David Jolly Wants to Lead Florida After Running Away From It

David Jolly wants Floridians to make him their next governor. The same David Jolly who couldn’t get out of the state fast enough when things got tough. The same guy who sat safely in Pennsylvania while millions of Americans were desperately trying to get into Florida for a breath of actual freedom.

Let that sink in for a moment. This man fled the state he now claims he wants to lead, hiding out in restriction-heavy Pennsylvania while mocking the very people who stayed behind. And not just mocking them quietly, mind you. He was on television, doing interviews, calling Governor Ron DeSantis’s pandemic response an “abject failure” while Florida became the promised land for Americans escaping authoritarian lockdowns.

You know what’s rich about all this? Jolly, a Republican turned Democrat (which tells you plenty right there), spent his exile trashing personal freedom itself. Not just disagreeing with it or offering alternative views. Actually disparaging the concept. He said out loud that rules were “greater than the calling of personal freedom.” Those are his words, not mine.

Here’s a guy who once told people he and his wife ask themselves every single day whether they should raise their children in Florida. Every single day. Most of us call that place we want to escape “home” for a reason. If you’re questioning daily whether to stay somewhere, maybe you’ve already answered your own question. But instead of just leaving quietly, Jolly made a spectacle of his contempt.

During one particularly revealing interview, he declared he wouldn’t put his kids in a Florida school because DeSantis refused to force children to mask up. Never mind that masks didn’t stop transmission anyway, something public health officials later admitted when they thought nobody was paying attention anymore. Jolly was outraged at the mere thought of children breathing freely, of parents having choices about their own kids’ health decisions.

The audacity gets worse. He actually said DeSantis created a crisis “by his failure to recognize this is a moment for something greater than the calling of selfishness, greater than the calling of personal freedom.” Read that again. Personal freedom equals selfishness in Jolly’s world. This is the foundation of his political philosophy, laid bare for everyone to see.

And while he was ranting from his safe perch in Pennsylvania, something remarkable was happening back in Florida. Millions of Americans were voting with their feet, flooding into the state to escape the exact kind of thinking Jolly was promoting. Families were pulling up stakes, leaving jobs, moving across the country to get what DeSantis was offering and what Jolly was mocking.

The free market of ideas played out in real time. One state said trust people to make their own decisions. Another approach said government knows best, comply or else. Americans chose. They chose freedom, and they chose Florida.

Jolly even accused DeSantis of engaging in “racist xenophobia” for pointing out that illegal immigrants pouring over the border during Biden’s open border disaster were spreading COVID. Because apparently noticing reality is racist now. That’s the playbook, isn’t it? Can’t argue the facts, so attack the character.

His contempt for personal choice extended to vaccines too. He dramatically claimed the only persuadables left among the unvaccinated were already in hospital beds. He mocked DeSantis for framing health decisions as matters of freedom, saying Republicans “pitted this notion of personal freedom against public health.” As if the two were naturally opposed, as if free people couldn’t also be healthy people.

The irony is almost too perfect. Jolly complained that DeSantis and Republicans made freedom a cause, and that they could never pivot off it because their political careers would be over. He said this like it was a bad thing. Like being permanently committed to liberty was some kind of trap rather than the entire point of American governance.

Meanwhile, back in reality, Florida thrived. The state’s economy boomed while locked-down states withered. Students learned in classrooms instead of staring at screens in their bedrooms. Businesses stayed open. People lived their lives. The disaster Jolly predicted never materialized, but he’s never apologized for being spectacularly wrong.

Now he wants to lead this state. The state he abandoned. The state he insulted. The state whose values he finds so repugnant that he questioned daily whether to raise his family there. He wants Floridians to forget all of that and hand him the keys to their government.

This is the same pattern we see over and over. People flee the consequences of progressive policies, move to places run on conservative principles, then immediately try to import the same failed ideas they just escaped. Except Jolly’s doing it in reverse. He fled conservative governance, hid in a progressive state, and now wants to come back and transform Florida into the place he ran to.

The sheer gall of it is almost admirable in a twisted way. It takes a special kind of confidence to spend years publicly despising something and then ask to be put in charge of it. Most people would have the self-awareness to recognize the contradiction. Not Jolly.

Florida doesn’t need a leader who runs when times get tough. It doesn’t need someone who thinks personal freedom is selfish. It certainly doesn’t need a governor who spent the last crisis hiding in another state while criticizing from afar. Actions reveal character, and Jolly’s actions told us everything we need to know.

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