Second in a four-part series on the 2026 Florida governor’s race. Part one, “Twenty Years, One Chair,“ is how Florida got here. Part two, “The DeSantis Inheritance,“ is the record the next governor takes over. Part three, “The Field and the Data,“ is the candidates and the numbers. Part four, “Run, Byron, Run,“ is the reckoning on the Trump endorsement and what it means. A standalone companion, “First, and for Whom,“ keys in on Byron Donalds’s historic first and the full race breakdown.
A governor’s race is not really a choice between two people. It is a choice about a record. Whoever wins in November inherits eight years of Ron DeSantis, either extends it or reverses it, and that is the actual question on the ballot beneath the names. So before you can weigh Byron Donalds or David Jolly, you have to read the inheritance. I am going to read it fairly, the wins at full strength and the costs in full daylight, because a piece that will only tell you one half has not earned your trust with the other.
The ledger his supporters will hand you
Start with the case DeSantis makes for himself, because it is not empty. Florida’s unemployment has run around 2 percent, below the national rate. The state budget has climbed past $ 115 billion; there is still no state income tax, and property tax relief has been his signature economic push. People have moved here by the hundreds of thousands, and he has branded the place the “free state of Florida” and sold that brand to the whole country. He expanded school choice to a universal voucher, so that state money can follow almost any child to a private school. He has moved fast on hurricanes, and disaster response is one of the few things Floridians of both parties tend to credit him for. That is a real record, and a Democrat who pretends none of it exists is going to lose the voters who feel it in their paycheck and their commute.
But a low headline unemployment number does not tell you whether a family can afford to stay, and this is where the inheritance gets heavier.
The affordability of the brand hides
Here is the fact that cuts through the “free state” marketing, and it is one your readers pay every month. Florida now has the highest home insurance premiums in the country, averaging around $ 8,292 per year, roughly 181 percent above the national average, and projected to climb even higher. After Hurricane Ian in 2022 dealt tens of billions in insured losses, insurers fled the state or stopped writing new policies, and the 2023 laws the Legislature passed to steady the market did so largely by shifting risk onto homeowners rather than lowering their bills. Put that next to the rent, which, in the metros I write about, is among the most cost-burdened in America, and the “free state” starts to look expensive to live in, actually. A governor can post a two percent unemployment rate and still preside over a state that a nurse or a teacher can no longer afford. That is the part of the inheritance the brochure leaves out.
The culture-war record
Then there is the record DeSantis is most famous for, the one he built for a national audience, and it landed hardest on people who look like the readers of this paper.
He signed the Stop WOKE Act, which restricted how race and privilege can be taught in schools and discussed in workplace training, though a federal court blocked a central provision as a violation of free speech. He signed the Parental Rights in Education Act, the law critics call “Don’t Say Gay,” barring instruction on sexual orientation and gender identity in the early grades, and later expanded it. His administration blocked the College Board’s Advanced Placement course in African American Studies from Florida high schools, with DeSantis calling it “indoctrination.” Books were removed from school library shelves across the state under new review laws. And when the Walt Disney Company, one of the largest employers in Florida, criticized the “Don’t Say Gay” law, DeSantis moved to strip the company of the self-governing special district it had held for half a century.
Of everything on this ledger, the one I cannot walk past is the AP African American Studies block. Sit in what that actually said. The state of Florida looked at a course in which a Black child could study the history that produced him and called it indoctrination. Not too hard, not poorly built. Indoctrination. There is a message inside that word, and every Black student in a Florida classroom received it, whether or not anyone said it out loud: your history is a threat, and learning it is a danger the state has to manage. I have sat with young people who absorbed that message. It does not make them apathetic. It makes it clear early on that the system was not built to see them whole.
Immigration, abortion, guns
The rest of the record ran in the same direction and at the same speed. DeSantis signed one of the strictest state immigration laws in the country and famously flew a group of migrants from Texas to Martha’s Vineyard as a national statement. He signed a six-week abortion ban. He signed a permitless concealed carry bill, so Floridians no longer need a permit to carry a concealed firearm. Whatever you think of each, together they are the clearest picture of what the chair has been used for, and whoever wins in November will hold the same pen.
The maps and the thing this whole slate is about
And then there is the piece that ties this series to everything else I have written this year. DeSantis did not only govern Florida. He redrew it. In 2022, his administration pushed a congressional map that dismantled a majority-Black district in North Florida, and in 2026 he convened a mid-decade redistricting effort designed to add as many as four more Republican seats. Florida has only two majority-Black congressional districts left, and I have spent this year reporting on the fight to keep them. The governor’s chair is where that map was born. That is not a side issue in this race. For Black Florida, it may be the center of it.
The presidential detour
One more line belongs on the ledger, in fairness to the voters who felt it. DeSantis spent a real part of his second term running for president in 2024, a campaign that did not end where he hoped, and a governor running for another office is a governor with one eye somewhere else. It is a fair thing to weigh when you are deciding whether the next person in the chair should be cut from the same cloth or a different one.
What the inheritance means for the ballot
So set the whole thing down and look at it. Low unemployment and a booming budget, and the highest insurance bills in the country. A national brand of freedom, and a state that told a Black child his history was indoctrination. Fast disaster response, and maps drawn to thin Black political power. This is the inheritance, all of it, and the 2026 race is a referendum on it, whether the candidates say so or not. A vote for one direction is a vote to extend this record. A vote for the other is a vote to reverse it. That is what is actually on the ballot.
So here is the honest question I would put to any Florida voter, and it has nothing to do with whose personality you prefer. Agovernor’ss race is not a popularity contest. It is a referendum on a ledger. One side of it is the low unemployment and the booming budget, which you can feel in a good month. The other is the insurance bill you cannot afford, the history your child is not allowed to study, and the map drawn to thin your voice. The next governor either extends that ledger for another eight years or begins to reverse it. So before you fall in love with a name, ask yourself the only thing that matters. Which of these two Floridas do you actually want to keep? Part Three is about who is running to hand each one to you.
Denzel D. Burnside III is a Miami-Dade native, a minister, and a former organizer and campaign manager. He is the founder and executive director of the North Carolina Housing Table, a statewide housing coalition.
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