21, showed an even tighter gap, with Donalds ahead 49% to 47% and a margin of error of 2.8 points, per tallahassee.com. Florida Politics also noted that undecided voters shrank steadily across three St. Pete Polls surveys, falling from 9% to 7% to 3%.
The closeness of the contest stands out given Florida’s registration numbers: Republicans hold a 1.5-million-voter statewide registration advantage, yet the race has remained within striking distance for both sides, Florida Politics reported. That tightness echoes a broader shift in Florida politics since 2022, when DeSantis won reelection by 20 percentage points — a margin tallahassee.com described as a record for Republican wins in the state. Jolly, a former Republican congressman, has called for a change after nearly four decades of Republican control of the Florida Governor’s Mansion, according to wsvn.com.
Ballots Piled Up Across Hillsborough and the State
In Hillsborough County, 10 Tampa Bay reported that Tampa Bay area voters turned out in large numbers. The county had offered 27 early-voting sites open from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. from Oct. 19 through Nov. 1, where residents could also drop off Vote By Mail ballots, according to a notice from votehillsborough.gov. Statewide, about 3.5 million Floridians had voted before early voting ended, with Republicans holding a slight edge, per wsvn.com.
Voters at the Tampa rally cited busy schedules as one reason for casting ballots early, while naming the economy, government accountability and state leadership as the issues weighing most on their minds. With early voting now closed and both campaigns making their final appeals, Florida’s governor’s race heads into Election Day with the outcome still undecided.
