A Democrat candidate for mayor in Jacksonville, Florida, defeated the Republican candidate backed by Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis in a May 16 runoff.
According to the Duval County Supervisor of Elections website, the unofficial results of the May 16 unitary general election has Democrat Donna Deegan with 52.08 percent of the vote. Republican candidate Daniel Davis pulled in 47.92 percent of the vote. Unofficial results do not include provisional ballots, which can be challenged or rejected.
Voter turnout for the contest, which included races for property appraiser and seven city council seats, was 33.05 percent.
Jacksonville, with just under 1 million residents, was the largest city in the nation with a Republican mayor. Due to term limits, outgoing two-term Republican Mayor Lenny Curry could not seek reelection.
While Deegan took 39.43 percent of the vote during the March 21 first unitary election in Duval County, beating all five of her opponents, she did not reach the 50 percent margin of victory, forcing the May 16 runoff.
Deegan, a retired journalist, breast cancer awareness advocate, and generational resident of Jacksonville, was considered the underdog in the race against Davis, a well-funded former Florida state representative.
Action News Jax reported that the 2023 mayoral race for Jacksonville was the most expensive in the city’s history, with the Deegan and Davis amassing nearly $11 million between them.
Davis raised and spent more money than Deegan by a margin of roughly 4 to 1. Where Deegan raised $2.32 million, Davis raked in $8.47 million. In the final weeks leading up to the election, Davis pulled in $1.9 million in donations. Deegan took in $872,000.
Local Democrats Celebrate
The Duval County Democratic Party heralded the victory on social media, congratulating Deegan for becoming “the First Female Mayor of Jacksonville.”Deegan’s victory was decribed by some as a stunning upset, but she was leading in the polls since February.
Still, while DeSantis did endorse Davis, he never appeared at any campaign events or made efforts to actively encourage voters to cast their ballots for Davis.
He did, however, travel to Iowa to speak at Republican Rep. Randy Feenstra’s May 13 family picnic.
Just three months after voters in the Sunshine State handed DeSantis a landslide reelection victory, he left the state to go on a book tour through a string of six key primary states. From there, DeSantis traveled to Israel and Japan.
While Ken Lovejoy personally believes DeSantis has done a good job as Florida’s governor, the popular host of local radio program “Charlotte County Speaks” on iHeartRadio confessed he has “taken a lot of heat” for expressing disappointment in the governor’s presidential aspirations.
“I don’t mind him running for president,“ Lovejoy told The Epoch Times. ”But I think it’s the dumbest move he’s made in his political career.”
In the 2022 election, Florida’s voters handed DeSantis a landslide victory over his Democrat opponent, former Florida governor and congressman Charlie Crist. While Democrat voters outnumber Republican voters in Duval County—where Jacksonville is the county seat—DeSantis still won by a margin of 55.44 percent to Crist’s 43.68 percent.